On the Road Not Taken is a memoir about the transformational power of music. It begins with a boy growing up in a small town on the Kent coast in the 1970s, who learns to play the guitar and dreams of heading out on the open road with a head full of songs. But when the moment comes to make the choice he is not brave enough to try and do it for a living...

If a tree falls in a forest and Jon Bon Jovi is with you when it happens, is it still a figment of your imagination? Haunted by the idea that he is somehow broken, the narrator a depressed, heartbroken, thirty-something writer embarks on a journey through his own mind with his spirit guide, Jon Bon Jovi, for company. From the redwoods of California to a...

Aleister Crowley, also known as the Great Beast, is one of the most reviled men in history. Satanist, cult leader, debauched novelist and poet, his legacy has been harshly contested for decades. Crowley supposedly died in 1947, but in Ian Thornton's new novel, set in the present day, the Great Beast is alive and well and living in Shangri-la. Now over 130...

Abandoned and alone, thirteen-year-old Joe's world is shattered when he enters a deserted council house and becomes trapped within a labyrinth protecting the last magical places on earth. There, Joe discovers a book charting this immense no-man's land, without time or place, its thirteen doors each leading to a different realm. Hunted by sinister foes, the...

It doesn't take much familiarity with the news to see that the world has become a more hate-filled place. In Others, a group of writers explore the power of words to help us to see the world as others see it, and to reveal some of the strangeness of our own selves. Through stories, poems, memoirs and essays, we look at otherness in a variety of its forms...

Shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the British Sports Book Awards When Laurie Cunningham played for England in an under-21s match against Scotland in 1977, he became the first black footballer to represent England professionally. Two years later, he would become the first Englishman to play for Real Madrid. In a time when racist chants flew from the...

Young people in this country are facing a chasm of doubt and instability. Mental health problems are widespread, university fees are rising, job opportunities are drying up, and the prospect of ever owning a home is increasingly out of reach. But this generation is noticeably absent from the opinion columns, comment pieces and news reports of the mainstream...

When Ray is sacked from his job in London, he goes to Japan hoping to start his life afresh. Things begin well: he lands work as an English teacher and strikes up a relationship with the beautiful, intriguing Tomoe. But his world is turned upside down when Tomoe s father is found dead. Convinced that his death was a murder, Tomoe sets out after the killers...

When Jet McDonald cycled four thousand miles to India and back, he didn’t want to write a straightforward travel book. He wanted to go on an imaginative journey. Mind is the Ride takes the reader on a physical and intellectual adventure from West to East using the components of a bike as a metaphor for philosophy, which is woven into the cyclist's...

'I can't remember the last book I read that I could say with absolute assurance would save lives. But this one will' Chris Packham When Joe Harkness suffered a breakdown in 2013, he tried all the things his doctor recommended: medication helped, counselling was enlightening, and mindfulness grounded him. But nothing came close to nature, particularly...

Farah is a young lawyer living and working in London. She's just ended a long relationship, and her parents are looking for a husband - whether Farah wants one or not. So far, so normal. But at a work dinner, hosted by a dangerously powerful man, she comes across a young woman called Razia, who Farah soon realises is being kept as a domestic slave. We...

March 1681. Oxford is hosting the English Parliament under the ‘merry monarch’, King Charles II. As politicians and their hangers-on converge on the divided city, an MP is found murdered, triggering tensions that threaten mayhem on the streets. Luke Sandys, Chief Officer of the Oxford Bailiffs, must solve the crime and thwart the plot. On his side is the...

Donald's wife Belinda died. So he tried to kill himself. But it didn’t work out the way he planned. Grief-stricken and still alive, he reluctantly returns to his job as a scriptwriter on a regional TV station. But then an idea comes up that might just save him – and Belinda's legacy. The Wall in the Head is a love story and a black comedy – about bad...

What if reading the wrong book could get you arrested? In a decaying city controlled by the First General and his army, expressing the wrong opinion can have terrible consequences. Clara Winter knows this better than anyone. When she was a child, her father was taken by the Authorisation Bureau for the crime of teaching banned books to his students. She is...

One million cloned soldiers. A nation imprisoned. A group of neurodiverse rebels fighting back.

Britain as we know it lies destroyed. In the aftermath of the most daring military coup in history, the surviving population is crammed inside giant Citadels, watched over by an army of cloned soldiers. The hope of a nation lies in a tiny number of freedom...

Ever Millen is in LA, losing his mind. He's landed in the City of Angels seeking the truth about the death of his father, an abstract expressionist painter whose work has fallen out of favour. Ever soon discovers that revenge doesn't come easy.

But then, by chance, he meets the beautiful, enigmatic Lomita Nairn, a woman almost fifty years his senior, his...

