Finding Endurance (Paperback)

Shackleton, My Father and a World Without End

Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Finding Endurance is beautiful, thrilling, heroic and kind, a ripping yarn and a generous and humane reflection on this business of being human.

UPROAR! (Paperback)

Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London

Alice Loxton

**A brilliant new history of Georgian Britain through the eyes of the artists who immortalised it, by one of the UK's most exciting young historians**

'Alice Loxton is the star of her generation … the next big thing in history' DAN SNOW

'Vivid, pacey and endlessly engaging, this brilliant debut brings the late Georgian period dazzlingly to life. Irresistible stuff' TRACY BORMAN

London, 1772: a young artist called Thomas Rowlandson is making his way through the grimy backstreets of the capital, on his way to begin his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Within a few years, James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank would join him in Piccadilly, turning satire into an artform, taking on the British establishment, and forever changing the way we view power.

Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars, UPROAR! follows the satirists as they lampoon those in power, from the Prince Regent to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Their prints and illustrations deconstruct the political and social landscape with surreal and razor-sharp wit, as the three men vie with each other to create the most iconic images of the day.

Alice Loxton's writing fizzes with energy on every page, and never fails to convince us that Gillray and his gang profoundly altered British humour, setting the stage for everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Private Eye and Spitting Image today. This is a book that will cause readers to reappraise everything they think they know about genteel Georgian London, and see it for what it was – a time of UPROAR!

Alice Loxton is a history broadcaster and writer. She has over two million followers on social media (@history_alice). She has appeared on many channels including Sky Arts, Channel 5, BBC News and History Hit, and has worked with a wide array of organisations to bring history to mainstream audiences (including Christie's, Meta, The National Trust, 10 Downing Street, The Royal Collection Trust, The National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery). UPROAR! is Alice's first book.

Well Beings (Hardback)

How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves

James Riley

James Riley, author of the cult hit The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, returns with another incisive and thought-provoking cultural history, turning his trenchant eye to the wellness industry that emerged in the 1970s.

Concepts such as wellness and self-care may feel like distinctly twenty-first century ideas, but they first gained traction as part of the New Age health movements that began to flourish in the wake of the 1960s. Riley dives into this strange and hypnotic world of panoramic coastal retreats and darkened floatation tanks, blending a page-turning narrative with illuminating explorations of the era's music, film, art and literature.

Well Beings delves deep into the mind of the seventies – its popular culture, its radical philosophies, its approach to health and its sense of social crisis. It tells the story of what was sought, what was found and how these explorations helped the 'Me Decade' find itself. In so doing, it questions what good health means today and reveals what the seventies can teach us about the strange art of being well.

James Riley is a Fellow of English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge, focusing on modern and contemporary literature, popular film and 1960s culture. His previous titles include The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties. He also makes films and performs spoken word poetry.

The Box with the Sunflower Clasp (Paperback)

Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai

Rachel Meller

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL CHRISTOPHER BLAND PRIZE 2024*

'A transfixingly readable amalgam of memoir and history… Superbly written and researched…. [Meller] has turned the raw material of her life into literature'
Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai.

Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life – a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply – a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love.

Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.

Rachel Meller grew up near London, the middle daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees. After studying neurobiology at Sussex, and research into hormones and behaviour at Cambridge, she became a writer in a communication consultancy. The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is her first book.

The History Lessons (Hardback)

Shalina Patel

'CAN WE ALL AGREE THAT WE WANT SHALINA TO BE OUR HISTORY TEACHER?'
Anita Rani

'SHALINA PATEL IS THE HISTORY TEACHER I WISH I HAD AT SCHOOL'
Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland

'GO AND BUY THIS BOOK – SHALINA IS AN EXTRAORDINARY TEACHER AND MAKES EVERY SUBJECT FASCINATING'
Bella Mackie, author of How to Kill Your Family

Taking the reader on a tour through history, from the Romans to the Second World War via Tudor courts, medieval castles and more, this hugely entertaining debut from an award-winning history teacher explores a variety of historical topics in a thoughtful and engaging way. Written in an approachable and accessible style, Shalina Patel will be your guide on an eye-opening and jaw-dropping journey back in time.

The History Lessons invites readers to reclaim our history education, and is a treat for curious minds keen to look beyond the usual narratives. This is a book that celebrates stories and people that may be less familiar – but no less remarkable or fascinating.

Shalina Patel is a historian, writer and award-winning history teacher. Her achievements include the Silver Pearson Teaching Award (2018) and the GG2 Inspire Award for Work in Education. As well as working on a range of history documentaries for TV, she has appeared on BBC programmes including Teach Me a Lesson and is a regular guest on BBC Radio London. Shalina is a trustee of Chalke Valley History Festival and the creator of the @thehistorycorridor on Instagram, where she explores diverse histories and new historical perspectives.

The Kremlin's Noose (Hardback)

Vladimir Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia

Amy Knight

A Guardian Book of the Day
'By telling the story of Putin and Berezovsky – a sort of modern reincarnation of Stalin and Trotsky – Knight shines a penetrating light on post-communist Russia'

In The Kremlin's Noose Amy Knight tells the riveting story of Vladimir Putin and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who forged a relationship in the early years of the Yeltsin era.

Berezovsky later played a crucial role in Putin's rise to the Russian presidency in March 2000. When Putin began dismantling Boris Yeltsin's democratic reforms, Berezovsky came into conflict with the new Russian leader by reproaching him publicly. Their relationship quickly disintegrated into a bitter feud played out against the backdrop of billion-dollar financial deals, Kremlin in-fighting and international politics.

Dubbed the 'Godfather of the Kremlin' by the slain Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, Berezovsky was a successful businessman and media mogul who had an outsized role in Russia after 1991. Worth a reported $3 billion by 1997, Berezovsky engineered the re-election of Yeltsin as president in 1996 and negotiated an end to the 1995-96 Chechen war. Despite his own wealth, power and influence, once he became Putin's enemy, Berezovsky was forced into exile in Britain, where he waged a determined campaign to topple Putin. Kremlin authorities responded with bogus criminal charges and demanded Berezovsky's extradition. Death threats soon followed. In March 2013, after losing a British court battle with another Russian oligarch, Berezovsky was found dead at his ex-wife's mansion outside London. Whether he died from suicide or murder remains a mystery.

The Kremlin's Noose sheds crucial new light on the Kremlin's volatile politics under Yeltsin and Putin, helping us understand why democracy in Russia failed so badly. Knight provides a fascinating narrative of Putin's rise to power and his authoritarian rule, told through the prism of his relationship with Russia's once most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.

Amy Knight earned her PhD in Russian politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has taught at the LSE, Johns Hopkins, SAIS and Carleton University. She worked for eighteen years at the US Library of Congress as a Soviet/Russian affairs specialist.