Non-fiction

World-famous writer Bill Bryson brings us this brilliantly readable biography of our greatest dramatist and poet, William Shakespeare. Examining centuries of myths, half-truths and downright lies, Bill Bryson tries to make sense of the man behind the masterpieces. In a journey through the streets of Shakespeare's time, he brings to life the hubbub of Elizabethan England and a host of characters along the way. Bryson celebrates the glory of Shakespeare's language - his ceaselss inventiveness gave us hundreds of now indispensable phrases, images and words - and delights in details of his fall-outs and folios, poetry and plays. Stitching together information from a vast array of sources, he has created a unique celebration of one of the most significant, and least understood, figures in h

This is the complete collection of Nick Cave lyrics spanning his entire career, from 1978 until 2013, revised and updated by the cult rock star. "He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist - beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute". (from Nick Cave's induction into the Australian Hall of Fame). This complete collection of Nick Cave's lyrics spans his entire career, from his writing for The Birthday Party through the highly acclaimed Murder Ballads and The Boatman's Call to recent work with Grinderman and his 2013 album, Push the Sky Away. Brought together in one volume, these lyrics make up one of the most outstanding achievements of contemporary music. Switching between the cynical and the sanguine, the defeated and the defiant, Nick Cave deals in lov

'Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything – even die.' Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools – especially for girls – in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscap

An intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel combines the same powerful eloquence, moral passion, and abiding wisdom that informed his writing as a dissident and playwright, with a candor unprecedented from one with the broad perspective and infinite responsibility of governing a country.

Havel, now president of the Czech Republic, addresses the legacy of Communism as the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution gives way to a more problematic reality. Yet even as he grapples with the challenges of political change, he affirms his belief in a politics motivated by moral responsibility; in an economy tempered by compassion; and in the central roles of art and culture in the transformation of society. Summer Meditations is not only a timely and necessary

"My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents."

Russell Brand grew up in Essex . His father left when he was three months old, he was bulimic at 12 and left school at 16 to study at the Italia Conti stage school. There, he began drinking heavily and taking drugs. He regularly visited prostitutes in Soho, began cutting himself, took drugs on stage during his stand-up shows, and even set himself on fire while on crack cocaine. He has been arrested 11 times and fired from 3 different jobs - including from XFM and MTV - and he claims to have slept with over 2,000 women. In 2003 Russell was told that he would be in prison, in a metal hospital or dead within six months unless he went in to rehab. He has

The film tie-in edition of Jon Krakauer's classic account of a gifted young man who chose literally to walk away from his life. By examining the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man, who in 1992 walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later, internationally bestselling author Jon Krakauer explores the obsession which leads some people to explore the outer limits of self, leave civilization behind and seek enlightenment through solitude and contact with nature. 'An astonishingly gifted writer: his account of 'Alex Supertramp' is powerfully dramatic, eliciting sympathy for both the idealistic, anti-consumerist boy - and his parents' Guardian 'A compelling tale of tragic idealism' The Times

The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it.' What is the difference between mean and median, blatant and flagrant, flout and flaunt? Is it a whodunnit or whodunit? Do you know? Are you sure? With Troublesome Words journalist and bestselling travel-writer Bill Bryson gives us a clear, concise and entertaining guide to problems of English usage and spelling. Originally published as The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, it has been an indispensable companion to those who work with the written word for nearly twenty years. Now fully updated and revised, it is better than ever. So if you want to discover whether you should care about split infinitives, are cursed with an uncontrollable outbreak of commas or wer

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or wher

An entertaining, anecdotal look at the origins of language and ideas in the USA. Bryson explains why two bicycle repairmen from Ohio succeeded in mastering manned flight, why the assassination of President Garfield led to the invention of air conditioning, and many other improbable but true facts.

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson, the acclaimed author of such bestsellers as "The Mother Tongue" and "Made in America", decided it was time to move back to the United States for a while. This was partly to let his wife and kids experience life in Bryson's homeland - and partly because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another. It was thus clear to him that his people needed him.
But before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of modern-day Britain, and to analyze what he loved so much about a country that had produce

A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything In Freakonomics Steven Levitt asks a series of provocative and profound questions about contemporary living and helps us to see the familiar world through a completely original lens. He examines everything from education to traffic jams, from food to guns, from sports to getting elected, from betting to parenting, pushing back the boundaries of economics along the way. Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away the jargon and calculations of the ‘experts’ to explore the riddles of everyday life. He reaches some astonishing conclusions, showing us that Freakonomics is all about how people get what they want.