Press titles Jan-June 2012 by sam shone

Press Books Catalogue January - June 2012 New Titles

Fourth Estate

HarperPress

The Friday Project

Press Books Jan â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Jun 2012 Table of contents: Fourth Estate Non Fiction 1-15 Fourth Estate Fiction 16-33 HarperPress Non Fiction 34-51 HarperPress Fiction 52-59

The Friday Project Non Fiction 60 The Friday Project Fiction 61-63

Fourth Estate Non Fiction

Dr John Briffa

ESCAPE THE DIET TRAP Escape the Diet Trap promises to put an end to yo-yo dieting and fluctuating weight. Dr John Briffa, award-winning authority on diet and weight loss, shows how conventional advice – to eat less and exercise more – actually causes the body to resist weight loss and dooms us to failure. Offering a science-based and a sustainable approach to weight loss that works with the body, not against it, Escape the Diet Trap reveals how to achieve lasting weight control, without calorie-counting, extensive exercise or hunger, including: •Ten reasons why eating a low-fat, calorie-controlled diet makes a sustained weight loss virtually impossible. •Why the less hungry you are, the more weight you’ll lose. •How different types of calorie have different fattening potential. •Why weight is not just about calories, but the impact our diet has on key hormones, including insulin and leptin. •Why you should ignore foods labelled ‘low fat’ or ‘light’. •Why aerobic exercise has little impact on weight, and the type of exercise that does. •The simple mental tricks and techniques that ensure success.

Stocklist: Diet and slimming ISBN: 978-0-00-744243-0 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback (Royal) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 January 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Dr John Briffa is a practising doctor and award-winning health writer who has contributed to a wide variety of newspaper and magazines both in the UK and abroad. He was formerly the natural health columnist for the Daily Mail, and has been the Observer’s nutritionist since 2002. He is the author of several books on the subject of health, nutrition and natural health including Ultimate Health, Natural Health for Kids, The True You Diet and Waist Disposal and writes a well-trafficked blog at drbriffa.com. He works in private practice in London.

Nick Cohen

YOU CAN’T READ THIS BOOK: Censorship in an Age of Freedom After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the advent of the Web , which allowed for even the smallest voice to be heard, everywhere you turned you were told that we were living in an age of unparalleled freedom. In You Can't Read This Book , Nick Cohen argues that this view is dangerously naive. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't, to the Great Firewall of China and the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich protecting their privacy, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech – religious fanaticism, plutocratic power and dictatorial states – are thriving, and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place in the early 21st century than they did in the late 20th. This is not an account of interesting but trivial disputes about freedom of speech: the rights and wrongs of shouting ‘Fire' in a crowded theatre, of playing heavy metal at 3 am in a built-up area or articulating extremist ideas in a school or university. Rather, this is a story that starts with the cataclysmic reaction of the Left and Right to the publication and denunciation of The Satanic Verses in 1988 which saw them jump into bed with radical extremists. And it compellingly and provocatively reminds us that even in the transgressive, liberated West, where so much blood has been spilt for Freedom, where rebellion is the conformist style and playing the dissenter the smart career move in the arts and media, you can write a book and end up destroyed or dead. Praise for What’s Left?: ‘Exceptional and necessary’ Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times

Stocklist: Politics ISBN: 978-0-00-730890-3 Size: 135x216mm Format: Paperback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Nick Cohen is a journalist and commentator for the Observer and Evening Standard. He is also the author of What’s Left? the most important and provocative commentary on how the Left lost its way.

Wael Ghonim

REVOLUTION 2.0 Revolution 2.0 is the story of Wael Ghonim’s extraordinary contribution to the Egyptian Revolution. On the 25th of January 2011, a call for people to protest against the Egyptian government appeared on Facebook. ‘We are all Khaled Said’ was set up by one of the Arab world’s leading internet gurus – Wael Ghonim. He wanted it to be a focal point for ordinary Egyptians to express their anger at the killing of a young student, and transform the feeling of injustice into a peaceful protest that brought people out on to the streets of Cairo. But two days later, as the number of people in the streets grew, Wael disappeared. After 11 days in captivity, when he was finally released by Egyptian state security amid cheers and applause, he went straight on to Egyptian television to try and mobilise the people, and stood up in Tahrir Square to tell thousands of Egyptians ‘this is not the time for individuals, parties or movements. It’s time for all of us to say one thing: Egypt above all.’ A visionary with a passion for computers, Wael had created one of the Arab world’s leading websites whilst still at university. Through the internet, he had met his wife, and networked with hundreds of young men and women from around the world. But in January 2011, Wael’s knowledge of technology, and his understanding of the attitudes of young people and the way they use the internet enabled him to make a lasting contribution to the future of Egypt. In Revolution 2.0 Wael gives his unique insight into Egypt’s history – how it shaped his life, and thousands like him. It introduces the problems and injustice of Egyptian politics before the revolution, and tells the full story of Wael’s journey – from We are all Khaled Said to Wael’s imprisonment by State Security, and the last triumphant days of the revolution. Hailed as a hero, but modestly rejecting the label, Wael’s determination to change the course of Egyptian history is a truly remarkable story – and testament to the ability of one man to bring people together for the cause of justice, and ultimately, freedom.

ISBN: 978-0-00-745436-5 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Wael Ghonim was born in 1980 in Cairo, and lived in Saudi Arabia for most of his childhood until moving back to Egypt at the age of 13 . A prominent internet entrepreneur, by his mid-twenties Wael was a key member or founder of three of the Arab world’s most popular websites, and in 2008 he was hired by Google as Regional Product Manager for the Middle East and North Africa. A passionate and committed individual, Wael’s knowledge of technology and his dedication to the cause of democracy in Egypt came together in 2011 when he set up a Facebook page that facilitated the protests that would lead to the departure of Hosni Mubarak. Wael is married with two children.

Alec Wilkinson

THE ICE BALLOON The story of the only person to attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon, and the golden age of Polar Exploration. In August 1930, a Norwegian sloop, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island called White Island. Landing, the sealers followed some walruses around a point of land. A few hours later, they returned with a book, together with a boathook stamped ‘Andree’s Pol. Exp 1896’. Not far from the boat was a body. It was leaning against a rock, with its legs extended, frozen. They carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing, and when they saw a large monogram ‘A’. They knew who they were looking at: S. A. Andree, the Swede who, with two companions, ascended on July 11, 1897, in a hydrogen balloon to discover the North Pole, one of the last unmapped continents on earth. The Ice Balloon is their story and that of this last heroic age of polar exploration. Of the thousand or so people who had gone looking for the Pole before the twentieth century, at least seven hundred and fifty of whom died, only Andree used a balloon. Andree had ascended on a blustery afternoon from Dane’s Island, in the Spitzberg archipelago, six hundred miles from the Pole. It took an hour for the balloon, which was a hundred feet tall, to disappear from the view of the people who were watching from the shore, carpenters, technicians, members of the Swedish navy who had assisted in the weeks leading up to the launch. Two years of planning had led him to predict that he would arrive at the Pole in about forty three hours. Ideally, he said, and perhaps disingenuously, he would descend in San Francisco. He was a figure of international glamour. Every newspaper of substance in Europe and North America carried word of his leaving.

“Wilkinson’s writing is so flawless and engaging that I’d read him on a packed subway at rush hour.” Sebastian Junger

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978-0-00-744588-2 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Alec Wilkinson began writing for The New Yorker in 1980. Before that, he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that he was a rock-and-roll musician. He has published nine books, including The Happiest Man in the World and The Protest Singer. His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Prize, and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Joanna Blythman

WHAT TO EAT: How To Reinvent Your Food – For Your Health, Your Pocket and Your Plate Covering all the pressing food dilemmas of our times, award-winning food writer Joanna Blythman assesses the desirability of common foods from all angles, showing you how to make sensible, thoughtful and practical choices about what to eat each day, irrespective of your income.

Food should be one of life's greatest pleasures yet, increasingly, choosing it is becoming a chore. Bombarded by questions such as ‘Is red meat bad for you?’ and ‘Is local always best?’ it’s difficult to know what to eat. At the same time, even the basics are becoming more and more expensive, making it essential that we choose the best foods for ourselves and the planet and make them go as far as possible. So how can we eat well without waste, expense and ethical dilemmas? In this inspiring, practical guide award-winning journalist Joanna Blythman addresses all of these issues and more to help you buy food that’s good in the broadest sense of that word: food that is healthy and affordable and which doesn’t trash the environment; food that doesn’t exploit producers or cause unnecessary animal suffering, and last but not least, food that tastes great. She explains how to save money in the supermarket and elsewhere, how to use up every bit of food, from stale bread to old vegetables and how to improve your diet as well as your finances. Packed with brilliant ideas for choosing lovely, wholesome meat, fish and veg and quick and easy suggestions for cooking them well, without compromising your principles or emptying your purse, this is the modern manual for eating well in the twentyfirst century. Reviews for Shopped: ‘She probably knows more than anyone else about where our food comes from.' Nigel Slater

Stocklist: Cookery ISBN: 978-0-00-734142-9 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £16.99

Joanna Blythman is Britain's leading investigative food journalist. She has won four Glenfiddich awards for her writing, a Caroline Walker Media Award for Improving the Nation's Health by Means of Good Food, and a Guild of Food Writers Award for The Food We Eat. In 2004, she won the prestigious Derek Cooper Award, one of BBC Radio 4's Food and Farming Awards. She writes and broadcasts frequently on food issues.

