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The unseen letters of the only British officer to spend three years in the trenches throughout the First World War

Colonel Graham Chaplin, commander of the Cameron Highlanders, wrote letters from the trenches almost daily to the wife he had married just before the war began. Even if he had no time to write, he would at least send a postcard to reassure her he was ‘Quite well’. These personal and loving letters give a rare insight into the mind of a serving officer, his worries about his men and his family back home, his concern for the progress of the war (however cautiously phrased) and his comments on the growing list of friends dead or wounded.

Having once refused what he considered unacceptably dangerous orders to send his troops over the top during the Battle of Loos, Chaplin wasn’t promoted out of the trenches until 1917. Respected and trusted by his men, he was, even so, the only officer to whom this happened.

Andrew Davidson, author of the highly praised Fred’s War, analyses Chaplin’s unique status and weaves around his letters a fascinating portrait of a soldier’s life and of the war on the Western Front.

‘Mike Heron, as part of the Incredible String Band, changed the way I looked at music. Read it!’ Billy Connolly

‘Mike Heron’s lyrics always sparkled with wit and warmth and his prose is a delightful continuation. The book evokes a smoky, unheated eccentric Edinburgh that was a crucible for so much creativity.’ Joe Boyd, author of White Bicycles

This singular book offers two harmonising memoirs of music making in the 1960s. Mike Heron for the first time writes vividly of his formative years in dour, Presbyterian Edinburgh. Armed with a love of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Hungarian folk music, he plays in school cloakrooms, graduates to rock, discovers the joy of a folk audience, starts writing songs, tries to talk to girls, wishes he was a Beatnik all while training as a reluctant accountant. When asked to join Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, the Incredible String Band are formed – and their wildly innovative, astounding music became indelibly linked with the latter Sixties.

Andrew Greig was a frustrated provincial schoolboy when he heard their songs. It changed everything. Undaunted by a lack of experience and ability, he formed a band in their image. Fate & Ferret populated back-country Fife with Pan, nymphs and Apollo, met the String Band and caught the fish lorry to London to hang around Joe Boyd’s Witchseason office, watching at the fringes of the blooming Underground scene. It was forty years later that he and Mike became friends.

These entwined stories will delight anyone who has loved the Incredible String Band; and their differing portraits of that hopeful, erratic and stubborn stumble towards the life that is ours will strike a chord with everyone.

From earliest times, women gained access to leadership in times of conflict and proved themselves equal to the challenge of commanding during war. Women leaders abounded in the ancient world from Ireland to Israel, sometimes through the accident of birth, but often rising to power through naked opportunism and raw courage in the ranks – and it is no accident that women war leaders, like men, are often famous for their strong sexual drive.

Wherever there is war, there has often been a woman at the helm. Later ages frequently wrote these women out of history, but their stories have refused to die. From the legendary leader of the Amazons who fought the greatest of Greek heroes, Achilles, to the Iron Ladies of today, the women of both West and East directing military campaigns and leading their countries in war.

Presenting an array of fascinating and sometimes little known women war leaders, popular author Rosalind Miles and the acclaimed military historian Robin Cross do full justice to the achievements of these women, some of whose amazing stories have so far never been told.

Warrior women include: Penthesilea the Amazons queen, Deborah, Cleopatra VII, Boudicca, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Grace O’Malley, Deborah Samson, Nadezda Durova, Harriet Tubman, Anna Etheridge, Soldaderas, Flora Sandes, Lily Litvak, Women of the Warsaw Ghetto, Hanna Reitsch, Ruth Werner, Jeanne Holm, Margaret Thatcher, Women in Today’s Armies, Martha McSally and more…

A homage to a remarkable poet and his world.

‘At The Loch of Green Corrie is more than merely elegant, more than a collection of albeit fascinating insights, laugh-out-loud observations and impressively broad erudition’ – Sunday Herald
‘You could easily make a case that Andrew Greig has the greatest range of any living Scottish writer’ – Scotsman

For many years Andrew Greig saw the poet Norman MacCaig as a father figure. Months before his death, MacCaig’s enigmatic final request to Greig was that he fish for him at the Loch of the Green Corrie; the location, even the real name of his destination was more mysterious still. His search took in days of outdoor living, meetings, and fishing with friends in the remote hill lochs of far North-West Scotland. It led, finally, to the waters of the Green Corrie, which would come to reflect Greig’s own life, his thoughts on poetry, geology and land ownership in the Highlands and the ambiguous roles of whisky, love and male friendship.

At the Loch of the Green Corrie is a richly atmospheric narrative, a celebration of losing and recovering oneself in a unique landscape, the consideration of a particular culture, and a homage to a remarkable poet and his world.

