4th Estate, HarperPress, The Friday Project by sam shone

Fourth Estate, HarperPress, The Friday Project July – December 2012 Catalogue

Contents: 4th estate Non Fiction:.......................................pp 4 – 10 4th Estate Fiction................................................pp 11 – 22 HarperPress Non Fiction...................................pp 24 – 40 The Friday Project.............................................pp 42 – 49

Nigel Slater

THE KITCHEN DIARIES II: A Year of Simple Suppers From Nigel Slater, one of Britain’s best‐loved food writers and presenter of BBC One’s Simple Suppers, a beautiful and inspiring companion volume to the acclaimed Kitchen Diaries. ‘Empty glasses are scattered around the room, perched on shelves and window ledges from where we toasted the new, albeit unfinished kitchen. And there is just enough Champagne left in a bottle in the fridge for me to celebrate, in secret, the first morning of the New Year. This January 1st is no different from all the others, in that I will make soup and a loaf in what is now an annual ritual. Kneading is a good way to start the year. Tactile, peaceful, creative, there is something grounding about baking a loaf on New Year’s Day.’ The Kitchen Diaries was one of the most acclaimed food books of recent times. With Kitchen Diaries II: A Year of Simple Suppers, Nigel Slater returns to this inspiring structure – recording the food he buys, prepares, eats and shares throughout the year. With over 300 recipes, many from his hugely successful TV series, Simple Suppers, a new series of which starts this autumn, Kitchen Diaries II is full of classic Slater ideas, from a cider loaf to start the new year, to an indulgent chicken and leek pie or a simple fresh salad of pears and bitter leaves. 'Nigel is a bloody genius.' Jamie Oliver 'The greatest cookery writer of them all.' Guardian

Stocklist: Cookery ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐725603‐7 Size: 180x240mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 13 September 2012 UK Price: £30.00

Nigel Slater is one of Britain’s most highly regarded food writers. His beautifully written prose, warm personality and unpretentious, easy‐to‐follow recipes have won him a huge following. He writes an award winning weekly column in the Observer and edits their ‘Food Monthly’ supplement, and he is a regular contributor to Sainsbury’s The Magazine.

Toast (PB) 978‐0‐00‐739361‐9

Tender (HB) 978‐0‐00‐724849‐0

The Kitchen Diaries (PB) 978‐0‐00‐724115‐6

The Kitchen Diaries (HB) 978‐0‐00‐719948‐8

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J.G. Ballard, Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara

EXTREME METAPHORS A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J.G. Ballard’s greatest interviews. After a morning’s writing J.G. Ballard sometimes found himself with company. Latterly, friends and interviewers came to his Shepperton home, the same home from which Ballard had observed the rising suburban tide, the advancing world he captured, analysed and second‐guessed so accurately in his fiction. His acuity was not exclusive to the page, though, as this book reminds us: Ballard had a restive, vigilant intelligence that overflowed naturally into conversation, often sharpening itself in dialogue. He entertained his many admirers and interviewers with insights into the world as he saw it, and speculated, often correctly, about its future. As a result of these conversations he acquired a somewhat oracular reputation. Now, for the first time, Extreme Metaphors collects the finest interviews of Ballard’s career. It is not only a validation of those visionary and predictive instincts, proof of a remarkable, worldly sympathy, but also a tribute to a celebrated thinker and great interviewee. It is a collection for lovers of Ballard but also for lovers of this world. Praise for Miracles of Life: 'The greatest of living English writers…a superb memoir.' Mail on Sunday

Stocklist: Letters, essays, journalism and other prose ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745485‐3 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £25.00

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.

Crash (PB) 978‐0‐00‐728702‐4

High‐Rise (PB) 978‐0‐586‐04456‐8

The Complete Short Stories (PB) 978‐0‐00‐724229‐0

Cocaine Nights (PB) 978‐0‐00‐655064‐8

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Ian Sansom

PAPER: AN ELEGY A witty, personal and entertaining meditation on the history and meaning of paper during the (passing) era of its universal importance. Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost. Paper is the technology through which and with which we have made sense of the world. The making of paper and the manifold uses of paper have made our civilization what it is. But the age of paper is coming to an end. In 2010, Amazon announced for the first time that it was selling more e‐books than paper books: according to some, the paper book has no more than five years before it becomes extinct. E‐tickets replace tickets. Archives are digitised. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear.

Stocklist: Social and cultural studies ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐748026‐5 Size: 135x203mm Format: Hardback (Short demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 31 October 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Born in Essex, England, Ian Sansom is the author of the popular Mobile Library Mystery Series. He is also a frequent contributor and critic for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The London Review of Books, and The Spectator. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

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Sylvia Nasar

GRAND PURSUIT: The Story of the People Who Made Modern Economics From the bestselling author of A Beautiful Mind, a brilliant new approach to the story of modern economics and to understanding how we got into today’s financial mess. Nasar's account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid 19th century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new pursuit. She then describes the efforts of Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and Irving Fisher to put those insights into action ‐ with revolutionary consequences for the world. From the great John Maynard Keynes to Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes's disciple Joan Robinson, the influential American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, and India's Nobel Prize Winner Amartya Sen, she show how the insights of these activist thinkers transformed the world ‐ from one city, London, to the developed nations in Europe and America and now the entire world. In Nasar's dramatic account of these discoverers we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals, and each others' ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the dismal science into a triumph over mankind's hitherto age‐old destiny of misery and early death. This story, unimaginable less than 200 years ago, is a story of trial and error, and ultimately transcendent, rendered here in stunning narrative. ‘A history of economics which is full of flesh, bloom and warmth…Grand Pursuit deserves a place not only in every economist’s study but also on every serious reader’s bedside table’ The Economist ‘Much of Grand Pursuit may be a reminder that as bad as things seem now, they have been worse — much worse — and that those difficult times can shed light on what is happening today. Economists have always tried to come up with theories about how to stimulate flaccid economies. The reader finishes Nasar's book wondering what brilliant and quirky thinker may fill in the next chapters of our economic history and come up with an idea that shakes our current economy out of its funk’ Los Angeles Times

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978‐1‐84115‐456‐5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 July 2012 UK Price: £10.99

Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind. She is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Grand Pursuit (HB) 978‐1‐84115‐455‐8

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Craig Brown

ONE ON ONE 101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, told by Britain’s funniest writer. Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say “how do you do?” Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy. One on One examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Gladstone terrifies the teenage Bertrand Russell) and between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles has her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary random encounters on television (George Galloway meets Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother). All human life is here, dancing in a circle. Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, One on One is a wholly original book. ‘For those who know Brown as a parodist, this book will come as a surprise. Though often very funny, it’s a work of straight non‐fiction whose great virtue is not excess but restraint… A hugely enjoyable book that looks with affection and melancholy on the whirring roundabouts of history and celebrity, and reminds us that the paths to glory lead, handshake by handshake, pratfall by pratfall, to the grave’ Sam Leith, Guardian ‘The book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger than fiction, many of them are every bit as bizarre as Brown could have invented, and some are as funny… This is much more than a comedy book’ Spectator

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐736064‐2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Craig Brown has been writing the Private Eye celebrity diary since 1989. He has also written parodies for many other publications, including The Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Times and The Guardian.