Alex James

ALL CHEESES GREAT AND SMALL 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. It will also include illustrations by Graham Coxon. Praise for Bit of a Blur: 'Alex James is a witty, engaging guide to the mad goings-on behind the scenes of Britpop. Blur's bassist famously estimates that he blew around £1m on champagne and cocaine during the nineties. Here's how.' Independent

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-745312-2 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback (Royal) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £18.99

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 will host the ‘Harvest’ festival at his farm, combining the best in British music and food.

Eliane Glaser

GET REAL: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions An ideology-spotter’s guide to the delusions we live by. Multinational oil corporations trumpet their green credentials. Shadowy billionaires orchestrate ‘grassroots’ political movements. Public-spending cuts that target the poor are billed as ‘giving power to the people’. Casually dressed employees play table football in airy open-plan offices, but work longer hours than ever before. These are just a few examples of the growing gap between appearance and reality in modern life. With the melting away of the conflicts between East and West and Right and Left, the old ideologies were supposedly consigned to history. But Eliane Glaser argues that they never really went away – they just went undercover, creating a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and crude vested interests appear in seductive new disguises. A world of illusion, persuasion and coercion which aims to conceal the truth and beguile us all. It’s time to radically alter the way we perceive the world, to raise a sceptical yet optimistic eyebrow. Time to get real. Get Real is a passionate and entertaining guide to spotting and decoding the delusions we live under – from ‘revolutionary’ plus-size models to ‘world-saving’ organic vegetables; from heavily scripted and edited ‘reality’ TV to ‘life-changing’ iPhone apps. Busting the jargon and unravelling the spin, Get Real reveals the secrets about modern life that we were never supposed to know. It’s an insider’s guide to understanding the present which puts the truth and the power to choose firmly in our hands. Only by telling it like it is can we improve – and maybe even save – our world for real.

Stocklist: Politics ISBN: 978-0-00-741681-3 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Eliane Glaser is a writer, radio producer, and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

Sinclair McKay

RAMBLE ON A history of walking and our relationship with the British countryside. On the afternoon of Sunday April 24, 1932, a group of approximately five hundred men and women set out for the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire's Peak District. They were not here to take in the fresh air and breathtaking vistas: they were here to make a stand. Kinder Scout, like almost every other site of natural beauty in Britain at that time, was privately owned and fiercely guarded. This wild, open landscape was one that they had absolutely no right to visit. Ramble On, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Ramblers’ Association, tells the story of how country walks and rambling were transformed from a small and often illegal pastime to the most popular recreational activity in the country. But the story of rambling is not so much about parliamentary acts as it is about the remarkable people who campaigned for (and in some cases against) the pastime. There was a Lancastrian town council accountant called Alfred Wainwright, who in the 1950s changed his life, and the lives of many others, when he popularised walking in the Lake District with his series of guides. And any history of rambling would be incomplete without mentioning the resistant landowners – from the notorious Nicholas Van Hoogstraten to celebrities such as Madonna and Jeremy Clarkson – who have done their level best (and worst) to keep walkers off their land. Above all, this tale is about the exhilaration of a gusty hill-top path; the curious unease that a labyrinthine dark forest floor can induce; the feel of different soil, peat and rock; the sight of alternating sunlight and shadow sweeping across vast valleys. Both a biography of Britain's favourite outdoor pursuit and a celebration of our wonderful countryside, Ramble On is for anyone who has ever pulled on a pair of walking boots or is partial to the taste of Kendal mintcake.

Stocklist: Travel Writing ISBN: 978-0-00-742864-9 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 31 May 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Sinclair McKay is a features writer for The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday. He is also the acclaimed author of The Secret Life of Bletchley Park.

Nick Cohen

Stocklist: Politics ISBN: 978-0-00-730890-3 Size: 135x216mm Format: Paperback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Nick Cohen is a journalist and commentator for the Observer and Evening Standard. He is also the author of What’s Left? the most important and provocative commentary on how the Left lost its way.

Laura Hillenbrand

UNBROKEN From the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit, an extraordinary true story of courage and survival. On a May afternoon in 1943, a bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, who struggled to a life raft and pulled himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been an incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channelled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and adrift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humour; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. ‘The pages almost turn themselves. His tale is remarkable and his resilience inspiring.’ Ben Macintyre ‘An instant classic.’ Mail on Sunday

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978-0-00-737803-6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Laura Hillenbrand is a contributing writer/editor to Equus magazine among many other journals. Her article on Seabiscuit won the Eclipse Award for Magazine Writing; she served as a consultant on the Universal film of this book, released in 2003. She lives in Washington DC.

Joyce Carol Oates

A WIDOW’S STORY: A Memoir ‘My husband died, my life collapsed.’ On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray was dead from a hospital-acquired virulent infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced – totally unprepared – with the reality of widowhood. A Widow's Story illuminates one woman's struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of ‘death duties’, and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief – the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous ‘pools’ of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Enlivened by the piercing vision, acute perception and mordant humour that are the hallmarks of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, this is a extremely moving tale of life and death, love and grief. ‘This is one of the most compelling books I have read in a long time. One is with her, every inch of the way, as if her story were one's own.’ Observer ‘There are memorable sentences on every page, little crystalline moments that leap out and stay imprinted in your mind for days afterwards. It’s an extraordinary piece of work – naked, unflinching and unforgettable.’ Sunday Telegraph

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-738817-2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 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.

James Gleick

THE INFORMATION James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Genius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code. In The Information James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the ‘bit’, it is a fascinating account of the modern age’s defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.

‘Mind-stretching but enlightening … the power and breadth of the ideas involved cannot but make you marvel’ Daily Mail ‘Deeply impressive and rather beautiful book.’ Philip Ball, Observer Magisterial…It is not merely a history of information, but also a theory and a prospectus. To describe it as ambitious is to engage in almost comical understatement’ Matthew Syed, The Times

Stocklist: Social and cultural studies ISBN: 978-0-00-722574-3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £8.99

James Gleick was born in New York in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Chaos, Genius, Faster, What Just Happened and a biography of Isaac Newton.

Annie Proulx

BIRD CLOUD Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of American history locked beneath the topsoil. Bird Cloud is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400 foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She knew she had to purchase the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she would build on it – a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character – a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Proulx's first non-fiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of building that house – solar panels, a Japanese soak tub, a concrete floor, elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets – and an enthralling natural history and archeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians. It is also a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi river boat captains and Canadian settlers, and an illuminating autobiography. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

'Magic … Books are like homes and within 10 pages of crossing the threshold of this one readers will put up their feet, secure in the knowledge that they won’t be moving on to another any time soon ' Geoff Dyer, Observer

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-723199-7 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Annie Proulx's books include the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Fine Just the Way It Is. Her many honours include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. She lives in Wyoming.

Tim Radford

THE ADDRESS BOOK: Our Place in the Scheme of Things At the start of each school term, at the age of about 10, I did something that I suppose a million other 10-year-olds have done… The Address Book starts with some of the fundamental questions asked by everyone, in every culture since the beginning of civilisation. Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Tim Radford attempts to answer them by drafting in a technique he first used as a school-boy, when he wrote his address in the inside front cover of his exercise book every term, starting with the house number, the street name, the town, and proceeding upwards through levels of scale – the hemisphere, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy – until he reached the final line, the universe itself. So – this is a book written on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. We open with Tim in the present day, in Hastings, sitting at his desk, thinking about his house, his possessions, how they have shaped him and how he has affected them, how a house becomes part of our identity and what binds us to the objects in it. The next chapter deals with Hastings itself; the town as a unit of scale, why we associate ourselves with one place rather than another. And so on, upwards through levels of magnitude. As the units of space grow larger, so Tim himself dwindles and the bigger, colder forces of astronomy and astrophysics come into play. By the time we reach the address's final line we are beginning to understand that there is no final answer to the question

‘One of our finest science writers … Radford’s book builds into a complex and compelling linguistic, poetic, scientific, spiritual and historical survey’ The Times

Stocklist: Popular science ISBN: 978-0-00-735629-4 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 12 April 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Tim Radford is a freelance journalist. He worked for The Guardian for 32 years, becoming (among other things) letters editor, arts editor, literary editor and science editor. He won the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times. He served on the UK committee for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. He has lectured about science and the media in dozens of British and foreign cities. He has written one book, The Crisis of Life On Earth, and edited two books of science writing for the Guardian.

Diane Keaton

THEN AGAIN An intimate memoir by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved actresses. “Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK.” So begins Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir about her mother and herself. In it you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always thinking Dorothy Hall. To write about herself, Diane realized she had to write about her mother, too, and how their bond came to define both their lives. And so, in a remarkable act of creation, Diane not only reveals herself to us, she also lets us meet in intimate detail her mother. Throughout her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals - literally thousands of pages - in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, about herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through all these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother – a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy struggling to find an outlet for her talents – as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years. More than just the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams. Diane will remind you of yourself, and her bonds with her family will remind you of your own relationships with those you love the most.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-736070-3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Diane Keaton has starred in some of the most memorable movies of the past forty years, including the Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Reds, Baby Boom, The First Wives Club, . and Something’s Gotta Give. Her many awards include the Golden Globe and the Academy Award. Keaton lives with her daughter and son in Los Angeles.