‘The book of the year’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘One of the very best biographies I have ever read’ STEPHEN FRY
‘A hot thunderstorm of a book’ DAVID HARE
‘Erotic Vagrancy gave me a week of pure joy’ CRAIG BROWN
‘Unputdownable’ TONY PALMER
‘A genius writer’ LYNN BARBER
‘ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE . . . ONE OF THE GREAT READING EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE’ MARINA HYDE
A TOP 25 BEST BOOK OF 2023 (INDEPENDENT)

Thirteen years in the writing, Erotic Vagrancy doesn’t only surpass every other biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton yet to appear, this rich, vital and passionately articulated book, which is as extravagant and wayward as its two subjects, is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed, being brilliant, sexuality, the intermingling of a low and a highbrow existence, pride, insecurity, attraction and repulsion, and devilry.

We see Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see Burton emerging from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation. The pair come together in Rome during the making of Cleopatra, which gives Lewis the opportunity for a major farcical set-piece. We then enter a world of jewels and private jets, vodka, yachts and furs – the splendid vulgarity of the Sixties, where the narrative of Taylor and Burton becomes a Pop Art story.

Then, inevitably, it all goes wrong, with alcoholism, violence, recrimination and divorce ( twice ) – with Burton, whom Lewis depicts as a Faustus figure, damned by fame, dead at fifty-eight.

Stephen Fry has said, ‘It is one of the very best biographies I have ever read. One of the best books about fame, desire, Hollywood and mid-to-late twentieth century culture ever written. Inside which, brilliant, hilarious and sensitive insights on all manner of subjects fizz and froth. Magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant.’

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

Hotel K – Bali’s most notorious jail – is Hell in Paradise.

Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan, or Hotel K, Bali’s most notorious jail. Its walls touch paradise; sparkling oceans, surf beaches and palm trees on one side, while on the other it’s a dark, bizarre and truly frightening underworld of sex, drugs, violence and squalor.

Hotel K’s filthy and disease ridden cells have been home to the infamous and the tragic: a Balinese King, Gordon Ramsay’s brother, Muslim terror bombers, beautiful women tourists and surfers from across the globe. Petty thieves share cells with killers, rapists, and gangsters. Hardened drug traffickers sleep alongside unlucky tourists, who’ve seen their holiday turn from paradise to hell over one ecstasy pill.

Hotel K is the shocking inside story of the jail and its inmates, revealing the wild ‘sex nights’ organised by corrupt guards for the prisoners who have cash to pay, the jail’s ecstasy factory, the killings made to look like suicides, the days out at the beach, the escapes and the corruption that means anything is for sale – including a fully catered Italian jail wedding, or a luxury cell upgrade with a Bose sound system.

The truth about the dark heart of Bali explodes off the page.

The best political biography of the year’ Jonathan Sumption, Spectator
‘Wonderful . . . A Life so nearly complete it need never be written again’ Ferdinand Mount, Times Literary Supplement
By the author of the Orwell Prize-winning Citizen Clem

Damned in coruscating verse by Shelley and Byron, his coffin hissed at during his funeral, Lord Castlereagh has one of the blackest reputations in British history. But as John Bew shows, this is but a half-drawn portrait. His gripping biography reveals a shy, inarticulate but passionate man; a towering political figure of implacable principles who redrew the map of Europe, fought a duel with a cabinet colleague and would tragically take his own life amid rumours of scandal and madness.

A brand new graphic novel series by Charlaine Harris, no. 1 bestselling creator of Sookie Stackhouse, and Christopher Golden, bestselling co-creator of Baltimore.

Calexa Rose Dunhill was just fourteen when she woke in a cemetery. Bruised, bloody and left for dead, with no memory of her previous life, she took a new name from the headstones that surrounded her.

Now, three years on, Calexa still lives in Dunhill Cemetery, struggling with the desire to know her true identity – and the all-consuming fear of what she might discover when she does.

Then, when she witnesses a gang of teenagers staging a stunt that goes horribly, fatally wrong, Calexa Rose Dunhill discovers she has a unique ability. One she cannot control . . .

‘Cemetery Girl has a power all of its own’ – Fantasy Book Review

The Borgias have become a byword for pride, lust, cruelty, avarice, splendour and venomous intrigue. An inspiration for many works of fiction, most famously Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, they have aroused abomination and fascination in almost equal measure, while their patronage of the arts created some of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance. 

From the powerful, merciless Rodrigo Borgia, better known as Pope Alexander VI, to the beautiful Lucrezia and the debauched and murderous Cesare, Mary Hollingsworth’s account of the dynasty’s dramatic rise from its Spanish roots to the heights of Renaissance society forms a compelling tale of brutality, incest, unparalleled corruption and extortionate greed.

The dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible–how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life’s diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity’s role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself.