The Lost Diaries (PB) 978‐0‐00‐743649‐1

One on One (HB) 978‐0‐00‐736062‐8

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Alex James

ALL CHEESES GREAT AND SMALL: A Life Less Blurry This is the story of Alex James’s transition from a leading light of the Britpop movement in the 1990s, to gentleman farmer, artisan cheese‐maker and father of five. All Cheeses Great and Small is the follow‐up memoir to Alex James's first book, Bit of a Blur, the story of his excessive pop star lifestyle during the nineties. But now Alex has grown up, fallen in love and got married. He has also fallen passionately for his new home, an enormous rambling farmhouse in the Cotswolds, set in two hundred acres of beautiful British countryside. The farm represents not just a new house for Alex, but also a new career. As he breathes new life into the old farm he chances across an unexpected calling: making cheese. His cheeses, Blue Monday, Farleigh Wallop and Little Wallop have received widespread media interest and are now sold through many outlets. The story culminates with an account of the triumphant reformation of Blur for Glastonbury 2009. ‘James’s prose is clean and poetic. His childlike wonder at the simple things – from herons to heaps of rubble – can be infectious’. Daily Telegraph ‘A joy to read. Prose flows and weaves and curls itself into pleasing rhythms…(Alex James) can write like a god.’ Spectator

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745314‐6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 July 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Alex James was the bass guitarist in the nineties band Blur, a life he chronicled with great success in his first book, Bit of a Blur. He now lives on a farm in the Cotswolds with his wife and five children, makes cheese, writes for both the Sun and the Spectator and has his own show on Classic FM. In September 2011 he hosted the ‘Harvest’ festival at his farm, combining the best in British music and food.

All Cheeses Great and Small (HB) 978‐0‐00‐745312‐2

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John Coates

THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF: Risk‐taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust In this time of financial crisis, a resonant and singular exploration of economic behaviour and its ramifications. In this startling and unconventional book, neuroscientist and former Wall Street trader John Coates explains something we have long suspected: that we think with our body as well as our brain. This is true when we take risks at work, in sport, on the battlefield, and especially in the financial markets. Making and losing money provokes an overwhelming biological response, and this can alter the way we behave. Could this bodily turmoil lead to the kind of irrational exuberance and pessimism that so regularly destabilise the global economy? In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Coates has shown that under the pressure of risk our biology transforms us into different people, a transformation he refers to as the hour between dog and wolf. Traders and investors are especially prone, becoming revved‐up and testosterone‐driven when on a winning streak, and tentative and risk‐averse when cowering from losses. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf reveals the biology of bubbles and crashes; and how the presence of more women on the trading floors could help stabilise the markets. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience and medicine, Coates looks more generally at how our bodies produce the fabled gut feelings we so often rely on; how stress in the workplace can affect our risk‐taking and even damage our health; how sports science can teach us how to toughen our physiology against the ravages of stress. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf sheds new and surprising light on issues that affect us all.

Stocklist: Business ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐741352‐2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £9.99

John Coates is a senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge. He previously worked on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs, and ran a trading desk for Deutsche Bank. In 2004 he returned to Cambridge to research the biology of financial risk‐taking. His work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Financial Times and been cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Scientist, Wired and Time.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (PB) 978‐0‐00‐747669‐5

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Alan Garner

BONELAND A major novel from one of the country’s greatest writers, and the crowning achievement of an astonishing career, Boneland is also the long‐awaited conclusion to the story of Colin and Susan – a story that began over fifty years ago in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen A woman was reading a book to a child on her knee. “‘So the little boy went into the wood, and he met a witch. And the witch said, “You come home with me and I’ll give you a good dinner.”’ Now you wouldn’t go home with a witch, would you?” Colin stood. “Young man. Do not go into the witch’s house. Do not. And whatever you do, do not go upstairs. You must not go upstairs. Do not go! You are not to go!” Laurels for Alan Garner: “Alan Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful. His work is where human emotion and mythic resonance, sexuality and geology, modernity and memory and craftsmanship meet and cross‐fertilise. Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street‐names. But that’s the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration.” Philip Pullman

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐746324‐4 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 30 August 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Alan Garner was born and still lives in Cheshire, an area which has had a profound effect on his writing and provided the seed of many ideas worked out in his books. His fourth book, The Owl Service brought Alan Garner to everyone’s attention. It won two important literary prizes ‐ The Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal ‐ and was made into a serial by Granada Television. It has established itself as a classic and Alan Garner as a writer of great distinction.

Collected Folk Tales (HB) 978‐0‐00‐744597‐4

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (HB) 978‐0‐00‐737110‐5

The Moon of Gomrath (PB) 978‐0‐00‐712787‐0

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (PB) 978‐0‐00‐735521‐1

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Michael Chabon

TELEGRAPH AVENUE The new novel from Michael Chabon, his first in 5 years, is a lovingly painted pop‐culture epic. One street, two families. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co‐regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth‐Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi‐legendary nurse midwives. When ex‐NFL quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to go forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. But behind Goode's announcement a nefarious story lurks. As their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a professional struggle that tests the limits of their friendship. And simultaneously, into their already tangled lives, comes Titus Joyner, the teenaged son Archy has never acknowledged.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐728875‐5 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 11 September 2012 UK Price: £18.99

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize‐winning author of seven novels ‐ including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union ‐ two collections of short stories, and one other work of non‐ fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man (PB) 978‐0‐00‐745338‐2