Fourth Estate Fiction

Chad Harbach

THE ART OF FIELDING For fans of Freedom and The Marriage Plot, a wonderful, warm novel from a major new American voice. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment – to oneself and to others. ‘Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.’ Jonathan Franzen 'The Art of Fielding is one of those rare novels -- like Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh or John Irving's The World According to Garp -- that seems to appear out of nowhere, and then dazzles and bewitches and inspires, until you nearly lose your breath from the enjoyment and satisfaction' James Patterson

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-737444-1 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £16.99

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-737445-8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 26 April 2012 UK Price: £ 8.99

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, and graduated from Harvard in 1997. He was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received an MFA in Fiction in 2004. He is currently the Executive Editor of n+1, which he co-founded, and lives in Brooklyn.

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Lily Tuck

I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS A riveting and deeply moving portrait of love and marriage. ‘His hand is growing cold, still she holds it.’ is how this story begins. Unfolding over a single night, Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician – it was a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As the reader is drawn through select memories – real and imagined – of events that occurred in places as distant and disparate as France, Wisconsin, Hong Kong, Mexico, and California, Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that shaped the lives of Nina and Philip. Moving, powerful, and utterly engaging, I Married You for Happiness is a riveting portrait of a forty-three-year-old marriage, an elegant elegy to a man and a meditation on how chance can affect both a life and love. Praise for The News From Paraguay: ‘Tuck’s prose is elegant, the subject well researched.’ New York Times Book Review

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-744914-9 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Lily Tuck was born in Paris and is the author of four previous novels – Interviewing Matisse, The Woman Who Walked on Water, the PEN/Faulkner award finalist Siam and The News From Paraguay, which won the National Book Award – as well as a collection of stories, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. She lives in New York City.

Darran McCann

AFTER THE LOCKOUT An ambitious and compelling first novel about a key moment in Irish history. November 1917. With tensions in Ireland, war in Europe and revolution in Russia, the return of leftwing Easter Rising gunman Victor Lennon to his home village after a long exile stirs up excitement and trepidation. A hero to many but a danger to some, his socialist ideas unsettle the fearsome parish priest, Stanislaus Benedict. Soon Victor and Stanislaus are on a collision course, with the very souls of the people caught between religion and socialism. McCann expertly tells his story from the perspectives of, and in the context of conflict between, these two titanic opposing forces; a conflict emblematic not only of a recurring trope in Irish history but of one more eternal and universal: between hope and experience; between ideals and human weakness. ‘With this one novel Darran McCann succeeds where many writers over an entire career fail, laying claim to a terrain entirely his own. Spread the word, Darran McCann has arrived.’ Glenn Patterson ‘A wonderful novel, about what history has done to Ireland, and what Ireland has done to history. The triumph is that it is not only deeply intelligent and self-aware, but also entertaining from the first page to the last.’ Hilary Mantel

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-742947-9 Size: 153x234mm Format: Paperback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Darran McCann was born in Co. Armagh in 1979. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University before becoming a journalist with Belfast's Irish News. He went on to write, teach and study at Queen's University Belfast under Glenn Patterson and Ciaran Carson. In 2010 received the PhD in creative writing for After the Lockout, the first such doctorate ever awarded by an Irish university. His play, Confession, was produced at the Brian Friel Theatre in Belfast in 2008. He lives in Ireland with his wife and son.

Evan Mandery

Q: A Love Story 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. But when our hero receives an unhappy forecast from a man claiming to be his future self, he is faced with an agonizing . decision: should he evade future misery or pursue present bliss?

In Q, Evan Mandery has fashioned an epic love-story on quantum foundations. The novel wears its philosophical and narrative sophistication lightly: in prose that is exuberant, direct, witty, Mandery brings the poise of an essayist to this fabulous romance. And it has an ending that will melt even the darkest heart.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-744760-2 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £16.99

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. www.evanmandery.com

Patrick Gale

A PERFECTLY GOOD MAN Patrick Gale, the much-loved British author with ‘uplifting faith in human nature’, returns readers to his beloved Cornish coastline with a compelling story of love, devotion and loyalty. The apparent serenity of parish life in Pendeen and Morvah is disturbed when 20-year-old Lenny Barnes takes his own life in the presence of Father Barnaby Thomas, the charismatic, indefatigable local priest, whose enduring service has made him a popular member of his Cornish neighbourhood. Though Lenny’s death is publicly mourned, the tragedy continues to wound those closest to him, and its reverberations threaten a divide between the Church and the community. Yet Lenny’s death is only Pendeen and Morvah’s most visible misfortune: beneath the surface of the parish newsletter, in the lives of those closest to Lenny, in the lives of Barnaby’s wife and children, and particularly in the life of Father Barnaby himself, lies vast, inarticulate sadness. Praise for Notes from an Exhibition: ‘This book is complete perfection’ Stephen Fry 'I was completely enthralled by Notes from an Exhibition Patrick's Gale's prose grows ever more acrobatic and heart stopping, though somehow he never seems to be showing off. And few writers have grasped the twisted dynamics of family the way Gale has. There's really no one he can't inhabit, understand and forgive.' Armistead Maupin

Patrick Gale was born in 1962 on the Isle of Wight. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and now lives in north

'All the characters are dimensional and heartbreaking. It is a book saturated with love and humanity. And it has a great last line.' Barbara Gowdy

Cornwall.

ISBN: 978-0-00-731347-1 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Joyce Carol Oates

MUDWOMAN 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 anticipated. 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.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-745626-0 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award. Her recent work of non-fiction on grief and bereavement, A Widow’s Story was a critically-acclaimed success.

Tom Perrotta

THE LEFTOVERS What if – whoosh, right now, with no explanation – a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened—not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children. Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin’s own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a home-grown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin’s teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet “A” student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he’s distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start. With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss. Soon to be seen on HBO as an 8 part mini-series. Praise for The Abstinence Teacher: ‘Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America.’ New York Times Book Review

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-745309-2 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback (Royal) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £12.99

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

Vincent Lam

THE HEADMASTER’S WAGER The first novel from Vincent Lam, the acclaimed Canadian author of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, The Headmaster’s Wager follows a Chinese family in 1960s Vietnam, a country on the brink of war. Percival Chen is a successful Chinese rice importer in Vietnam. He is also the headmaster of the most respected English school in Saigon – and a compulsive gambler. Proud of his Chinese inheritance, he instills the same sense of pride in his son Dai Jai. But when Dai Jai is arrested and tortured, after joining protests about Vietnamese discrimination against the Chinese population, Percival is determined to secure Dai Jai‘s release at any cost. Percival successfully frees his son from the authorities, only to confront a darker threat in the form of Dai Jai’s Vietnamese conscription papers. He determines to send his son to China to escape the draft, not realising that he is sending him to an even harder fate at the hands of the Cultural Revolution. As war in Vietnam intensifies, Percival prepares to flee to America, but first he must get his son out of Communist China. He is ready to risk everything in order to do so. It is his final wager and one that could lose him everything. This is a sweeping generational saga that reveals the true human cost of a father’s love for his son. It is a story of one man's tragic misunderstandings, and his acts of greatest courage. Praise for Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures: 'Direct in style, unsparing though compassionate in observation, subtle in emotion, and occasionally gruesome in humour, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures follows four medical students from widely different backgrounds as their stories intertwine, as their illusions shatter, and as the meanings of many lives expand around them. The good news is that doctors are human beings. The bad news is that doctors are human beings. The other good news is that this book marks a stunning debut.' Margaret Atwood

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-726382-0 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Dr Vincent Lam was born in London, Ontario. His family is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. He studied medicine in Toronto and is an emergency physician. He lives in Toronto with his wife and son. www.vincentlam.ca

Philip Hensher

SCENES FROM EARLY LIFE The startling new novel from the author of King of the Badgers and the Man Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher’s husband, Zaved Mahmood, was born in late 1970 in Dacca, then a regional capital of Pakistan. In the months following his birth, the eastern part of the country split from the western side in a war of independence of savage violence. In December 1971, after the deaths of millions of innocent victims in the civil war, a new country was declared: Bangla Desh, the Home of the Bengalis. Scenes from Early Life is the story of one upper-middle-class Bengali family, told in the form of a memoir, narrated by Zaved it is an autobiography, a novel and, in part, a history of one of the most ferocious of twentieth-century civil wars. Praise for King of the Badgers: ‘An extraordinary, great pudding of a novel which confirms Philip Hensher as one of the most entertaining writers of Britain today.’ Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail

Philip Hensher is a columnist for the Independent, arts critic for the Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written seven novels, including The Mulberry Empire and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and one collection of short stories. He lives in South London.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-743370-4 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 12 April 2012 UK Price: £18.99

Nicci Cloke

SOMEDAY FIND ME Someday Find Me is a shocking and thought-provoking love story. Told through the charming and funny voices of two young lovers, it is a beautiful debut novel about finding your way and making the right choices. It’s a hot summer in the city and the nation is gripped by the disappearance of London student Fate Jones. But 25-year-old Fitz has a different blonde girl on his mind: his beloved girlfriend Saffy is slipping slowly back into the grasp of an eating disorder. Struggling under the weight of her self-doubt and self-hatred, Saffy becomes increasingly lost and Fitz finds himself unable to help. As Saffy’s behaviour grows more dangerous, he does the only thing he can think of – he calls for help and she is taken away. Petrified at the prospect of another stay in Happy Blossoms, a residential treatment centre, Saffy runs. In London, Fitz realises too late that he is the only one who can help Saffy and sets off in a desperate bid to find her. Meanwhile the media’s obsession with the search for Fate Jones intensifies. Her image is everywhere, her last days suddenly public property. But how much does anyone really know about the girl on the poster?

