*** What's New *** 

Bloomsbury announces Berg fashion Library Launch 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

The Berg Fashion Library will be available from 20 September 2010 and is a major online educational resource for fashion students. The portal will offer users fully cross-searchable access to a wide range of content including the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, an e-book collection, and an image bank with thousands of images. Read more.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc announces interim results 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc today announces interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2010. Read more.

Sneak Peek 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Email us for a chance to win an advanced proof copy of Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest. We have ten to give away. Read more.

No and Me and Operation Mincemeat selected for The Richard and Judy Book Club 9 Jan 2010, 11:51 am

Two Bloomsbury titles, No and Me by Delphine de Vigan and Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre have been selected for The Richard and Judy Book Club. To read more and to see the full list, click here.

*** Events *** 

Michael Mansfield - Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons Event 9 Jul 2010, 12:00 am

Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons, Oxford
Michael Mansfield will be given a talk at Le Mansoir aux Quatre Saison.

07/09/2010

Howard Jacobson - Appearance at Topping & Co in Bath 9 Jul 2010, 8:00 pm

Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath The Paragon Bath Somerset

07/09/2010 20:00:00

Patrick McCabe - Interview at Mountain To Sea Festival in Dublin 9 Aug 2010, 12:30 pm

Royal St George Yacht Club, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Patrick McCabe In Conversation with Hugo Hamilton.
08/09/2010 12:30:00

Frank Dikötter - Talk at BACS Annual Conference 9 Aug 2010, 6:30 pm

Bristol Arts Complex, 11 Woodland Road, BRISTOL
Frank Dikotter will be launching his book Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe at the British Association for Chinese Studies Conference in Bristol.
08/09/2010 18:30:00

Will Self - Talk at the SW11 Literary Festival 9 Sep 2010, 7:00 pm

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), 

Lavender Hill

Will Self will be talking about his new book Walking to Hollywood.
09/09/2010 19:00:00

Ben Macintyre - The Week Literary Lunch 9 Oct 2010, 12:00 pm

Private Room,

The Ivy,

1-5 West Street,

London

Ben Macintyre will give a talk about his new book Operation Mincemeat after a three course meal at the the Ivy.
10/09/2010 12:00:00

Elen Caldecott - CARAD Event 9 Oct 2010, 6:00 pm

CARAD, East Street, Rhayader, Powys

Children's Literature & Storytelling Night

Featuring Elen Caldecott, Val Tyler and David Thorpe

Children: £3.50

Adults: £4.50

Concessions £4

10/09/2010 18:00:00

Niki Segnit - The Ludlow Food Festival 9 Dec 2010, 11:00 am

The Olive Stage
Niki Segnit will talking about what falovours go with what.
12/09/2010 11:00:00

Mark Hudson - Italian Institute Event 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Istituto Italiano di Cultura
39 Belgrave Square
London
Mark Hudson will be talking about Titian at the Italian Institute.
13/09/2010 19:00:00

Michael Mansfield - An Evening with Michael Mansfield 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Riverside Studios,

Crisp Road,

Hammersmith,

London

Michael Mansfield QC is Britain’s most high-profile defence lawyer and a champion of civil liberties. He has taken on the most difficult and challenging cases of our times including the Birmingham Six, Stephen Lawrence and the recent Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry. This is a rare chance to hear the biggest household name at the Criminal Bar. Come along and have a great evening out while supporting a good cause.

Copies of the paperback edition of his latest book, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer, will be available for purchase and Michael will be happy to sign your copy.

British Irish RIGHTS WATCH (BIRW) is an independent, non-governmental organisation that has been monitoring the human rights dimension of the conflict and the peace process in Northern Ireland since 1990.