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 9781841154930

Wonder Boys (PB) 978‐1‐85702‐405‐0

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (PB) 978‐0‐00‐715093‐9

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Susan Fletcher

THE SILVER DARK SEA The powerful new novel from Susan Fletcher, award‐winning author of the bestselling Eve Green and Oystercatchers. A profound tale of love, loss and the lore of the sea. The islanders of Parla are still mourning the loss of one of their own. Four years since that loss, and a man – un‐named, unclothed – is washed onto their shores. Some say he is a mythical man from the sea – potent, kind and beautiful; others suspect him. For the bereft Maggie, this stranger brings love back to the isle. But as the days pass he changes every one of them – and the time comes for his story to be told… Tender, lyrical and redemptive, The Silver Dark Sea is the dazzling new novel from the author of Eve Green (winner of Whitbread First Novel award) and Corrag (later re‐titled Witch Light). It is a story about what life can give and take from us, when we least expect it – and how love, in all its forms, is the greatest gift of all. Praise for ‘Witch Light’/’Corrag’ 'Corrag's descriptions combine the oblique originality of a child with the precision and control of a poet … the novel is crowded with images stunning in their freshness and simplicity … there are moments when the sheer beauty of the prose takes one's breath away … it is a novel of such extraordinary beauty and quiet power that is impossible, having read it, not to look at the world anew' Guardian

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐732162‐9 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 July 2012 UK Price: £16.99

Susan Fletcher was born in 1979 in Birmingham. ‘Eve Green’ was her first novel which went on to be a best‐selling success; her second novel was ‘Oystercatchers’ and her latest novel is Witch Light

Witch Light (PB) 978‐0‐00‐732160‐5

Oystercatchers (PB) 978‐0‐00‐719026‐3

Eve Green (PB) 978‐0‐00‐719040‐9

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Sam Thompson

COMMUNION TOWN A city in ten chapters. ‘Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city?’ Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters. Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, this is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets among voices half‐heard, signs half‐glimpsed and desires half‐acknowledged. ‘Dreamlike, gnarly and present, Communion Town shifts like a city walker, from street to street.’ China Miéville ‘Communion Town is one of those rare creatures – a first novel that combines ambition with humanity. It is a strange, remarkable work.’ Tash Aw

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745476‐1 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 July 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Sam Thompson was born in London in 1978, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He writes for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. He lives in Oxford with his wife and son.

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Nicola Barker

THE YIPS A new novel of the pre‐Olympic moment from the Booker‐shortlisted author of Darkmans, Nicola Barker. 'There was a rat in the bath', Gene explains. 'It's a long story, but basically I fished it out and was carrying around by the tail, not quite sure how to dispose of it, when I managed to barge in on this woman having a genital tattoo'. 2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist yet. Storm‐clouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A‐level but a PhD in bullshit, and a free‐thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife. But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic figure of Stuart Ransom – a golfer in free‐fall. Nicola Barker's The Yips is at once a historical novel of the pre‐Twitter moment, the filthiest state‐of‐the‐nation novel since Martin Amis' Money and the most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton. Praise for Burley Cross Postbox Theft: 'A vastly satisfying and adventurous novel, a state‐of‐the‐nation comedy from a novelist who can do pretty much anything she likes and is having a great time doing it. This really isn't a book to pass up.’ Daily Telegraph

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐747665‐7 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 July 2012 UK Price: £18.99

Nicola Barker lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, and Clear was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. She is one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ of the decade.

Reversed Forecast (PB) 978‐0‐00‐743605‐7

Darkmans (PB) 978‐0‐00‐719363‐9

Behindlings (PB) 978‐0‐00‐713526‐4

Clear (PB) 978‐0‐00‐719361‐5

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Paul La Farge

LUMINOUS AIRPLANES A novel of intelligence, humour and wonder. In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died. He has to return to the upstate New York town where he spent his childhood summers in order to clean out his house; while there he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman he fell in love with as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, his thoughts move from his upbringing at the hands of his two artist mothers (the twins Marie Celeste and Celeste Marie), to San Francisco in the years of the Internet boom, to Richard Ente, the father he only knows through the words and stories his mothers have let slip over the years. Nearly ten years in the making, Luminous Airplanes is a novel of intelligence, humour and wonder, that considers large histories and small ones, grief, love, memory, family – and flying machines. “This is one of the best works of fiction to come my way in a long time. Paul La Farge writes beautifully, with wit, humor and passion. He has created as thoroughly imagined a world as you would expect from Chekhov or Flaubert, and has bestowed upon two fictional families enough sympathy and care to rank himself among the best of parents. Luminous Airplanes is a quiet triumph of a book.” Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story “Like some kind of freakishly gifted Olympic ice skater, Paul La Farge skates gracefully through decades of time, tracing the through lines from childhood games to the dramas and disintegrating dreams of adulthood … Luminous Airplanes is a coming of age story like none other I’ve ever read, one that seems to exists simultaneously in the past and the present, in plausible futures and science‐fictional realms. Luminous Airplanes is brilliant, poignant, startling, hilarious, and a really, really fun read. I loved it.” Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745954‐4 Size: 153x234mm Format: Paperback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 August 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.

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Will Wiles

CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for his piece Variations on Tram Timetables. He lives with his wife and two cats in an unnamed Eastern European city. But this book isn’t really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. Meanwhile, he has entrusted an old friend to take care of his perfect, beautiful apartment. Despite Oskar leaving extensive notes on how to keep his flat in pristine condition, a tiny oversight initiates a chain of farcical, and even fatal, disasters. Care of Wooden Floors is about loneliness, friendship and the quest for, and struggle against, perfection. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors. ‘This novel acquires the queasy allure of a cliff edge, the sense of impending catastrophe becoming strangely compelling…addictive and rather clever, too.’ Daily Mail ‘Funny, beguiling and quietly profound; a wonderfully well‐crafted debut.’ TLS

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐742444‐3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 30 August 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Will Wiles is an architecture and design journalist. He lives in London.

Care of Wooden Floors (HB) 978‐0‐00‐742443‐6

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Evan Mandery

Q: A Love Story In a gripping tale of time travel and true love that will appeal to fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Adventures of Max Tivoli, a successful writer meets his future self, who advises him not to marry Q, the love of his life. Would you give up the love of your life on the advice of a stranger? A picturesque love story begins at the cinema when our hero – an unacclaimed writer, unorthodox professor and unmistakeable New Yorker – first meets Q, his one everlasting love. Over the following weeks, in the rowboats of Central Park, on the miniature golf courses of Lower Manhattan, under a pear tree in Q’s own inner‐city Eden, their miraculous romance accelerates and blossoms. Nothing, it seems – not even the hostilities of Q’s father or the impending destruction of Q’s garden – can disturb the lovers, or obstruct their advancing wedding. They are destined to be together. Praise for ‘Q’: ‘…the payoff is big. A word to the tear prone: don’t attempt to read the ending in public.’ Susannah Meadows, The New York Times

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐746794‐5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 July 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Evan Mandery is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is the author of two works of non‐fiction and two previous novels, Dreaming of Gwen Stefani and First Contact.