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-744761-9 Size: 135x216mm Format: Paperback (Demy) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Nicci Cloke was born in Cambridgeshire in 1986. She graduated from the University of Liverpool in 2008 and currently lives in Brixton, where she spends her time reading, writing, dreaming about travelling and watching really awful television. Nicci works for Faber and Faber. Someday Find Me is her first novel; she is currently working on her second.

Anthony Doerr

MEMORY WALL Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new collection of stories is about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. This paperback edition now includes The Deep, which was awarded the 2011 Sunday Times Short Story Award. In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In The River Nemunas, a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. Village 113 is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seedkeeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in Afterworld, the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.

The stories in Memory Wall show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be one of the masters of the form. ‘It's fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. The stories in Memory Wall have such scope and depth that they hit as hard as novels three times their length. Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do.’ Dave Eggers

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-736772-6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 05 January 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and twin sons. He is the author of The Shell Collector and About Grace, and is one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

David Levithan

THE LOVER’S DICTIONARY: A LOVE STORY IN 185 DEFINITIONS How does one talk about love? We are all beginners when it comes to love, from those tentative first dates to learning how to live with, or without, someone. But how does one describe love? How does one chart its delights and pleasures, its depths and desolations? Do we even have the right words to describe something that can be both utterly mundane and completely transcendent, pulling us out of our everyday lives and making us feel a part of something greater than ourselves? David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary starts where we all once started – with the alphabet. Constructing the story of a relationship as a dictionary, Levithan explores the intimacies and workings of love through his nameless narrator, to paint a moving portrait of love through everyday words. Cleverly using the confines of language to provide an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being part of a couple, Levithan gives us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time. ‘Teasing, intriguing and easy to devour in one go.’ Cosmopolitan ‘Romantic, quick, clever, funny. Read it in one sitting.’ Sunday Times Style

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-737799-2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £7.99

David Levithan was not born in France, Milwaukee or Olympia, Washington. He did not go to Eton, Harvard Law School or Oxford University. He is not the author of War and Peace, Hollywood Wives: The New Generation or The Babysitters Club #8: Boy-crazy Stacey. He has not won the Newbery Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bausch & Lomb Science Award or the race for eleventh-grade vice president. He currently does not live in Manhattan.

David Prete

AUGUST AND THEN SOME A gripping literary novel from a striking new voice in American fiction. New York City. By day, JT Savage is a labourer on the Upper East Side; by night an insomniac in an East Village tenement. His had been a superficially normal childhood in Yonkers, New York; a time of beers by the river, of working in his friend’s father’s garage, of studying to go to college. Then, one night, everything changed. August and then some is a taut and gripping family drama, in which horrifying secrets kept between father and daughter, and mother and son, explode during one tragic night. Set over the course of two summers, it is a novel of revenge and the difficulty of repentance and forgiveness. Jaggedly beautiful and intensely realised, tightly plotted yet expansive, this debut novel is the coming-of-age of a striking new voice in American fiction. ‘David Prete is scary good. He is a heartbreaking talent, born to this line of work, our very own Bronx Chekhov.’ Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love ‘Electrifying … August and then some weaves a raw and tantalising tale of revenge and repentance, played out when a Pandora’s box of family secrets implodes’ Sunday Herald

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-743879-2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £7.99

David Prete is an actor, voice coach and writer of Say It to My Face, published in 2004. He lives in New York.

Michael Cunningham

BY NIGHTFALL From the author of the bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Hours, a beautiful novel about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives. Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close to twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself as happy. But then Rebecca’s much younger brother Mizzy shows up for a visit. Beautiful, twenty-three years old, with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his marriage, his desires, his career – the entire world he has so carefully constructed for himself. Making us think deeply about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives, By Nightfall is heartbreaking look at the way we live now.

‘Cunningham encourages his reader to wrestle with things that interest him by sketching his plots delicately over classic lines. In this case, the arrival of the guest who will change everything is reworked into a discussion about art and decay by a writer who can write a pageturning novel that lingers eloquently in the mind’ The Times ‘This is a book about art, love, marriage and mortality… One of the intriguing and peculiar qualities of “By Nightfall” is that it makes you live with a character who seems never quite at ease with his own identity… One of Cunningham's gifts is to be able to shift gears when he wants, out of banal everydayness into an intense rhapsodic meditation on the meaning and purpose of life.’ Hermione Lee, Guardian

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-743784-9 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in New York. His novels include: A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, and Specimen Days. His work has been published in the New Yorker and Best American Short Stories 1989.

Cressida Connolly

MY FORMER HEART 'Unusual and brilliant … It has similarities to Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child.' Deborah Orr, Guardian A beautifully written novel, which tells a story of love and loss through three generations of a family. When she grew up, Ruth would say that she could place the day that her mother had decided to go away. She didn’t know the actual date, but she recalled the occasion: it was on the afternoon of a wet day, early in 1942, during a visit to the cinema. She thought she could even pinpoint the exact moment at which Iris had made up her mind to go, leaving her only child behind. Neither of them could have guessed then that they would never live together again. Spanning the second half of the last century, My Former Heart, Cressida Connolly’s mesmerising first novel, charts the lives of three generations of Iris’s family . Ruth will be deserted again, many years later, by a husband she loves, but not before she has had two children by him. She leaves London to live with her uncle, where she creates a new life for herself with another woman. And we follow the lives of her two children, trying to make a place for themselves in the world in the shadow of the family that precedes them. With its large cast of fascinating characters, this is an outstanding novel about families and their ability to adapt. It surely marks the beginning of long career as a novelist for Cressida Connolly. ‘A writer who seems able to peer directly into the human heart, to understand its follies and strivings, and to write about them with such sparkling originality that it makes you see the world afresh … I strongly suggest readers buy two copies — one to savour, and one to throw at the Man Booker judges who unaccountably left it off this year’s longlist.’ Spectator

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-735635-5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Cressida Connolly was born in 1960. She is a journalist and reviewer. She lives in Worcestershire with her husband and three children.

Jeffrey Eugenides

THE MARRIAGE PLOT ‘There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.’ Anthony Trollope It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different suitors, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead – charismatic loner and college Darwinist – suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange – resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they have learned. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives. ‘Eugenides’s superb third novel is his most mature to date, the work of an author who has achieved a new gravity after the audacious brilliance of his earlier work…Eugenides looks poised to become a writer on a par with Updike and Cheever as an anatomist of contemporary American matters’ Sunday Times ‘If you were ever young and thought that you knew what you wanted, if you ever imagined that no one else could ever feel such intensity of emotions as you, if you ever had your dreams dashed and your heart broken, then this is the book for you.’ The Times ‘The tight plotting and internalised psychology of this new novel, allied to the full sweep of ideas and social observation and quiet comedy that characterised Eugenides's earlier works, are signs of a new maturity. In the generosity and nuance of his characters and paragraphs, you are reminded of the Jonathan Franzen of The Corrections.’ Tim Adams, Observer

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-744130-3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £8.99 © HarperCollins Publishers 2011 Produced: Fri Sep 23 12:36:27 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993 to great acclaim and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and France’s Prix Medicis and has sold more than 3 million copies.

Philip Hensher

KING OF THE BADGERS Hanmouth: a quiet, picturesque English seaside town. But behind closed, Georgian front doors and the within the artisan cheese shop, its residents live lives that are anything but. When an 8-year-old girl goes missing from the estate on the fringes of the town, Hanmouth becomes the centre of national attention. Under the scrutiny of the investigation the extraordinary individual lives of the community are laid bare: the passions of a quiet international aid worker; a recently widowed old woman’s late discovery of sexual gratification; and a memorable party, held by the Bears. Through the apparent civility and spiralling paranoia a small town, Philip Hensher brings us another brilliantly funny and perfectly observed slice of contemporary English life.

‘Hensher at the height of his powers…the sort of thing George Eliot would have written if she was interested in gay orgies and abducted chavs’ Sunday Times ‘An extraordinary, great pudding of a novel which confirms Philip Hensher as one of the most entertaining writers of Britain today.’ Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-730134-8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Philip Hensher is a columnist for the Independent, arts critic for the Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written six novels, including The Mulberry Empire and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and one . collection of short stories. He lives in South London. His new novel Scenes from Early Life is published in April.

Geraldine Brooks

CALEB’S CROSSING The new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks, author of the Richard and Judy bestseller March, Sunday Times bestseller Year of Wonders and People of the Book. Martha’s Vineyard, 1650s: Bethia Mayfield is a young girl growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor, amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless, bright and curious, but denied the education that her brothers receive, she slips away as often as she can to explore the island’s wild landscapes and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At the age of twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the children form a secret friendship that gradually draws each into the alien world of the other. Meanwhile, Bethia’s minister father is trying to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe’s shaman against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. And when he takes it upon himself to educate Caleb, it will further divide the communities – within a year the boy is learning Latin and Greek, and leaves the island to study at Harvard. As Caleb makes the crossing into white culture, Bethia finds herself pulled in the opposite direction. Trapped by the narrow strictures of her faith and her gender, she seeks connections with Caleb’s world that will challenge her beliefs and set her at odds with her community… ‘Caleb’s Crossing could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it confirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and insightful novelists’ New York Times ‘Fascinating … Brooks has dressed the bare facts in moving and imaginative storytelling’ Kate Saunders, The Times

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-733354-7 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: Fourth Estate Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on the Wall Street Journal, covering stories from some of the world’s most troubled areas, including Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East. Her first novels A Year of Wonders and March have become international bestsellers, the latter earning Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She lives with her husband and son in rural Virginia and is currently a fellow at Harvard University.

