In 2001 a group of authors including Andrew O'Hagan, Tony Hawks and Irvine Welsh were given the opportunity to visit Sudan, one of the world's most inaccessible countries. The resulting book: The Weekenders - Travels in the Heart of Africa was an award-winning triumph, combining fiction and non-fiction into a compelling travel narrative that was both entertaining and illuminating. Now the Weekenders are back, joined by some new faces and taking on one of the world's most fascinating and contradictory cities - Calcutta. It promises to be a trip like nothing you've ever seen or heard of before-'Powerful- affecting-' TLS 'Thoroughly enjoyable- a story for our times-' Literary Review

The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta

Simon Garfield

SAM MILLER

JENNY COLGAN

Tony Hawks

Bella Bathurst

Monica Ali

Michael Atherton

Literature & Fiction

Random House]

In Private Battles, award-winning writer Simon Garfield has skilfully interwoven the diaries of four ordinary people as they struggle to cope with the day-to-day reality of life during World War II. Their voices combine to create one of the most compelling and refreshing takes on the period ever published. Meet Maggie Joy Blunt, a perceptive but frustrated young writer living alone near Slough; Pam Ashford, a shipping clerk in Glasgow who writes of office life as if it were an episode of The Archers; Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old discharged soldier living with a stern landlady in Essex; and Ernest Van Someren, a research chemist in Hertfordshire, father of two children, and proposer of several unique scientific ways to beat the Nazis. Perhaps here, for the first time, is the true story of how the ordinary people of Britain won World War II. And of how they almost didn't.

Private Battles : How the War Almost Defeated Us -

Biographies & Memoirs

Unknown, Author

Historical

Ebury Press

Agent

Penguin/Random House

Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.

End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

FABER

Originally published in 1996, the story of five wrestlers of the 1970s and 1980s: Kendo Nagasaki, Mick McManus, Les Kellet, Klondyke Kate and Dr Death.

The wrestling

Faber and Faber

An artificial dye, mauve, was discovered by a 19th-century chemist called William Perkin while searching for a synthetic alternative to natural quinine. This book examines how the different worlds of fashion, industry, business, chemistry and medicine were transformed by a single colour.

Mauve: how one man invented a colour that changed the world

Science & Math

Faber&Faber

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the greatest engineering feat of its age. George and Robert Stevenson's "Rocket" was to become the most famous locomotive in history. William Huskisson was one of the greatest statesmen of his generation and certainly the most accident prone. On 15th September 1830, the three met for the first time. Huskisson's fateful accident, in which the "Rocket" crushed his leg and thigh, is an unforgettable image of the Industrial Revolution. But what really happened on that day? How did the opening of the world's first passenger railyway turn from a glorious morning into a tragic afternoon? This book is an entertaining tale of ambition, genius, rivalry and legend, plotting the eight-year struggle to build a railway with a cast of engineers, politicians, actresses, surgeons, socialites and breathtaking machines. It is a loud and evocative snapshot of the times, but above all it is a human story of one man's shocking and very gory demise.

The Last Journey of William Huskisson

History

When he was very young, Simon Garfield lusted after rare stamps, but could not afford them. When he was older, the passion reignited with almost ruinous results. His memoir begins at the door of his marriage guidance counsellor, stamp collection under his arm (he couldn't leave it in the car) and what follows is an examination of obsession and desire, as well as reflections on collecting in general and philately in particular.

The Error World

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

The New York Times bestselling author of Just My Type and On the Map offers an ode to letter writing and its possible salvation in the digital age. Few things are as exciting—and potentially life-changing—as discovering an old letter. And while etiquette books still extol the practice, letter writing seems to be disappearing amid a flurry of e-mails, texting, and tweeting. The recent decline in letter writing marks a cultural shift so vast that in the future historians may divide time not between BC and AD but between the eras when people wrote letters and when they did not. So New York Times bestselling author Simon Garfield asks: Can anything be done to revive a practice that has dictated and tracked the progress of civilization for more than five hundred years?In To the Letter, Garfield traces the fascinating history of letter writing from the love letter and the business letter to the chain letter and the letter of recommendation. He provides a tender critique of early letter-writing manuals and analyzes celebrated correspondence from Erasmus to Princess Diana. He also considers the role that letters have played as a literary device from Shakespeare to the epistolary novel, all the rage in the eighteenth century and alive and well today with bestsellers like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. At a time when the decline of letter writing appears to be irreversible, Garfield is the perfect candidate to inspire bibliophiles to put pen to paper and create “a form of expression, emotion, and tactile delight we may clasp to our heart.”

To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Albertus: The Biography of a Typeface (The ABC of Fonts)

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

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Books by Simon Garfield