Literary essays

Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times - Homer's Iliad and Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a chivalric roman...

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh...

'Grief is for People' is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behaviour, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on ...

Using case studies, Sacks examines the effects of impairment and incapacity of neurological function such as loss of speech and loss of memory, and looks at the relationship between the brain and the mind.

Migraine is an age-old - the first recorded instances date back over two thousand years - and often debilitating condition, affecting a 'substantial minority' of the population across the globe. In this book, Oliver Sacks offers at once a medical account of its occurrence and management; an explo...

Following the publication of her acclaimed, darkly funny novel 'O Caledonia', Elspeth Barker's sharp and witty essays appeared regularly in the national press. 'Notes from the Hen House', a selection of the most personal of these pieces, welcomes readers into the celebrated writer's life.

Richard Holloway thinks back on some of the questions that have shaped his life. Here are the big asks: Is there a God? How can we forgive? Where does creativity come from? How can we face loss and death? How can we live a good life? And how do we find beauty in the world? To this cause he also r...

Following the international critical acclaim of 'The Cost of Living', this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

In this love letter to the heroes of literacy, James Patterson uncovers true stories from booksellers and librarians. Prepare to enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, and find whatever you need. Meet the smart and talented people who live between the shelves - an...

In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated. Peter Parker explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they we...