HarperPress Non Fiction

Anne Somerset

QUEEN ANNE: The Politics of Passion 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, in some respects she was a pitiable figure. But against all expectation she proved Britain’s most successful Stuart ruler. Her rule was marked by many triumphs, including union with Scotland and glorious victories in war against France. Yet while the Duke of Marlborough performed feats of military genius, Anne’s relationship with his outspoken wife Sarah became ever more rancorous. Political differences partly explained the tension between them, but the final rupture was precipitated by Sarah’s startling claim that it was the Queen’s lesbian infatuation with another lady-in-waiting, Abigail Masham, that had destroyed their friendship. As her reign continued, and it became clear that Anne did not have long to live, the nation became polarised by fears that she intended to bequeath her crown to her Catholic half brother, rather than the German Protestant cousin whom Parliament had designated her heir. Drawing widely on unpublished sources, Anne Somerset vividly depicts the clashes of personality and party rivalries of the period. Queen Anne emerges as a woman whose unshakeable commitment to duty enabled her to overcome private tragedy, setting her kingdom on the path to greatness. Praise for Elizabeth I: ‘The most balanced and impartial of all Elizabeth's biographers. An excellent book.’ Sunday Times Praise for Unnatural Murder: ‘A gripping detective story. It tells us more about the corruption, debauchery and naked power-plays of seventeenth-century life than anything I have read’ Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-720375-8 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £25.00

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.

Richard Davenport-Hines

TITANIC LIVES: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew On the night of 14 April 1912, midway through her maiden voyage, the seemingly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg, sustaining a 300-feet gash as six compartments were wrenched open to the Atlantic Ocean. In little over two hours, the palatial liner nose-dived to the bottom of the sea. More than 1,500 people perished in the freezing waters. But who were they? In Titanic Lives, Richard Davenport-Hines brings to life in fascinating and absorbing detail the stories of the men who built and owned the ship, the crew who serviced her and the passengers of all classes who sailed on her. The Titanic was a floating microcosm of Edwardian society – at the bottom of the ship was third class, filled with economic migrants and political and religious refugees hoping for a better life in the New World. Above them were hundreds of second-class passengers buoyed up by their prosperous respectability. On the upper decks were the hereditary rich and those of inconceivable wealth – American titans of industry such as John Jacob Astor IV, who was found with $4000 in sodden notes in his pockets. In this epic, sweeping history we are introduced to this broad cast of characters, from every class and every continent, as we follow their lives on board the ship through to the supreme dramatic climax of the disaster itself. Published to coincide with the centenary of the sinking, Titanic Lives is an impeccably researched and utterly riveting history which re-creates the complexities, disparities and tensions of life one hundred years ago. ‘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 ‘Superbly brings to life the long-forgotten or never-known human stories of the Titanic’ Simon Winchester

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978-0-00-732164-3 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 05 January 2012 UK Price: £20.00

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.

Patrick Bishop

TARGET TIRPITZ: The Epic Quest to Sink Hitler’s Last Battleship The Tirpitz was Hitler’s greatest weapon. The largest battleship in Europe, ‘the Beast’ as Churchill called it, was reputed to be unsinkable. Lurking off Norway, it threatened vital convoys to Russia, tied up key British resources and – despite firing its guns only once – cast an almost supernatural shadow over the war effort. Nothing in the Allied armoury could compete. So profound was the ship’s psychological effect that, in 1942, rumour of its presence scattered an Allied convoy, leaving undefended 35 merchantmen, 24 of which were sunk. The fear ‘the Beast’ inspired would stoke an Allied obsession: to sink the Tirpitz, at any cost. Many men, over many years, would attempt what came to seem almost impossible. In total 13 major operations were launched. Midget submarines planted explosives beneath her hull, with no lasting damage. Bold attacks by Fairey Barracuda dive-bombers had little effect. It was not until 1944 that a daring raid by the RAF, under the command of one of the heroes of the Dambusters raid, finally destroyed this potent symbol of Hitler’s ambition. Willie Tait had flown with Leonard Cheshire and Guy Gibson during the destruction of the Ruhr dams. However the third Dambuster consistently shunned the spotlight and his story until now has never been told. With exclusive access to Tait’s personal papers, best-selling historian Patrick Bishop brings to life one of the most daring missions of the Second World War in the words of the extraordinary men and women whose courage and single-minded dedication would strike a vital blow against the Nazis and hasten Allied victory. Full of colour, insight and drama, Target Tirpitz is Second World War storytelling at its best. Praise for ‘Bomber Boys’ : ‘The best kind of military history’ Evening Standard

Stocklist: Military history ISBN: 978-0-00-731923-7 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £20.00 © HarperCollins Publishers 2011 Produced: Fri Sep 23 12:36:27 2011

Patrick Bishop has been a foreign correspondent for over twenty years, reporting from conflicts all over the world and working as senior correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. 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.

Simon Callow

CHARLES DICKENS AND THE GREAT THEATRE OF THE WORLD In Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow offers a fresh perspective on one of the greatest novelists in the English language, bringing to life Dickens the man in this highly entertaining biography. Though most famous for his great novels of the industrial age, Dickens was one of the first ‘celebrity’ authors, attracting thousands of fans to his readings both in Britain and across the Atlantic. Not only did he give voice to his vast cast of characters; he was also a dazzling mimic and raconteur, and he wrote, stage-managed and acted in plays for the public. From his early years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth pubs to his reluctant retirement from ‘these garish lights’, he remained fanatical about the stage. Just months before his death he pointed at a theatre and declared, ‘That’s what I should have done with my life!’ In this lively, entertaining study, and tying in with Dickens’ bicentennial, Callow reveals an original genius, and offers a compelling insight into a life that was driven as much by performance and showmanship as by literary endeavour. Rather than a dry academic study, here is an accessible introduction to an exuberant and irrepressible talent, whose extraordinary wit and personality crackle off the page.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-744530-1 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £16.99

Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared in many films, including the hugely popular Four 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.

Paul Preston

THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain Between 1936 and 1945, thousands upon thousands of General Franco’s enemies met their deaths. As well as those killed on the battlefield, innumerable Spaniards were officially executed and whilst countless others became ‘non-persons’, their fates as obscure as the nation’s collective memory of this terrible period. In The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston, the world’s foremost historian of twentieth century Spain, paints a full picture of this terrible period, in all its dimensions – ranging from systematic killings and judicial murders to the abuse of women and children, imprisonment, torture and the grisly fate of Spaniards in the hands of the Gestapo.

Framed by the activities of four men whose dogma of eugenics, terrorisation, and domination mirrored the fascism of 1930s Italy and Germany – General Mola who dictated the military coup of 1936; Quiepo de Llano who virtually ran an independent fiefdom in the South; Major Vallejo Najera who provided ‘scientific’ justifications for the annihilation of thousands; and Captain Aguilera, the Nationalist press officer who blamed the war on do-gooders’ interference with the divine process of decimating the working classes – and reflecting more than a decade of research, The Spanish Holocaust conveys the intense horrors inflicted upon Spain by the brutality of the officers who rose up on 17 July 1936, provoking a civil war whose consequences still reverberate bitterly in the country today. Telling many stories of individuals from both sides, The Spanish Holocaust seeks to reflect the intense horrors visited upon Spain by the arrogance and brutality of the officers who rose up on 17 July 1936, provoking a civil war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still reverberate bitterly in Spain today.

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978-0-00-255634-7 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £30.00

Paul Preston is Principe de Asturias Professor of Iberian History at the LSE, and was head of the International History Department there for several years. He is regarded as the leading historian of twentieth-century Spain alive.

A. N. Wilson

HITLER 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’. In 1923, aged thirty four, Hitler was languishing in prison after leading an unsuccessful putsch to overthrow the German Government. Within a decade he was German Chancellor, one of the most powerful men in Europe. How did he do it? Had Hitler been a regular politician, Wilson argues, he would have vanished without trace after his prison experience. But he was not a regular politician, but rather a conjurer, seeing politics not as the Art of the Possible but as the Art of the Impossible: ‘Whereas politicians watched the weather and waited for calm, Hitler wanted to ride storms.’ 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.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-741349-2 Size: 135x203mm Format: Hardback (Short demy) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 15 March 2012 UK Price: £12.99

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 Spectator. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981. His writing includes novels The Sweets of Pimlico, The Healing Art, Wise Virgin and biographies of Walter Scott, Milton and Tolstoy.

Dan Jones

THE PLANTAGENETS: The Warrior Kings Who Invented England Eight generations of the greatest and worst kings and queens that this country has ever seen – from the White Ship to the Lionheart, bad King John to the Black Prince and John of Gaunt – this is the dynasty that invented England as we still know it today – great history to appeal to readers of Ken Follet, Bernard Cornwell, Tom Holland.

This riveting new book explores the lives of eight generations of the greatest – and worst – royal dynasty this country has ever seen. They were the Plantagenets, and their story is the story of Britain. The Plantagenets inherited a bloodied, broken kingdom from the Normans, and set about expanding royal rule until it stretched at its largest from the Scottish lowlands to the Pyrenees, and from the Ireland to the foothills of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, they developed aspects of English law, government, architecture, art and folklore that survive to this day. Despite all this, and having reigned for twice as long as their eventual successors, the Tudors, the Plantagenets remain relatively unknown. In this gripping, vivid new book, Dan Jones brings the Plantagenets and their world back to life. This is both an epic narrative history of the 'high' Middle Ages, and a spellbinding portrait of a family blessed and cursed in equal measure.