13/09/2010 19:30:00

Keith Jeffery - Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms Event 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Clive Steps,
King Charles Street,
London
Evening event at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.
14/09/2010

Will Self - Talk at Topping & Co Bookshop 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath
The Paragon
Bath
Somerset

Will Self will be giving a talk about his new book Walking to Hollywood
14/09/2010 19:45:00

Howard Jacobson - Talk at the Muswell Hill Bookshop 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Muswell Hill Bookshop,
72 Fortis Green Road,
London
Howard Jacobson will be talking about ‘The Finkler Question’ at the Muswell Hill Bookshop.
15/09/2010 19:00:00

Elizabeth Gilbert - An onstage interview with Paul Holdengraber. 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Intelligence 2 Ltd
Newcombe House Notting Hill Gate
London

 

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, will be talking about her life and writing for the first time in the UK at this exclusive Intelligence Squared event.
15/09/2010 19:00:00

Daisy Hay - The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

The Oxfordshire Museum
Fletcher's House
Park Street
Woodstock
Oxfordshire

Daisy Hay talks about her book Young Romantics - The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives.

16/09/2010 10:30:00

Elizabeth Gilbert - Grazia and Waterstones Book Club 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Waterstone's,
193 Kensington High Street,
London

Elizabeth will be discussing the issues raised in Eat Pray Love, and her new book Committed, and debating 'Why, when we have everything, are we still beating ourselves up?'.
16/09/2010 19:00:00

Niki Segnit - The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

The Courtyard Restaurant,

Blenheim Palace.

 

Niki Segnit will discuss the art of food combination with two other leading cookery writers. Their deliberations will be chaired by Jon Walsh, The Independent's assistant editor.
17/09/2010 16:00:00

Will Self - An evening at the Cambridge Art's Theatre 31 Dec 1969, 7:00 pm

Cambridge Art's Theatre,

6 St Edward's Passage,

Cambridge

Join Will for an evening of readings, stories and a wealth of anecdotes drawn from his colourful career.

17/09/2010 19:45:00

*** Bestsellers *** 

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.

Ordinary Thunderstorms - William Boyd 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

With the police and a hit man in merciless pursuit, Adam has no choice but to go underground, joining the ranks of the disappeared, struggling to understand how his life has unravelled so spectacularly. His journey of discovery will take him along the Thames from Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End. On the way he encounters aristocrats, priests, prostitutes and a policewoman – but will he ever find himself again?

Bed I Made - Lucie Whitehouse 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

I haven’t given up on you and I’m not going to. It’s time to stop playing hard to get now.

When Kate meets a dark, enigmatic man in a Soho bar, she doesn't hesitate long before going home with him. There is something undeniably attractive about Richard – and irresistibly dangerous, too. Now, after eighteen exhilarating but fraught months, Kate knows she has to finish their relationship and hopes that will be the end of it. But it is only just the beginning.

Fleeing London for the wintry Isle of Wight, she is determined to ignore the flood of calls and emails from an increasingly insistent Richard. But what began as a nuisance becomes an ever more threatening game of cat and mouse...

Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Hedgerow - John Wright 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Hedgerows, moors, meadows and woods – these hold a veritable feast for the forager. In this hugely informative and witty handbook, John Wright reveals how to spot the free and delicious ingredients to be found in the British countryside, and then how to prepare and cook them.

First John touches on the basics for the hedgerow forager, with an introduction to conservation, safety, the law, and all the equipment that you may need. Next he guides us through the tasty edible species to be found. Each one is accompanied by photographs for identification, along with their conservation status, habitat, distribution, season, taste, texture and cooking methods – not forgetting, of course, some fascinating asides and diversions about their taxonomy and history. Over 40 species are covered, including bilberries, blackberries, cloudberries, common mallow, dandelions, hedge garlic, horseradish, pignuts, nettles, sloes, sweet chestnuts, water mint and wild cherries. Then John describes the poisonous species to steer clear of, including warnings about any nasty ‘lookalikes’, along with their identifying photographs.

Finally, there are 30 tempting recipes. Introduced by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hedgerow is an indispensable household reference, and an essential book to have by your side for every trip into the countryside.

Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War.

Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece.

The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill’s team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler’s desk.

Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang - Emma Thompson 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Nanny McPhee embarks on a brand new adventure in this brilliant, funny and captivating novel based on the new Nanny McPhee film.