Q (HB) 978‐0‐00‐744760‐2

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Kathryn Harrison

ENCHANTMENTS From the author of The Kiss, a magical, riveting story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia's last Tsar. New Year’s Day, St. Petersburg, 1917. Divers pull the body of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, from the icy waters of the Neva River. Within hours, his daughters are taken to the Royal Palace, where the Tsarina makes a shocking request: would Masha, 18, take on her father’s role as healer to the Tsarevitch Alyosha? Two months later, revolution has toppled the Tsar, and the entire family is placed under house‐arrest. Trapped together in harsh conditions, Masha and Alyosha find solace in one another’s company. Two teenagers, with radically different experiences of the Romanov’s ill‐fated reign, create a private realm of magic and love, as Masha introduces Alyosha to the wild and beautiful land he will never rule. ‘A sumptuous, atmospheric account of the last days of the Romanovs from the perspective of Rasputin’s daughter, Enchantments animates a kaleidoscopic breadth of historical detail with the sensuous, transporting prose that is Kathryn Harrison’s trademark.’ Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad ‘Ask yourself who, in all the world, would be the best novelist to imagine being Rasputin’s daughter. Kathryn Harrison makes the answer obvious. Her Enchantments is a stupendous work of historical imagination.’ Peter Carey

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐747647‐3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 16 August 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels The Binding Chair, Exposure, A Thousand Orange Trees and Envy, as well as two volumes of memoirs, The Kiss and Seeking Rapture, all available from Fourth Estate. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.

Enchantments (HB) 978‐0‐00‐747256‐7

Enchantments (PB) 978‐0‐00‐745606‐2

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Tom Perrotta

THE LEFTOVERS What if – one day, without explanation – some of us simply vanished? Would we carry on, and act as we did before our world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton have to figure out… Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, wants to bring a sense of hope to this traumatised community, but his family has fallen apart in the wake of disaster. His wife has joined a homegrown cult, and his son is a disciple of the prophet Holy Wayne. Only Jill, Kevin’s daughter, remains, and she’s no longer the sweet student she once was. Written with a rare ability to illuminate our everyday struggles, The Leftovers is a startling novel about love, connection and loss. ‘There are few writers more entertaining or adept than Tom Perrotta at explaining the frustrations, ennui and creeping darkness at the heart of American suburbia’ Vogue ‘An American Nick Hornby’ Newsweek

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745311‐5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 August 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Tom Perrotta is the author of several works of fiction, including Little Children. Joe College and Election. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

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Bonnie Jo Campbell

ONCE UPON A RIVER Meet Margo Crane – a female Huckleberry Finn, a teenage Scout Finch – as she single‐handedly takes on a hostile world in this enthralling debut. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo’s childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman travelling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self‐preservation and to deciding what price she is willing to pay for her choices. ‘With all the fixings of a Johnny Cash song — love, loss, redemption — Campbell captures these Michiganders and their earthy, brutal paradise in a tale rich with insight’ Elle ‘An excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom.” – Jane Smiley, The New York Times

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐744337‐6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 25 October 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of three previous books, including American Salvage, a National Book Award finalist.

Once Upon a River (HB) 978‐0‐00‐744336‐9

18 of 50

Joyce Carol Oates

MUDWOMAN A haunting new novel from Joyce Carol Oates. Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate ‐ or destiny. After her rescue, she will slowly forget her own origin, her past erased, her future uncertain. The well‐meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their Quaker values: compassion, modesty, and hard work ‐ seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past. Meredith ‘M.R.’ Neukirchen is the first woman president of a prestigious Ivy League university whose commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all‐consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward a declaration of war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her professional leadership which test her in ways she could not have expected. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her. A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, ‘Mudwoman’ is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of an individual who breaks ‐ but finds a way to heal herself. Praise for Mudwoman ‘Oates is a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish. For a writer in her early 70s, she continues to be wonderfully, unnervingly anarchic, experimental, angry. As if her aim were not to satisfy or entertain – though she always does both – but to do the vandalistic prose equivalent of spray‐painting or setting fire to bins in public parks.’ New York Times

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐748181‐1 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 16 August 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and is one of America’s most highly respected literary figures. She currently holds the post of Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

Mudwoman (HB) 978‐0‐00‐746765‐5

A Widow’s Story (PB) 978‐0‐00‐738817‐2

A Widow’s Story (HB) 978‐0‐00‐738816‐5

Little Bird of Heaven (PB) 978‐0‐00‐734254‐9

17 of 50

Sheila Hale

TITIAN: His Life The first biography of Venice’s greatest artist since 1877 – a towering work which captures the genius of Titian. Devoted father and loyal friend, Titian was notorious for disregarding authority and was an international celebrity by his late fifties. He was notoriously difficult but his stubbornness and horrendous timekeeping did nothing to deter his patrons who included the Hapsburgs, the Pope and his family and Charles V. During his career, which spanned more than seventy years, Titian painted around five or six hundred pictures of which less than half survive. His work has been studied by generations of great artists from Rubens to Manet and he is often seen as having artistically transcended his own time. Sheila Hale not only examines his life, both personal and professional, but how his art affected his contemporaries and how it influences artists today. She also examines Venice in its context of a city at the time of the Renaissance, over shadowed artistically by Rome and Florence and growing into the famous historical city it has become. ‘Simply the most beautiful pictures in the world.’ Lucian Freud on Titian

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐717582‐6 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 19 July 2012 UK Price: £30.00

Sheila Hale has known and often lived in Venice since 1965 when she began work as a research assistant to John Hale. She is the author of a number of books including The Man Who Lost His Language. She is a trustee of Venice in Peril and lives in Twickenham.

46 of 50

John Major

MY OLD MAN: A Personal History of Music Hall Former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall. Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class‐conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes and fears, and sometimes the general absurdity of life. Vast, smoke‐filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain. The most popular performers, such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley and George Robey, were among the highest paid and most celebrated figures in the land. This was the world that John Major’s father Tom entered at the age of 21 as a comedian and singer. In My Old Man, the former prime minister uses his father’s story as a springboard for telling the entertaining history of the music hall, from its origins in the pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century through to its heyday in Victorian times and eventual decline with the rise of radio and cinema in the twentieth century.

Praise for More Than A Game ‘Full of insight, wisdom and dry humour and,. Most important of all, unquenchable enthusiasm.’ Sunday Times

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745013‐8 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 13 September 2012 UK Price: £20.00

More Than A Game (PB) 978‐0‐00‐718365‐4

John Major was Conservative Member of Parliament for Huntingdon between 1979 and 2001. In Cabinet, he served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was Prime Minister between 1990 and 1997. He was awarded the Companion of Honour in 1999, and became a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter in 2005. Since leaving office he has taken up business and charitable appointments. He is the author of two bestselling books, The Autobiography and More Than a Game.