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978-0-00-721392-4 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 12 April 2012 UK Price: £25.00

Dan Jones took a first in History from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 2002. He is an award-winning journalist and a pioneer of the resurgence of interest in medieval history. He lives in London.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark

THE MEADOW: Kidnapped in Kashmir - Where the Terror Began July 1995. Ten backpackers take a trip of a lifetime. Saving for years, they journey to the Indian Himalayas, to a place known as the Meadow. Here, at 3,000 metres, lies one of the world’s most idyllic campsites: a carpet of downy grass, creeping phlox and blue irises, surrounded by a crown of peaks. A sliver of old Kashmir, a Mughal paradise… They have come in search of many things – nirvana, exhilaration, a sense of self. But over the course of the next week, their holidays take a terrifying turn when they become entangled in a nail-biting hostage drama that will suck them into an alien world of jihad and Islamic fundamentalism. In the months that follow, their fates will become caught-up in a bloody struggle between India and Pakistan, fought out in the airless heights of Kashmir. With the world looking on, four of the captured travellers will vanish off the face of the earth, never to be seen again, creating one of the region’s great mysteries. Written with access to diaries, letters, unprocessed film and personal recollections from those enmeshed in the drama, drawing on classified police reports and secret tape recordings of Indian government negotiations, as well as interviews with the jihadis themselves and excerpts from their journals, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s book is a real-life thriller, a startling but compelling story told from the perspective of all involved.

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978-0-00-736816-7 Size: 135x216mm Format: Hardback (Demy) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 12 April 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark are internationally renowned investigative journalists who worked for The Sunday Times before joining the Guardian. Their first book, Stone of Heaven (2001) was a New York Times book of the year. The Amber Room (2004) was a finalist in the Borders’ Original Voices US book awards and Deception (2007) was a Washington Post ‘pick of the year’. 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 and live in London and in France.

Dan Snow

CASTLES: Six Castles – 500 Years of Knights, Battles and Siege Warfare Bring the Middle Ages back to life with this sumptuous, action-packed tie-in book to Dan Snow’s new TV series. Follow the building of these epic structures and the bloody weapons used to defeat them – from Edward I’s castles in North Wales, to Richard the Lionheart’s glittering fortress in Normandy and many more. Each chapter focuses on one of six key castles: Dover Castle, ‘the Key to England’ and King John’s first line of defence against the French Dauphin; Château Gaillard, Richard I’s fortress in Normandy (whose only chink in its 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, built to suppress the rebellious Welsh princes; and Krak des Chevaliers in Syria – an astounding feat of engineering by the Crusaders, which only fell to Sultan Baibars by the subterfuge of a forged letter.

Using the latest CGI imaging to show how they were constructed, the technology used to defend them and the weaponry that defeated them, Dan Snow gets to the very heart of the bloodshed and battles of the greatest fortresses of the Middle Ages.

Stocklist: History ISBN: 978-0-00-745558-4 Size: 189x246mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 12 April 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.

Sarah Fraser

THE LAST HIGHLANDER: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel and Double Agent April 1747 –the prisoner in the tower raged at his barber before stepping out to face his executioner. ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘I die a martyr for my country.’ He died for Bonnie Prince Charlie, for an independent Scotland and his ancient way of life. Lord Simon Lovat was the last of the great Scottish chiefs –and the last nobleman to be executed for treason in Britain. Born to inherit vast lands in the Highlands, and in a long life packed with plotting and incident, Simon became the greatest double-agent of the age. In July 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie landed on Eriskay – a tiny Hebridean island and launched his last and greatest attempt to seize back his throne, joined after victory at Preston Pans by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat and his clans. They reached Derby before retreating ignominiously and facing final defeat at the hands of the British at Culloden. This gripping adventure and spy story uses the events of Lovat’s life to recreate this extraordinary period of history. As Sarah Fraser argues, the defeat at Culloden led directly to the end of traditional Gaelic civilization; to the brutal clearances and ‘pacification’ of the Highlands which followed. Lovat was the last great Highlander, his death coinciding with the loss of a unique way of life in Scotland that was crushed after 1745 by English repression.

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-722949-9 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £20.00

Sarah Fraser was born in 1960 and was married until recently to Kit Fraser, part of the Lovat Fraser clan. She has a PhD in obscene Gaelic poetry and writes regularly for Scottish papers on Gaelic issues. She has four children and lives in the Highlands of Scotland.

Sherard Cowper-Coles

CABLES FROM KABUL: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign A frank and honest memoir by Britain’s former ambassador to Kabul which provides a unique, high-level insight into Western policy in Afghanistan. The West’s mission in Afghanistan has never been far from the headlines. For Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former Ambassador, Britain’s role in the conflict – the vast amount of money being spent and the huge number of lives being lost – was an everyday reality. In Cables from Kabul, Cowper-Coles takes the reader on a journey through the backstreets of Afghanistan’s capital to the corridors of power in London and Washington. He pays tribute to the tactical successes of our soldiers but asks whether these will be enough to secure stability. Nobody is better placed to tell this story of embassy life in one of the most dangerous places on earth. Powerful and astonishingly frank, Cables from Kabul explains how we got into the quagmire of Afghanistan, and how we can get out of it. ‘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 ‘Unquestionably the most important record yet of the diplomatic wrangling that has accompanied the slow military encirclement of western forces in Afghanistan. Extraordinary’ William Dalrymple, Observer

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-743204-2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £9.99

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.

Francis Pryor

THE BIRTH OF MODERN BRITAIN: A Journey Through Britain’s Remarkable Recent Archaeology From the author of Britain BC, Britain AD and Britain in the Middle Ages comes the fourth and final part in a critically acclaimed series on Britain's hidden past. The relevance of archaeology to the study of the ancient world is indisputable. But, when exploring our recent past, does it have any role to play? In The Birth of Modern Britain Francis Pryor highlights archaeology’s continued importance to the world around us. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution were too busy innovating to record what was happening around them but fortunately the buildings and machines they left behind bring the period to life. During the Second World War, the imminent threat of invasion meant that constructing strong defences was much more important than keeping precise records. As a result, when towns were flattened, archaeology provided the only real means of discovering what had been destroyed. Surveying the whole post-medieval period, from 1550 until the present day, Francis Pryor takes us on an exhilarating journey, bringing to a gripping conclusion his illuminating study of Britain’s hidden past. ‘Hugely enjoyable…You will learn a lot from it – and one of the things is how much work has gone into unearthing all this stuff. You will certainly never look at the A5 in the same way again’ Daily Telegraph ‘No one person has previously attempted such a journey into Britain’s entire archaeological past, and this book brings the series to a successful – and refreshingly jargon-free – conclusion’ BBC History magazine

Stocklist: Archaeology ISBN: 978-0-00-729911-9 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Dr Francis Pryor has spent thirty years studying the prehistory of the Fens. He has excavated sites as diverse as Bronze Age farms, field systems and entire Iron Age villages. From 1980 he turned his attention to pre-Roman religion and has excavated barrows, ‘henges’ and a large site dating to 3800 B.C. In 1987, with his wife Maisie Taylor, he set up the Fenland Archaeological Trust. He appears frequently on TV’s Time Team and is the author of Seahenge, Britain B.C. and Britain A.D.

Maya Jasanoff

LIBERTY’S EXILES: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire. Early in the afternoon of 25 November 1783, the American Revolution was finally over; the British were gone, the patriots were back and a key moment inscribed itself in the annals of the emerging United States. Territorial independence from Great Britain had effectively begun. In Liberty’s Exiles, Maya Jasanoff examines the realities of the end of the Revolution, through looking at the lives of the Loyalist refugees – those men and women who took Britain's side. She tells the story of Elizabeth Johnston from Savannah, whose family went on to settle in St Augustine, Scotland, Jamaica and Nova Scotia; Reverend Jacob Bailey, who fled from New England across rough seas to Canada with his family and little more than the clothes on his back; five-year-old Catherine Skinner – the daughter of a loyalist – who was trapped as a prisoner in her home, hiding from the gunshots of rebel raiders. Their experiences speak eloquently of a larger history of exile, mobility and the shaping of the British Empire in the wake of the American War. Beautifully written and rich with source material, Liberty’s Exiles is a history of the American Revolution unlike any before. ‘More than just a work of first-class scholarship, Liberty’s Exiles is a deeply moving masterpiece that fulfils the historian’s most challenging ambition: to revivify past experience.’ Niall Ferguson ‘Liberty’s Exiles is a book which in scope and originality, global reach and research, intellectual curiosity and sheer provocative panache… can sustain comparison with Linda Colley or the young Simon Schama. The truth is Maya Jasanoff is not just a very good writer, an indefatigable researcher and a fine historian, she is also a bit of a genius.’ William Dalrymple

Stocklist: Colonialism and Imperialism ISBN: 978-0-00-718010-3 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Maya Jasanoff is Associate Professor of British and Imperial history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Liberty’s Exile’s was shortlisted for the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.

Mitchell Zuckoff

LOST IN SHANGRI-LA: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story An utterly gripping non-fiction adventure narrative, Lost in Shangri-La is an untold true story of war, survival, discovery, heroism, and a near-impossible rescue mission.