The Green family is trying to survive the war in their house in the country, but unfortunately they are not out of harm’s way. A wicked uncle is intent on getting his hands on the family fortune and the children miss their father who is away fighting who knows where, and then their horrible cousins arrive! Life is not easy in the Green household . . .

Thank heavens for Nanny McPhee!

GLITTERWINGS ACADEMY 2: Midnight Feast - Titania Woods 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Twink can't wait to start her second term, the Summer term, at the fairy school, Glitterwings Academy. She loves the wonderful, huge oak tree that is Glitterwings Academy, and all the exciting new lessons. Best of all, she has made some new friends, Sooze and Bimi. But friendships can sometimes run into difficulty, as Twink is about to find out.

Glitterwings Academy is a lovingly created series by acclaimed author Lee Weatherly, writing as Titania Woods. Readers of the series can be assured of accomplished narrative, as well as stylish and exciting illustration.

Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

‘He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one...’

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

>Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.

It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.

And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan promises to help him — for he always helps Amir — but this is 1970s Afghanistan and Hassan is merely a low-caste servant who is jeered at in the street, although Amir still feels jealous of his natural courage and the place he holds in his father’s heart.

But neither of the boys could foresee what would happen to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament, which was to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return, to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Annie Barrows Mary Ann Shaffer 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

It’s 1946 and author Juliet Ashton can’t think what to write next. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey – by chance, he’s acquired a book that once belonged to her – and, spurred on by their mutual love of reading, they begin a correspondence. When Dawsey reveals that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, her curiosity is piqued and it’s not long before she begins to hear from other members.

As letters fly back and forth with stories of life in Guernsey under the German Occupation, Juliet soon realizes that the society is every bit as extraordinary as its name.

Magic Under Glass - Jaclyn Dolamore 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Nimira is a music-hall performer forced to dance for pennies to an audience of leering drunks. When wealthy sorcerer Hollin Parry hires her to do a special act – singing accompaniment to an exquisite piano-playing automaton, Nimira believes it is the start of a new life.

In Parry’s world, however, buried secrets stir. Unsettling below-stairs rumours abound about ghosts, a mad woman roaming the halls, and of Parry’s involvement in a gang of ruthless sorcerers who torture fairies for sport.

When Nimira discovers the spirit of a dashing young fairy gentleman is trapped inside the automaton’s stiff limbs, waiting for someone to break the curse and set him free, the two fall in love. But it is a love set against a dreadful race against time to save the entire fairy realm, which is in mortal peril.

Faerie Wars - Rejacketed - Herbie Brennan 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Faerie Lord - Herbie Brennan 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Two years after leaving the Faerie Realm, Henry Atherton finds a middle-aged Pyrgus and his new wife, Nymph, in Mr Fogarty’s garden. They explain that a terrible plague has taken hold of the Faerie Realm, causing faeries to age so rapidly that Pyrgus had to flee in order to save himself. Determined to help his friends, Henry returns to the Realm, hoping to find a cure and perhaps win his way back into the heart of Queen Holly Blue. But the plague isn’t what it seems, and when the treacherous villains of the Faerie Realm are involved, anything is possible.

No and Me - Delphine de Vigan 9 Apr 2010, 12:26 am

Lou Bertignac has an IQ of 160 and a good friend in class rebel Lucas. At home her father puts a brave face on things but cries in secret in the bathroom, while her mother rarely speaks and hardly ever leaves the house. To escape this desolate world, Lou goes often to Gare d’Austerlitz to see the big emotions in the smiles and tears of arrival and departure. But there she also sees the homeless, meets a girl called No, only a few years older than herself, and decides to make homelessness the topic of her class presentation. Bit by bit, Lou and No become friends until, the project over, No disappears. Heartbroken, Lou asks her parents the unaskable question and her parents say: Yes, No can come to live with them. So Lou goes down into the underworld of Paris’s street people to bring her friend up to the light of a home and family life, she thinks.