38 of 50

Sarah Gristwood

BLOOD SISTERS: The Women Who Won the Wars of the Roses From best‐selling historian, Sarah Gristwood comes the true story behind Philippa Gregory’s recent novels – the women who gave birth to the Tudor dynasty. It is a fiery history of Queens, the perils of power and of how the Wars of the Roses were ended – not by knights in battle, but the political and dynastic skills of women. The events of the Wars of the Roses are usually described in terms of the men involved; Richard, Duke of York, Henry VI, Edward IV and Henry VII. The reality though, argues Sarah Gristwood, was quite different. These years were also packed with women's drama and – in the tales of conflicted maternity and monstrous births – alive with female energy. In this completely original book, acclaimed author Sarah Gristwood sheds light on a neglected dimension of English history: the impact of Tudor women on the Wars of the Roses. She examines Cecily Neville, the wife of Richard Duke of York, who was deprived of being queen when her husband died at the Battle of Wakefield; Elizabeth Woodville, a widow with several children who married Edward IV in secret and was crowned queen consort; Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, whose ambitions centred on her son and whose persuasions are likely to have lead her husband Lord Stanley, previously allied with the Yorkists, to play his part in Henry's victory. Until now, the lives of these women have remained little known to the general public. Sarah Gristwood tells their stories in detail for the first time. Captivating and original, this is historical writing of the finest kind.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐730929‐0 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 13 September 2012 UK Price: £25.00

Sarah Gristwood is the author of a number of books including the Sunday Times best‐seller Arbella: England’s Lost Queen, Elizabeth and Leicester and the novel The Girl in the Mirror. She was born in Kent and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford University. She is married to film critic Derek Malcolm and lives in London and Kent.

The Girl in the Mirror (PB) 978‐0‐00‐737905‐7

31 of 50

Dan Snow

BATTLE CASTLES [TV tie‐in edition] Bring the Middle Ages back to life with this sumptuous, action‐packed tie‐in book to Dan Snow’s new TV series on castles. Castles and their ruins still dominate the landscape and our imaginations, and are a constant reminder to us today of a time when violence, or the threat of it, was the norm. Dan Snow explores in turn the world’s greatest castles: Dover Castle, ‘the Key to England’ and King John’s first line of defence against the French; Château Gaillard, Richard I’s fortress in Normandy (the only chink in whose armaments was through the latrines); Castillo de Gibalfaro, the last vanguard of Moorish rule in Southern Spain; Malbork Castle, headquarters of the evangelical and entrepreneurial Teutonic Knights in Poland; Edward I’s network of castles in Wales, with its heart at Conwy; and Krak des Chevaliers in Syria – an astounding feat of engineering by the Crusaders. Each castle’s story is dramatically recounted – the building techniques, day‐to‐day life and, the weapons used in its attack and defence. Spanning across the globe, and using the latest CGI reconstructions, Dan Snow gets to the very heart of the bloodshed and battles of the greatest fortresses of the Middle Ages. Praise for Dan Snow: “Many of us wondered whether Dan Snow could make the transition from fluent TV presenter to serious historian. This hugely impressive work confirms his triumphant arrival on the scene. It is by far the best account yet written of a campaign that helped shape North America, and is a fitting tribute on the 250th anniversary of that “wonderful year” 1759' Richard Holmes

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐745558‐4 Size: 189x246mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £25.00

Dan Snow is an historian who has researched, written and presented several documentaries on British and world history for the BBC including Twentieth Century Battlefields, the BAFTA award‐winning Battlefield Britain, which he co‐presented with his father Peter Snow, and his BBC2 series on the history of the Royal Navy. His writing has appeared in The Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Daily Express and BBC History Magazine. He is the author of Death or Victory – a history of Wolfe’s siege of Quebec. Educated at the University of Oxford, he has joint British and Canadian citizenship. He lives in London. Death or Victory (PB) 978‐0‐00‐728621‐8

30 of 50

Richard Holmes

FALLING UPWARDS: How the Romantics Took to the Air Dr Charles understood the perils of flight. Following his landmark ascent to 10,000 feet above Paris in 1783, he observed: ‘Never has a man felt so solitary, so sublime – and so utterly terrified.’ He never flew again. Not so Richard Holmes. Balloons, those ineffably romantic floating machines have drifted through his work for many years, and here, in this heart‐lifting book he tells a cracking international story of drama, adventure and danger – with a serious underlying scientific intent. His subject is flight itself; the aerial dimension explored with such courage by early 18th and 19th century balloonists; the heights of their glory and the fiery, appalling consequences that befell many. We meet the pioneer generation of aviators with their rivalries, reflections and revelations. In an instant, the world pondered for the first time weather prediction, observation of the stars from an aerial dimension, military reconnaissance, transportation of heavy cargo and the geographical exploration of remote continents. An arms race in balloon technology began. Those in previous centuries who had dreamed of flight believed this new mode of transport would open up the secrets of heaven. In fact, as Richard Holmes shows, it revealed the secrets of the world beneath.

‘Thrilling: a portrait of bold adventure among the stars, across the oceans, deep into matter, poetry and the human psyche.’ Peter Forbes, Independent ‘A glorious blend of the scientific and the literary that deserves to carry off armfuls of awards and confirms Holmes's reputation as one on the stellar biographers of the age.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

Stocklist: Popular science ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐738692‐5 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 11 October 2012 UK Price: £20.00

The Age of Wonder (PB) 978‐0‐00‐744135‐8

The Age of Wonder (PB) 978‐0‐00‐714953‐7

Richard Holmes is the author of many award winning books, most recently the best‐selling The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009 and won the Royal Society Prize for Science writing.

Shelley (PB) 978‐0‐00‐720458‐8

36 of 50

Sherard Cowper‐Coles

EVER THE DIPLOMAT: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin In this entertaining and engaging memoir, former ambassador Sherard Cowper‐Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world. For over 30 years Sherard Cowper‐Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high‐profile posts across the globe. Entering the Foreign Office fresh from Oxford in 1977, he enjoyed a meteoric rise with postings in Beirut, Alexandria, Cairo, Washington and Paris, punctuated with spells in London, where the young diplomat had a baptism of fire writing foreign affairs speeches for Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher. In 1999, he was made Principal Private Secretary to the irascible Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, providing the book with some of its most hilarious sequences, and his glittering career culminated in a succession of ambassadorial posts as Our Man in Israel, Saudi Arabia and finally Afghanistan. Praise for Cables from Kabul: ‘The clearest, best informed, and most honest account yet of why and how Britain was drawn deeper and deeper into the Afghan war, by the man who knows more about it than just about anyone else. If you want to understand what really happened, you absolutely have to read this book.’ John Simpson