One soul. One pact with the Devil. One chance at love. Elizabeth Murray has been condemned to burn at the stake. As she awaits her fate, a strange, handsome man visits her cell. He offers her a deal: her soul in return for immortality, but what he offers is not a normal life. To survive Elizabeth must become Death itself. Elizabeth must ease the passing...

A revealing memoir, laying open the cruel truth behind the longstanding ban on LGBT+ personnel serving openly in H.M. Forces.

Discover the human cost of being deemed a criminal in the institutions protecting fellow citizens’ hard-won freedoms.

The first book covering recent military history, written from a lesbian perspective.

In February 2016, Gabriel Stewart embarked on a walk around the UK with just a backpack, a camera and a tent for company. With little previous experience of hiking or camping on his own, it was always going to be an interesting one. This isn’t your typical hiking book, wittering on about the cold fierce winds battering Gabriel’s determined face as he...

In the tumultuous aftermath of the First World War the Wilson brothers head in opposite directions: Richard, interned in Austria throughout the conflict, returns to England; Edward, a junior officer, is dispatched from Italy to Vienna as part of the British Army’s relief mission.

For Edward, it will be a return to the city and to love. But it will not be...

No one in this city has believed in me for two thousand years. I'm unknown and unloved. And I'm very, very ill.' He sighed, and the sound chilled her blood. `Give me your hand.'

Dionysus, god of wine and divine ecstasy, is reborn in modern Rome. He doesn't understand how or why he's come to be here - a pagan god in a city where he has no believers. But...

On the run from unjust court-martial back home, a young British soldier gets robbed and shot on Copacabana Beach. The bullet in Jake's head should have been fatal, but miraculously, it saves him from a previously undetected condition that soon would have killed him.

Jake doesn't believe in fate, nor does he feel he owes anything to anybody, but he does...

March, 1945. The ravaged face of London will soon be painted with victory, but for Sylvie the private battle for peace is only just beginning. Revealing strength and small acts of kindness in the most unlikely places, A Small Dark Quiet looks through the eyes of a mother as she finds the courage to face loss – both her own, and that of the orphan born in a...

Idealistic young radical Brian Harper meets experienced politico and good-time bisexual Maria Rafferty at a Labour Students meeting in Manchester in 1987, and together they embark on an exploration of Mancunian night-and-day-life. Committed both to politics and to each other, they jointly fall under the spell of Blairite conspirator Terry Gallagher. Thanks...

1838 and under the new Poor Law the destitute are now housed in union workhouses.

Two men unknown to each other seek to uncover the suspected mistreatment of inmates in a small Suffolk workhouse. Edgar Lawes is a local landowner and justice of the peace; Ambrose Hudson a London journalist. 

Establishing himself on the board Lawes is immediately disturbed by...

13 October 2008. Welcome to the worst day of Chef Charlie Sheridan's life, the day he's about to lose his two great loves: his childhood sweetheart, Lulu, and the legendary Brighton hotel his grandfather, Franco Sheridan, opened in 1973. This is the story of the Belle Hotel, one that spans the course of four decades from the training of a young chef in the...

When a swan crashes through her window at the height of a winter storm, journalist Mitzi Fairweather decides to nurse the injured bird back to health. But at sunset, the swan becomes a woman.

This unexpected visitor is Odette, the swan princess – alone, adrift and in danger in 21st-century Britain, entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Bird by...

Daedalus Mole wants to make the best of a bad situation.

The plan: fly his unwanted passenger, Erin, to her destination, squeeze her for every last penny, then immediately find refuge in the nearest pub. Unfortunately, when the galaxy is on the verge of economic collapse and your passenger has a bounty the size of a planet on her head, there’s only so...

What happens when you leave city life and move to five acres on a hunch, with a husband who’s an aspiring alpaca-whisperer, and a feral cockerel for company? Can you eat the cockerel for dinner? Or has it got rigor mortis?

In search of a good life and a slower pace, Fiona Stocker upped-sticks and moved to Tasmania, a land of promise, wilderness, and...

Autumn in the market City of Barchester, and two bright students begin their final year at University, content with old friendships, paying lip-service to old dreams. Until, that is, an ill-conceived prank introduces them to Julian.

For Sophia and Steven, the friendship they form with this worldly stranger marks a coming of age, a possibility to embrace...

Spring 2000. Paul Geddes visits Venice to research the fin-de-siècle opera singer, Esme Maguire, seeking out a cache of papers held by Eva Forrest, the widow of a collector. What he reads begins in the 1680s, moving through the city’s later history of Enlightenment and Revolution, describing a life stretched beyond human possibilities.

She travels across...