A Book of Silence

After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and the Isle of Skye. She interweaves these experiences with the history of silence through fairy-tale and myth, Western and Eastern religious traditions, the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis, up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated Scottish moor, and the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home.

Sara Maitland

Religion & Spirituality

granta books uk

Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals

Butterflies animate our summers but the 59 butterfly species of the British Isles can be surprisingly elusive. Some bask unseen at the top of trees in London parks; others lurk at the bottom of damp bogs in Scotland. A few survive for months while other ephemeral creatures only fly for three days. Several are virtually extinct. This bewitching book charts Patrick Barkham's quest to find all 59 - from the Adonis Blue to the Dingy Skipper - in one unforgettable summer. Barkham brings alive the extraordinary physical beauty and amusingly diverse character of our butterflies. He witnesses a swarming invasion of Painted Ladies, experiences the curse of the Purple Emperor, makes a euphoric sighting of an exceedingly rare migrant and as summer draws to a close, suffers from butterfly burnout. He meets some deeply knowledgeable and eccentric butterfly obsessives and reconnects with lovely, overlooked corners of our countryside. As he goes, he looks back at the butterfly collectors of the past

Barkham, Patrick

In this indispensable horticultural manual, twelve great authors share their handy gardening tips. Brett Easton Ellis tells you how to remove a sucker, Mary Shelley creates new life from a vine, Alan Bennett reflects on caring for Heather, while Ibsen unearths some dark family secrets. Each spirited, note-perfect literary pastiche is illustrated in the style of a famous artist, from Klimt to Hockney.

Machiavelli's Lawn: The Great Writers' Garden Companion

Literature & Fiction

Mark Crick

Humor & Satire

This brilliant new book from the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch explores the tyranny of positive thinking, and offers a history of how it came to be the dominant mode in the USA. Ehrenreich conceived of the book when she became ill with breast cancer, and found herself surrounded by pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and platitudes. She balked at the way her anger and sadness about having the disease were seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other sufferers. In her droll and incisive analysis of the cult of cheerfulness, Ehrenreich also ranges across contemporary religion, business and the economy, arguing, for example, that undue optimism and a fear of giving bad news sowed the seeds for the current banking crisis. She argues passionately that the insistence on being cheerful actually leads to a lonely focus inwards, a blaming of oneself for any misfortunes, and thus to political apathy. Rigorous, insightful and bracing as always, and also incredibly funny, "Happy Face" uncovers the dark side of the 'have a nice day' nation.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Politics & Social Sciences

Barbara Ehrenreich

Social Sciences

Ego Trick: In Search of the Self

Baggini, Julian

History

Nostalgic, dark, comic, iconoclastic, the Irish short story has always punched well above its weight. Anne Enright has brought together a dazzling collection of Irish stories written in the last sixty years, by authors from Elizabeth Bowen and Frank O'Connor to Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry. With a pithy and passionate introduction by Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change, and shows the ease and pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short story form. There is no truth so telling as a small truth, or so much fun. Also includes stories by: Maeve Brennan Mary Lavin William Trevor John McGahern Colum McCann Colm Toibin

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

Enright. Anne

1970: Fourteen year old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It's a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosively risky.2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend.At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, the leader of the movement who came out as gay before dying of AIDs in 1993. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties and nineties, as the skinhead movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research.James starts to make contact with individuals on far right websites.He starts receiving threatening phone calls. And then the lives of these two very different heroes unforgettably intersect - CHILDREN OF THE SUN is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range - a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness, and that gives us a picture of a Britain that is strange and yet utterly convincing.

Children of the Sun

Max Schaefer

In a very near future a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. Despite his job at an outfit called 'Post-Human Services', which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly sta

Super Sad True Love Story

Shteyngart, Gary.

At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralysing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and humour, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

Two Kinds of Decay

Sarah Manguso

In her brilliant first book Elif Batuman takes the reader on a journey both literary and physical as she traces the evolution of her fascination with Russian literature across the globe and several centuries. This is a deeply funny, fiercely intelligent portrait of the not-always-rational pursuit of knowledge.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Batuman, Elif

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