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐743600‐2 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 25 October 2012 UK Price: £25.00

Sherard Cowper‐Coles is one of the most respected authorities on foreign affairs in the country. He has held a string of high‐ profile diplomat posts, both in the UK and overseas, most recently as the British Ambassador to Kabul and the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His book on Afghanistan, Cables from Kabul, was published in 2011 to great acclaim. Cables from Kabul (PB) 978‐0‐00‐743204‐2

Cables from Kabul (HB) 978‐0‐00‐743201‐1

34 of 50

William Rees‐Mogg

MEMOIRS William Rees‐Mogg is one of the pivotal figures of post‐war Britain. In this brilliantly entertaining memoir he recounts the story of a colourful life, and reflects on the key figures and events of his time. As editor of The Times, journalist, commentator, Chairman of the Arts Council and Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council, William Rees‐Mogg has spent his life at the centre of events in politics and journalism. He has mixed with royalty, prime ministers, presidents, business magnates and religious leaders – and in Memoirs he offers a unique, sometimes provocative, perspective on some of the most fascinating personalities of our age: Rab Butler, Margaret Thatcher, Anthony Eden, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Robin Day, Rupert Murdoch and many more. Rees‐Mogg’s personal life was filled with incident from an early age – he recounts his experiences during the Bristol Blitz; his doomed attempts to enter politics; writing speeches for Anthony Eden during the Suez Crisis; hiring burglars to uncover corruption in the Met; an eventful stay at Chequers with Harold Wilson; how Rupert Murdoch amused the Queen at lunch; and how Harold Macmillan impressed Ronald Reagan at dinner. William Rees‐Mogg’s colourful and illuminating memoirs offer a wonderfully readable life of one of the great characters of our time.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐653215‐6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 05 July 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Memoirs (HB) 978‐0‐00‐257183‐8

Educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford, William Rees‐Mogg joined the Financial Times in 1952, becoming chief leader writer and assistant editor. He then moved to The Times, eventually becoming its editor, and remaining there for fourteen years. An accepted figure of the establishment, he has been vice‐chairman of the BBC, chairman of the Arts Council and head of the Broadcasting Standards Council and sits on the boards of several companies.

16 of 50

Patrick Bishop

TARGET TIRPITZ: X‐Craft, Agents and Dambusters ‐ The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship A gripping account of the epic hunt for Hitler’s most terrifying battleship – the legendary Tirpitz – and the brave men who risked their lives to attack and destroy this most potent symbol of the Nazi’s fearsome war machine. Tirpitz was the pride of Hitler’s navy, the largest and most powerful battleship in Europe. To Churchill, she was ‘the Beast’, a menace to Britain’s supply lines and a threat to the convoys sustaining Stalin’s armies. Tirpitz was said to be unsinkable, impregnable – and she haunted the imaginations of the men directing Britain’s forces, casting an almost supernatural shadow over the war effort. No other target attracted so much attention. In total thirty‐six major Allied operations were launched against the battleship. They included desperately risky missions by human torpedoes and midget submarines and near‐suicidal bombing raids. Yet despite these heroic efforts, Tirpitz stayed afloat. It was not until November 1944 that she was finally destroyed by RAF Lancaster Bombers flown by 617 Squadron – the Dambusters – in a gruelling mission that tested the very limits of human endurance. The man who led the raid – Willie Tait – was one of the most remarkable figures of the war, flying missions almost continuously right from the start. Until now his deeds have been virtually unknown. With exclusive co‐operation from Tait’s family, Patrick Bishop reveals the extraordinary achievement of a man who shunned the spotlight but whose name will be renowned for generations to come. ‘This is a great wartime story, gung‐ho in its praise of the men who finally sank Tirpitz, yet compassionate towards her courageous crew. Already a bestselling war historian with his books on the RAF, Target Tirpitz proves that Bishop has sea legs, and this book should add another fleet of fans to his existing army of admirers.’ Sunday Telegraph

Stocklist: Military history ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐731924‐4 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 19 July 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Target Tirpitz (HB) 978‐0‐00‐731923‐7

3 Para (PB) 978‐0‐00‐725780‐5

Bomber Boys (PB) 978‐0‐00‐719215‐1

Patrick Bishop has been a foreign correspondent for over twenty years, reporting from conflicts all over the world. He is the author of The Irish Empire; the acclaimed book The Provisional IRA with Eamonn Mallie; and the bestselling Fighter Boys, Bomber Boys and 3 Para. He lives in London.

Fighter Boys (PB) 978‐0‐00‐653204‐0

25 of 50

Boris Johnson

JOHNSON’S LIFE OF LONDON: London is special. For centuries, it has been amongst the greatest cities of the world. But a city is nothing without its people. This sparkling new history of London, told through a relay‐race of great Londoners shows in one personality‐packed book that the ingenuity, diversity, creativity and enterprise of London are second to none. ‘London is the best big city in the world.’ Boris Johnson London, a city which has over the centuries, survived attack, fire and devastation, is a place where people feel enabled to create and empowered to invent. It is and always has been home to a great variety of remarkable men and women – whose lives have enriched the rest of the world. Boris Johnson’s book is a celebration of the people who, from the Romans to the present day, give the city its vibrant and exuberant character. From Boudicca to Chaucer, Shakespeare to Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill to Keith Richards, Johnson’s Life of London is the real story of London, told through the Londoners and non‐Londoners who have helped to shape the greatest city in the world. ‘A book of hidden gems….his vocabulary is extraordinary and his polymathery a joy….as he cycles through history we glimpse him everywhere….it is best when Boris’s enthusiasms are on display, as exuberant as a vase of bird‐of‐paradise blooms.’ The Times

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐741894‐7 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 19 July 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London in May 2008. Before this he was the Editor of the Spectator and Member of Parliament for Henley on Thames. He is the author of many books, notably Have I Got Views for You and Dream of Rome.

Johnson’s Life of London 978‐0‐00‐744061‐0

Johnson’s Life of London (HB) 978‐0‐00‐741893‐0

Have I Got Views For You (PB) 978‐0‐00‐729096‐3

The Dream of Rome (PB) 978‐0‐00‐722445‐6

14 of 50

Adam Nicolson

GENTRY: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England. Adam Nicolson’s riveting new book concentrates on fourteen families with a time‐span from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung‐ho of the Plumpton family to the high‐seas adventures of the Lascelles in the 18th‐century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. The families have been selected from all over the country and range from the famous to the unknown. Some families are divided by politics , such as the family that took different sides in the Reformation; others destroy their inheritance through reckless gambling or investments . All of them are vivid depictions of the life and code of the gentry, and have left deep archives of family papers which the author has been able to use, often for the very first time. The Gentry is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history. It presents a convincing argument on what has created the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel. ‘Dazzling…..there is an exhilarating narrative sweep that takes the story across the centuries, but above all there is a unity of theme and place that roots it in English history and the English landscape….This is an enviably good book.’ The Spectator ‘Nicolson is absolutely the perfect person to capture all this. He has a feeling for land and for tradition.…I was willingly swept along by his torrent of overblown romanticism…The other great strength of the book is the new path it beats through six centuries of English rural history….Clever, moving and put together with expert craftsmanship, The Gentry is the most enjoyable book I’ve read this year.’ Financial Times

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐733550‐3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 16 August 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent.