The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called “apostles” (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens–but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.

With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this landmark investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race.

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart stolen out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s.

Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, The Organ Thieves is a story that resonates now more than ever, when issues of race and healthcare are the stuff of headlines and horror stories.

‘This is a gripping memoir from one of our country’s greatest jury advocates, offering a fascinating, no-holds-barred tour behind the scenes of some of the most famous criminal cases of modern times’ The Secret Barrister

‘Gripping’ – The Times

‘Mixes the excitement of the courtroom and some practical tips on the advocacy with the more mundane life of the working lawyer’ – Sunday Times

‘Between such serious case studies, his jovial memoir reflects on the challenges and satisfactions of life as a barrister.’ – Daily Mail

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How can you speak up for someone accused of a savage murder? Or sway a jury? Or get a judge to drop a case?

In this memoir, murder case lawyer William Clegg revisits his most intriguing trials, from the acquittal of Colin Stagg to the shooting of Jill Dando, to the man given life because of an earprint.

All the while he lays bare the secrets of his profession, from the rivalry among barristers to the nervous moments before a verdict comes back, and how our right to a fair trial is now at risk.

Under the Wig is for anyone who wants to know the reality of a murder trial. It has been praised as “gripping” by The Times, “riveting” by the Sunday Express and “fascinating” by the Secret Barrister, who described the author as “one of our country’s greatest jury advocates.”

Several prominent barristers, including Matthew Scott and Bob Marshall-Andrews QC, have said Under the Wig is a “must read” for anyone with an interest in the criminal law. Switch off the TV dramas and see real criminal law in action.

Well-known cases featured:

The Murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common
The Chillenden Murders (Dr Lin and Megan Russell)
The Trial of Private Lee Clegg
The Murder of Jill Dando
The first Nazi war crimes prosecution in the UK
The Murder of Joanna Yeates
The Rebekah Brooks Phone Hacking Trial

The inside story of the world’s most notorious cults.

The strange and sinister world of cults is a source of endless fascination. Their secrets, rituals and shadowy hierarchies make for some of the most disturbing and shocking revelations in history. Most chilling of all is the fact that many of their followers forfeit all independence in order to carry out the often sadistic bidding of a mysterious master manipulator – and continue to defend their leader to this day.

From Charles Manson, who instructed his followers to murder seven people, including a heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, to Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult that carried out deadly terror attacks, and the People’s Temple, these cults and their leaders transfix us with their extreme ability to commit savage acts of cruelty and depravity in the name of a self-appointed higher power.

Many shocking and international cults are brought to life, including:

– The Manson Family
– People’s Temple
– Colonia Dignidad
– Thuggees
– Aum Shinrikyo
– Skopsty
– Raëlism
– Heaven’s Gate

FBI Special Agent Jeff Rinek had a gift for getting child predators to confess. All he had to do was share a piece of his soul . . .

In the Name of the Children gives an unflinching look at what it’s like to fight a never-ending battle against an enemy far more insidious than terrorists: the predators, lurking amongst us, who seek to harm our children.

During his 30-year career with the FBI, Jeff Rinek worked hundreds of investigations involving crimes against children: from stranger abduction to serial homicide to ritualized sexual abuse. Those who do this kind of work are required to plumb the depths of human depravity, to see things no one should ever have to see – and once seen can never forget. There is no more important – or more brutal – job in law enforcement, and few have been more successful than Rinek at solving these sort of cases.

Most famously, Rinek got Cary Stayner to confess to all four of the killings known as the Yosemite Park Murders, an accomplishment made more extraordinary by the fact that the FBI nearly pinned the crimes on the wrong suspects. Rinek’s recounting of the confession and what he learned about Stayner provides perhaps the most revelatory look ever inside the psyche of a serial killer and a privileged glimpse into the art of interrogation.

In the Name of the Children takes readers into the trenches of real-time investigations where every second counts and any wrong decision or overlooked fact can have tragic repercussions. Rinek offers an insider’s perspective of the actual case agents and street detectives who are the boots on the ground in this war at home. By placing us inside the heart and mind of a rigorously honest and remarkably self-reflective investigator, we will see with our own eyes what it takes-and what it costs – to try to keep our children safe and to bring to justice those who prey on society’s most vulnerable victims.

With each chapter dedicated to a real case he worked, In the Name of the Children also explores the evolution of Rinek as a Special Agent – whose unorthodox, empathy-based approach to interviewing suspects made him extraordinarily successful in obtaining confessions – and the toll it took to have such intimate contact with child molesters and murderers. Beyond exploring the devastating impact of these unthinkable crimes on the victims and their families, this book offers an unprecedented look at how investigators and their loved ones cope while living in the spectre of so much suffering.