Three months before the end of World War II, a U.S. Army plane flying over New Guinea crashed in uncharted mountains inhabited by a Stone Age tribe. Nineteen passengers and crew were killed and two were mortally wounded. But somehow three survived: a lieutenant whose twin brother died in the crash, a sergeant who suffered terrible head wounds, and a beautiful member of the Women's Army Corps. Hurt, unarmed and afraid, they prayed for deliverance – from their wounds, from the elements, and from the spear-carrying Dani tribesmen who roamed the mountains, men who were untouched by modernity. For seven weeks, the survivors experienced one remarkable adventure after another, until they were rescued in a truly incredible mission. Using a huge range of sources, including first-hand accounts from the survivors themselves, Mitchell Zuckoff exposes the enlightening and terrifying adventure of three individuals lost on unknown soil and the relationships they built not only with each other, but also with a lost civilization. ‘Thrilling … an incredible story’ Giles Foden ‘Lost in Shangri-La is a page-turner, ripe for the IMAX screen’ Independent on Sunday

Stocklist: True stories and narrative history ISBN: 978-0-00-741095-8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 26 April 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend, Judgment Ridge: The True Story of the Dartmouth Murders, with Dick Lehr and Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting, and the winner of numerous national awards as a reporter for The Boston Globe. He lives outside Boston.

Philip Marsden

THE LEVELLING SEA: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail Before the 1560s, it was said that there was only one Englishman capable of sailing across the Atlantic. Within just ten years, after a maritime revolution, an English ship with an English crew was circumnavigating the globe. At the same time in Cornwall, in the Fal estuary, just a single building – a lime kiln – existed where the port of Falmouth would develop. By the end of the century, Falmouth would emerge as one of the busiest harbours in the world. In The Levelling Sea, acclaimed author Philip Marsden draws on his own deep connection with Cornwall, using the story of Falmouth’s spectacular rise as a microcosm of British history. He writes unforgettably about the sea’s unparalleled power; its place in history and in the imagination; and its unique impact on the history of Britain.

‘His knowledge soaks through every page and his pitch-perfect feel for a phrase, plus a gift as sublime as James Hamilton-Paterson or Jonathan Raban’s for describing water, lifts The Levelling Sea far above ordinary to a state closer to poetry. ’ Sunday Times ‘Simply a splendid book…Marsden’s writing is delightfully honed as well as being profoundly well-researched. The Levelling Sea is a microcosm of British history…this portrait of a port and its people sails deep into the reader’s imagination’ Sunday Telegraph

Stocklist: Transport ISBN: 978-0-00-717454-6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Philip Marsden has written several highly-praised and award-winning travel books including The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians, The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers and Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance’; and one novel, The Main Cages. He lives in Cornwall.

Philip Eade

YOUNG PRINCE PHILIP: His Turbulent Early Life A revelatory and racy biography of the early life of Prince Philip. One of the most recognisable men in the United Kingdom, Prince Philip has been consort to Queen Elizabeth II since 1947. The patron of several charities and organisations, he is rarely out of the public eye. Yet, very little is known about the Prince's early life. In this fast-paced and highly entertaining biography, Philip Eade focuses on the most compelling aspects of this period: his father’s dramatic flight from revolutionary Greece; his mother’s madness, for which she was admitted to an asylum; his school days in Nazi Germany; his relationship with his three sisters who all married Germans, one an officer in the SS; and his courtship and marriage to the most eligible girl in the world: Princess Elizabeth. Written with great verve, this is the most complete account of Prince Philip’s storm-tossed younger years and timed perfectly for 2012’s Diamond Jubilee. ‘The narrative is as suspenseful as any thriller. Truly an excellent read’ Lynn Barber, Sunday Times ‘Highly readable…. This engaging book deserves to take its place among the first rank of modern royal biographies’ Daily Mail ‘Perhaps this should be regarded as a sighting shot, staking a claim for the official biography….on the basis of this excellent book one can say it would be a task that Eade was singularly well qualified to undertake’ Philip Ziegler, Spectator

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-730539-1 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Philip Eade was born in Shropshire and educated at Marlborough and Bristol University, where he read History. He has worked as a criminal barrister, English teacher and financial journalist, and for several years he was on the obituaries desk of the Daily Telegraph. He lives in London and the Welsh Marches. His first book, Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, was published in 2007 to widespread critical acclaim.

Bella Bathurst

THE BICYCLE BOOK Two wheels. A frame. Two pedals. What could be simpler than a bicycle? And yet the bike continues to inspire a passionate following. Since the millennium its use in Britain has doubled, and then doubled again. Thousands now cycle to work, with more and more taking it up every day. Acclaimed author Bella Bathurst takes us on a journey through cycling’s best stories and strangest incarnations, from the bicycle as a weapon of warfare to the secret life of couriers and the alchemy of framebuilding. With a cast of characters including the woman who watercycled across the Channel, the man who raced India’s Deccan Queen train and several of today’s top cyclists, she offers us a brilliantly engaging portrait of cycling’s past, present and world-conquering future.

‘You can keep the internet. You can keep the computer and the mobile phone. In the bicycle humanity has its most perfect invention of the last three hundred years and in Bella Bathurst the bike has found the best and brightest booster so far.’ Boris Johnson ‘As this beautifully written and gently erudite work easily proves, cycling is ideal for many things, and will doubtless draw more converts to agree that ‘there’s no lovelier form of transport’. Sunday Times

Stocklist: Cycling ISBN: 978-0-00-730589-6 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 26 April 2012 UK Price: £8.99

Bella Bathurst is a writer and photographer. Her first book The Lighthouse Stevensons was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Her novel Special was published in 2002 to wide acclaim, and The Wreckers was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award.

HarperPress Fiction

Will Wiles

CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book isn't really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment. Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well. Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors. ‘Highly idiosyncratic, well-written, with a vivid sense of place – compelling.’ Michael Frayn ‘Wonderful. Precisely constructed, with an eye that sees in between the everyday spaces of our lives, it sheds new light, not only on ourselves, but on the contemporary novel itself.’ Lee Rourke

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-742443-6 Size: 216.135mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Will Wiles is an architecture and design journalist, currently deputy editor of Icon magazine. He lives in London. This is his first novel.

Peter Ransley

CROMWELL’S BLESSING The second book in the Tom Neave Trilogy. 1647: The King has surrendered to Parliament. Lord Stonehouse, to show his loyalty to Parliament, has named Tom as his successor. But Lord Stonehouse’s son, Richard, is also Tom’s estranged father and a fervent Royalist. If the King reaches a settlement with Parliament, Richard will inherit… Parliament itself is deeply divided with those demanding a strict Puritan regime pitted against more liberal independents like Cromwell. King Charles, under house arrest, tries to exploit the divisions between them. When Richard arrives from France with a commission from the Queen to snatch the King from Parliamentary hands, he and Tom are set on a collision course. Caught between his love for his wife Anne and their young son, and his loyalty to the new regime, Tom must struggle to save both his family and the estate. Praise for Plague Child: ‘Ransley has a talent for melding dramatic historical detail with a strong story that could well give C. J. Sansom a run for his money.' Spectator ‘A gripping coming-of-age story … an enthralling mystery adventure.’ Radio Times ‘There are some cracking *historical+ writers out there. And Peter Ransley is certainly worthy of a place at the top.’ Eastern Daily Press

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-731239-9 Size: 153x234mm Format: Trade Paperback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Peter Ransley has written extensively for television. His BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith was nominated for a BAFTA for best series in 2006 and his ITV drama Falling Angel, starring Emilia Fox and Charles Dance, was screened in 2007. He is a winner of the Royal Television Society’s Writer’s Award. His first novel in the trilogy, Plague Child was published in 2011.

Susana Fortes

WAITING FOR ROBERT CAPA A gorgeously written, English Patient-style novel about the real-life romance between the war photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro during the Spanish Civil War. Already optioned to be the next film by Michael Mann (Public Enemies, The Insider, Manhunter, Collateral). Love, war and photography marked their lives. They were young, anti-Fascist, good-looking, and nonconformist. They had everything in life, and they put everything at risk. They created their own legend and remained faithful to it until the very end… A young German woman named Gerta Pohorylle and a young Hungarian man named Endre Friedmann meet in Paris in 1935. Both Communists, Jewish, exiled, and photographers, they decide to change their names in order to sell their work more easily, and so they become Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. With these new identities, they travel to Spain and begin to document the Spanish Civil War. Two years later, tragedy will befall them – but until then, theirs is a romance for the ages. Based on the true story of these legendary figures and set to be the next film by award-winning director Michael Mann, with Eva Green starring as Taro, Waiting for Robert Capa is a moving tribute to all journalists and photographers who lose their lives to show us the world's daily transformations.

Susana Fortes has won many awards, including the 1994 Premio Nuevos Narradores, the Premio Primavera, the Premio de la Crítica, and, for Waiting For Robert Capa, the Premio Fernando Lara 2009. Her novels have been translated into almost twenty languages. She currently teaches at a secondary school in Valencia and is a regular contributor to El Pais, as well as various cinema and literature magazines.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-741093-4 Size: 234x153mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Jane Borodale

THE KNOT From the author of the Orange New Writers shortlisted Book Of Fires. ‘And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of the senses.’ An extraordinarily evocative story of obsession, love and secrets, The Knot holds at its heart the struggle of one man: Henry Lyte. Spanning twelve years, 1565-1578, Henry struggles with his life’s work, the translation of a Herbal which lists, for the first time, every herb, against the backdrop of his heart’s desire, the creation of a perfect, beautiful garden at the heart of which lies the Knot. After the tragic death of his much-loved first wife Anys, Henry falls in love again and brings Frances home to Lytes Cary. She struggles to come to terms with life in the remote rural setting of the Levels in Somerset, and feels the threat of the watery landscape despite Henry’s efforts to show her how the landscape he loves can bring her happiness. Henry’s father is not happy about his second marriage, however, and the tensions within the family grow. Just as Henry finds a precarious equilibrium, in his intellectual and emotional lives, this sense of balance is shattered by his father’s unexpected death and the unleashed malevolence of Henry’s step-mother, Joan Young, begins. Praise for Jane Borodale’s first novel, The Book Of Fires: 'Jane Borodale displays a deft touch in this very pleasing story' Daily Telegraph

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-731332-7 Size: 153x234mm Format: Hardback Imprint: HarperPress Published: 10 May 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Jane Borodale gained her MA from Wimbledon School of Art. She has written and exhibited work for a variety of sites, including the Wordsworth Trust, Cumbria, the Foundling Museum, London, and the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon, where she was writer-in-residence. She is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex, and lives in the West Country with her husband and two children.