The Gentry (HB) 978‐0‐00‐733549‐7

Smell of Summer Grass (HB) 978‐0‐00‐733557‐2

When God Spoke English (PB) 978‐0‐00‐743100‐7

Sissinghurst (PB) 978‐0‐00‐724055‐5

11 of 50

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott‐Clark

THE MEADOW: Where the Terror Began The shocking true story of a brutal kidnapping high in the mountains of Kashmir that marked the beginning of modern terrorism. In July 1995, ten backpackers take a trip of a lifetime. They journey into the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, trekking to a place known as the Meadow, one of the world’s most idyllic campsites. They have come in search of many things – nirvana, exhilaration, a sense of self. But over the course of the next week, Islamic extremists hunt them down, taking them hostage and sucking them into an alien world of jihad. The Meadow charts how the lives of a small group of tourists and their kidnappers became entwined on the mountain trails they followed and in the cramped shepherds’ huts where they hid. It tells of the terrifying escape of one, the heart‐rending secret letters written on birch bark and hidden by another, and how – with a brutal beheading – the hostage takers took an irreversible step into the abyss. Written with access to diaries and letters, personal recollections and classified police reports, as well as secret tape recordings of Indian government negotiations and interviews with the jihadis themselves, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott‐Clark’s book is a startling true story told from the perspectives of all involved. Packed with explosive revelations, The Meadow provides the first definitive answers as to what happened to the missing backpackers and reveals how this kidnapping changed the face of modern jihad. ‘The definitive end to the story, which has remained unresolved for seventeen years…Levy and Scott‐Clark have dared to follow the pitiless logic of a very dirty war, and have shown where it can lead…a gripping and often emotional read.’ Literary Review ‘A meticulous account…Like a real‐life version of The Beach by Alex Garland’ Sunday Telegraph

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐736817‐4 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 16 August 2012 UK Price: £8.99

The Meadow (HB) 978‐0‐00‐736816‐7

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark are internationally renowned and award winning investigative journalists who worked as staff writers and foreign correspondents for The Sunday Times before joining the Guardian. Their first book, Stone of Heaven (2001) was named by the New York Times as a book of the year. The Amber Room (2004) was a finalist in the Borders’ Original Voices US book awards, becoming a national best seller there. Their third book, Deception (2007) was a Washington Post ‘pick of the year’, and a finalist in the Royal United Services Institute, Duke of Westminster’s Medal for military literature. They won the One World Media award for foreign reporting in 2005 and were selected as One World Media Journalists of the Year in 2009. They have produced several television documentaries, most recently City of Fear, a film for Channel 4’s Dispatches (2010). They live in London and in France.

28 of 50

A. N. Wilson

HITLER A short, sharp, gripping account of the twentieth century’s most notorious figure by one of our finest biographers. In this brilliant short biography of Adolf Hitler, acclaimed historian A. N. Wilson offers a fresh interpretation of the life of the ‘ultimate demon‐tyrant of history’. Among the book’s many insights, Wilson shows how Hitler had an intuitive sense which amounted to genius that the spoken word was going to be of more significance than the written word during the twentieth century. In this respect, the Führer is presented as a man ahead of his time, who foreshadowed Hollywood and TV stars and post‐war politicians. In a field dense with lengthy tomes, this brief, penetrating portrait provides a compelling introduction to a man whose evil continues to fascinate and appal. ‘In the best short biography of Adolf Hitler for three decades, A. N. Wilson goes straight to the essentials to explain what made the Fuhrer the phenomenon he was. His conclusions make fascinating, if occasionally uncomfortable, reading even two‐thirds of a century after Hitler’s death.’ —Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War ‘A. N. Wilson is a born biographer and has an eye for the telling detail. In a book written with verve, insight, and imagination, he gives us a fresh look at Hitler. The story he tells is bound to interest and surprise even those who think they already know and understand this most curious historical figure, one who against all odds rose to become leader of Germany and then promptly brought about the greatest catastrophe in European history.’ —Robert Gellately, author of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐741350‐8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 30 August 2012 UK Price: £7.99

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer at St Hugh’s College and New College from 1976 to 1981, and was then appointed Literary Editor of the I. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981. His novels include The Sweets of Pimlico, The Healing Art, Wise Virgin and biographies of Walter Scott, Milton and Tolstoy. Hitler (HB) 978‐0‐00‐741349‐2

13 of 50

Richard Fortey

SURVIVORS: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind An awe‐inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe, in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures which have survived from earlier times. In this groundbreaking book, prize‐winning science writer Richard Fortey chronicles life’s history not through the fossil record, but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, through geological time. Fortey takes us on a journey to ancient worlds: on a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance, we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago. Along a stretch of Australian coastline, we bear witness to the sights and sounds that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. And, in the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the secretive velvet worm burrows into the rotting timber of the jungle floor, we marvel at a living fossil which has survived unchanged since before the break‐up of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent, over 150 million years ago. Written with Fortey’s customary sparkle and gusto, this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the world’s oldest flora and fauna brilliantly combines the best science writing about the origins of life with an explorer’s sense of adventure and a poet’s wonder at the natural world. ‘I was thrilled by Survivors…. Reading Richard Fortey is always pure pleasure.’ Bill Bryson ‘Fortey has a unique way with the most humble of lifeforms and an infectious curiosity that can slide into near rapture’ Evening Standard

Stocklist: Popular science ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐720987‐3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 06 September 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Richard Fortey retired from his position as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in 2006. He is the author of several books, including Fossils: A Key to the Past, The Hidden Landscape which won The Natural World Book of the Year in 1993, Life: An Unauthorised Biography, Trilobite! and The Earth: An Intimate History and Dry Store‐ room No. 1. He was elected President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Survivors (HB) 978‐0‐00‐720986‐6

Dry Store Room No. 1 (PB) 978‐0‐00‐720989‐7

The Earth (PB) 978‐0‐00‐655137‐9

Trilobite! (PB) 978‐0‐00‐655138‐6

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Anne Somerset

QUEEN ANNE: The Politics of Passion With a personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue, Queen Anne presided over some of the most momentous events in British history. Like Antonia Fraser’s life of Marie Antoinette or Amanda Foreman’s The Duchess, Queen Anne is historical biography at its best. In 1702, fourteen years after she helped oust her father from his throne and deprived her newborn half‐brother of his birthright, Queen Anne inherited the crowns of England and Scotland. Childless, despite seventeen pregnancies that had all either ended in failure or produced heartrendingly short‐lived children, in some respects she was a pitiable figure. But against all expectation she proved Britain’s most successful Stuart ruler. Her reign was marked by many triumphs, including union with Scotland and glorious victories in war against France. It was also marked by controversy: Anne’s close relationship with Sarah, the outspoken wife of the Duke of Marlborough turned to rancor with Sarah’s startling claim of the Queen’s lesbian infatuation with another lady‐in‐waiting, Abigail Masham. ‘The formidable Anne Somerset ….in this admirably objective study sets out to rescue Anne’s unfortunate reputation from her critics….and restate the case for this shy and sickly ruler as one of our most unexpectedly effective monarchs….It has taken immense patience and skill ….to create a new and subtler image of the last of the Stuart monarchs. Anne Somerset has done a real service both to us and to her namesake.’ Sunday Times ‘Somerset …..goes a considerable way towards overturning ….the negative judgment attached to Anne, both during her lifetime and later….in this well‐argued biography.’ Daily Telegraph

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐720376‐5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 13 September 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Anne Somerset was born in 1955 and read History at King's College, London. Her first book, The Life and Times of William IV, was published in 1980. This was followed in 1984 by the bestselling Ladies‐in‐Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day, an acclaimed biography of Elizabeth I in 1991, and Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I: The Overbury Murder in 1998. Her most recent work is The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV.

Queen Anne (HB) 978‐0‐00‐720375‐8

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Simon Callow

CHARLES DICKENS An exuberant and entertaining biography of Charles Dickens that captures the essence of the great novelist. Simon Callow‘s sparkling biography explores the central importance of the theatre to the life of the greatest storyteller in the English language. From his early years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth to his reluctant retirement from ‘these garish lights’ just before his death, Dickens was obsessed with the stage. Not only was he a dazzling mimic who wrote, acted in and stage‐managed plays, all with fanatical perfectionism; as a writer he was a compulsive performer, whose very imagination was theatrical, both in terms of plot devices and construction of character. Like many actors, Dickens felt the need to be completed by contact with his audience. He was the original ‘celebrity’ author, who attracted thousands of adoring fans to his readings in Britain and across the Atlantic, in which he gave voice to his unforgettable cast of characters. ‘This is the book we have long been waiting for and only Simon Callow could have written it. The theatre was central to Dickens’s life, and it needed a skilled biographer to do justice to the subject. Simon Callow rises superbly to the challenge and the result is a marvellous book that really deepens and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of Dickens.’ Michael Slater ‘A comprehensive biography as enthralling as one of his own performances … A great achievement.’ Catherine Peters, Literary Review

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐744531‐8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 30 August 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared in many films, including the hugely IFour Weddings and a Funeral. Callow’s books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, a highly acclaimed biography of Charles Laughton, a biographical trilogy of Orson Welles (of which the first two parts have now been published) and Love is Where it Falls, an account of his friendship with the great play agent, Peggy Ramsay.

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World (HB) 978‐0‐00‐744530‐1

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Richard Holmes

SOLDIERS: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors This is the story of a man as ancient as a redcoat in Charles II’s Tangier garrison and as modern as gate‐guard on Camp Bastion. From battlefield to barrack‐room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier. Since 1660 the army has evolved and adapted, but the social organisation of the men has changed less, with the major combat arms retaining many of the characteristics familiar to those who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme. The Duke of Marlborough, who built up the British army to become a world‐class fighting force in the 1660s, would recognise in the tired heroes of Helmand the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago. Soldiers is exhaustively researched, and Holmes’s affection for the soldier shines through on every page. Above all, this book is brimming with great stories, from the chaos of the battlefield to the fug of the barrack‐room, from Ulster to Bengal, from Flanders’ fields to the Afghan hills. This is a magisterial social history of the British soldier – and Richard Holmes’s fitting last tribute to the British soldier, to whom he was so devoted. ‘If any of his many works of military history should stand as a memorial to his work and achievement, this last most lively book might well be the most fitting’ The Times ‘A book of majestic, heart‐rending humanity: a deeply affectionate portrait of British soldiers as they have existed for more than 350 years’ Daily Telegraph

Stocklist: Military history ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐722570‐5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Richard Holmes was one of Britain’s most distinguished and eminent military historians and broadcasters. He was the author of many best‐selling and widely acclaimed books including Redcoat, Tommy, Marlborough and Wellington, and famous for his BBC series. He served in the Territorial Army, and was Colonel of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment from 1999 to 2007. Richard Holmes died suddenly in April 2011 from pneumonia. He had been suffering from non‐Hodgkins’ Lymphoma.

Soldiers (HB) 978‐0‐00‐722569‐9

Marlborough (PB) 978‐0‐00‐722572‐9

Tommy (PB) 978‐0‐00‐713752‐7

Wellington (PB) 978‐0‐00‐713750‐3

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Richard Davenport‐Hines

TITANIC LIVES: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew Marking the centenary of the Titanic disaster, Titanic Lives is a fresh investigation of the lives of the passengers and crew on board the most famous ship in history. In this impeccably researched and utterly riveting social history, Richard Davenport‐Hines brings to life the stories of the men who built and owned the Titanic, the crew who serviced her and the passengers of all classes who sailed on her. We are introduced to this fascinating cast of characters and follow their lives on board the ship through to the supreme dramatic climax of the disaster. Universally critically acclaimed, Titanic Lives is the must‐read Titanic book of the centenary year. ‘An astonishing work, of meticulous research, which allows us to know, in painful detail, the men and women on that fateful voyage. Even now, a hundred years later, Mr Davenport‐Hines finds a new, and heart‐breaking, story to tell.’ Julian Fellowes ‘Eloquent and absorbing… As well as being a fascinating work of social history, Iis a remarkable study of empathy and its absence. As such it will stay afloat long after the armada of other Titanic books have gone down.’ Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978‐0‐00‐732166‐7 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 27 September 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Richard Davenport‐Hines is the acclaimed biographer of W. H. Auden, the Macmillan dynasty and the author of Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain Since the Renaissance. He is a regular contributor to the TLS, London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday.

Titanic Lives (HB) 978‐0‐00‐732164‐3

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