Dipika Rai

SOMEONE ELSE’S GARDEN Will she recall that night? Or is it one of those too horrible times that her brain, taking pity on her soul, will choose to wipe out the memory? When she realizes what happened, she will recall it as the night she did her duty for her family, with no sense of shame or lingering fear. She will be matter-of-fact about it, resigned and, therefore, resilient. Mamta, born low-caste and female in rural India against a backdrop of poverty and prejudice, is destined to be some man’s property. Her father says that bringing her up is only ‘tending someone else’s garden’ until a husband is found for her. Eventually saved from becoming one of the nameless and faceless millions of rejected humanity, Mamta survives but at a terrible cost. Lyrically told, this powerful story of a woman’s struggle to find acceptance compels us to question: Is life random? Or do we have a destiny?

‘A riveting page-turner that fills the reader with rage and despair and yet, somehow, against all the odds, finds the end a message of love and hope.’ Daily Mail

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-735511-2 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 19 January 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Dipika Rai was born and raised in New Delhi. She was educated in one of India’s most prestigious boarding schools in the foothills of the Himalayas and then went on to do an MBA before going into banking. After a career change, she worked as a journalist for many years, writing for publications including Vogue India and Marie Claire. She now divides her time between India and the island of Bali where she lives with her husband and two children. This is her first novel.

Jenny Wingfield

THE HOMECOMING OF SAMUEL LAKE A bewitching debut novel in the vein of the much-loved classic Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café. It's 1956 and Samuel Lake, a handsome preacher, is voted out of his ministry by yet another congregation disappointed by his relentless pleas for them to live more charitable lives. Out of options and out of pocket, Samuel and his family are forced to move in with their Arkansas in-laws, the rambunctious Moses clan. At first they thrive in the unruly sea of relatives – Willa, Samuel's wife, runs the bar for Grandma Calla, while the boys, Noble and Bienville, run riot through the surrounding countryside. But when Swan, their formidable but loveable 11-year-old Tomboy crosses the path of neighbour Raz Ballenger, things take a turn for the worse. Raz Ballenger, horse trainer, is a man who rules both his family and his animals through terror. Used to instant obedience, he is insulted when Swan leaps to his son’s defence, an act that sets a whole chain of unexpected and terrible events into motion… ‘Raw and powerful’ Fannie Flagg, bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe ‘With a teeming cast of memorable characters and an often heartbreaking story line, this gracefully written novel is sure to appeal broadly… it is the work of a born storyteller and a good choice for bookclubs.’ Booklist ‘Expect laughter and tears.’ Easy Living, Summer Reading Pick

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-735257-9 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 01 March 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Jenny Wingfield is an accomplished screenwriter. Her credits include The Man in the Moon (starring Reese Witherspoon), as well as The Outsider (starring Naomi Watts). She lives in Texas and this is her first novel.

Peter Ransley

PLAGUE CHILD The first instalment of a captivating trilogy set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. September 1625: Plague cart driver, Matthew Kneave, is sent to pick up the corpse of a baby. On the way to the plague pit, he hears a cry – the baby is alive. A plague child himself, and now immune from the disease, Matthew decides to raise it as his own. Fifteen years on, Matthew’s son Tom is apprenticed to a printer in the City. Somebody is interested in him and is keen to turn him into a gentleman. He is even given an education. But Tom is unaware that he has a benefactor and soon he discovers that someone else is determined to kill him. The civil war divides families, yet Tom is divided in himself. Devil or saint? Royalist or radicalist? He is at the bottom of the social ladder, yet soon finds himself within reach of a great estate – one which he must give up to be with the girl he loves. ‘Tom's search for his own identity is intimately connected with the seismic events tearing England apart in the 1640s. Ransley has a talent for melding dramatic historical detail with a strong story that could well give C. J. Sansom a run for his money.' Spectator ‘A gripping coming-of-age story…an enthralling mystery adventure.’ Radio Times

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-731237-5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Sarah Gristwood

THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR Jeanne, a young French exile orphaned by the wars of religion on the continent, is brought to London as a young girl disguised as a boy. Growing up, the disguise has not been shed and she finds a living as a clerk, ending up in the household of Robert Cecil. As she witnesses the intrigues and plots swirling round the court of Elizabeth I in the last days of Gloriana’s reign, she finds herself sucked into the orbit of the dashing and ambitious young favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen draws near to the end of her life, with no heir to follow, and the stakes are high. As Essex hurtles towards self-destruction, Jeanne finds her loyalties, her disguise and her emotions under threat – in a political climate where the least mistake can attract dire penalties.

'Entrancing, compelling, and beautifully written. The Girl in the Mirror is a fabulous novel, bursting with integrity and authenticity, vividly evoking the court of Elizabeth I, with wonderful period detail. I feel I know the characters, and was mesmerised by their story. This is the historical novel as literary fiction - and damned good literary fiction at that.' Alison Weir

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-737905-7 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: HarperPress Published: 29 March 2012 UK Price: £7.99

Sarah Gristwood was born in Kent and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford University. She is the author of Sunday Times bestselling narrative non-fiction, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen, as well as Elizabeth and Leicester. Her first novel, The Girl in the Mirror was published last year. She has written for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Daily Mail. Sarah lives in London and Kent.

The Friday Project Non Fiction & Fiction

Steve Berry

THE GREAT BRITISH TUCK SHOP The ultimate book of sweetie nostalgia! From the creators of the TV Cream website and the authors of TV Cream Toys comes the ultimate in 70s and 80s nostalgia – The Great British Tuck Shop. A colourful, witty and irreverent encyclopedia of all the sweets and crisps of your youth. From Mojos to Rainbow Drops, Space Raiders to Trios, Corona to Kia Ora and everything in between. Fully illustrated with hundreds of wrappers, ads and specially recreated packshots, this book will lead you down memory lane until you reach the corner shop, load up a 10p mix up bag and rot your teeth on the contents.

Stocklist: Humour ISBN: 978-1-906321-45-1 Size: 190x230mm Format: Hardback Imprint: The Friday Project Published: 15 March 2012 UK Price: £14.99

Steve Berry is a writer and one of the founders of tv.cream.org - the UK's foremost nostalgia website.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

THE LESSON OF THE MASTER [Library of Lost Books edition] A collection of essays on Jorge Luis Borges by his long-time friend and collaborator. Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer - is widely considered one of the giants of 20th-century world literature. Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked alongside Borges for a number of years creating English translations of his work, the only translations personally overseen by Borges himself. In The Lesson of the Master, a memoir and essays, he writes about his time with Borges but also offers us a unique insight on the man and his work. It is an indispensable volume for Borges readers and his growing legion of students and scholars. ‘It is a remarkable work… this book contains some wonderful nuggets.' Literary Review

Stocklist: Biography and autobiography ISBN: 978-0-00-735859-5 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: The Friday Project Published: 26 April 2012 UK Price: £9.99

Born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1933, di Giovanni now lives in Lymington on the south coast of England. He still works on translations and continues to fight for the right to make his work with Borges available once more.

Harry Karlinsky

THE EVOLUTION OF INANIMATE OBJECTS: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) A highly original and unusual debut. While carrying out historical research at an Ontario asylum, psychiatrist Harry Karlinsky comes across a familiar surname in the register. Could the “Thomas Darwin of Down, England” be a relative of the famous Charles Darwin? In a narrative woven from letters, photographs, historical documents and illustrations, what emerges is a sketch of Thomas’s life — the last of eleven children born to Charles Darwin. It tells of his obsession with extending his father’s studies into the realm of inanimate objects – kitchen utensils, to be precise. Can the theory of evolution be aplied to knives, forks and spoons? In this stunning factitious biography, Karlinsky presents us with the tragically short life of Thomas Darwin, leaving the reader to decide how much is fact and how much is fiction.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-745435-8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Hardback (B Format) Imprint: The Friday Project Published: 02 February 2012 UK Price: £12.99

Harry Karlinsky is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

Caroline Smailes and Nik Perring, Illustrated by Darren Craske

FREAKS The weirdest stories you will ever read. A bizarre collection of short stories, each featuring a character with an unusual superpower. Meet The Photocopier, a woman who can reproduce herself at will and who attempts to teach her daughter to do the same. Or the zombie hairdresser who is able to reanimate every time she dies. Praise for the authors: ‘Haunting, heartfelt, beautiful’ Chris Cleave on Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes.

Stocklist: Fiction ISBN: 978-0-00-744289-8 Size: 130x197mm Format: Paperback (B Format) Imprint: The Friday Project Published: 12 April 2012 UK Price: £6.99

Caroline Smailes was born in Newcastle in 1973 and now lives in the North West of England with her husband and three children. Darren Craske hails from the south of England and has been telling stories in one form or another all his life. He began his craft writing and illustrating comic books before moving onto writing novels in 2003.