The director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been, had he followed his father’s wishes and become a priest. As actors and crew gather to film this alternative destiny, Bergman tries to draw his father into the process, but quickly finds himself plunged back into the emotions of his childhood—both terrorized by his brutal and dominating father, and desperately longing for his approval—and reality gradually begins to crack and crumble, tipping him into a world of false memories and dangerous fantasies. Compelling and breathtakingly original, The Director mixes biographical fact taken from Bergman's writing and family documents with a wild kaleidoscopic imagination to reveal the boy and the man behind the great filmmaker.

The Director

Humor & Entertainment

Ahndoril, Alexander

Movies

Granta UK

A warm, personal memoir from one of Britain’s most high-profile and vocal immigrants, this is a mouthwatering exploration of the author’s East African Indian roots through the shared experience of cooking. Through the personal story of Yasmin’s family and the food and recipes they’ve shared together, The Settler’s Cookbooktells the history of the Indian migration to the UK, via East Africa. Her family was part of the mass exodus from India to East Africa during the height of British expansion, fleeing famine and lured by the prospect of prosperity under the imperial regime. In 1972, they were one of the many families expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin who moved to the UK, where Yasmin has made her home with an Englishman. The food she cooks now, in one of the world’s most ethnically-diverse cities, combines the traditions and tastes of her family’s hybrid history. Here you’ll discover how Shepherd’s Pie is much enhanced by sprinkling in some chilli, Victoria sponge can be enlivened by saffron and lime, and the addition of ketchup to a curry can be life-changing.

The Settlers Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food

Biographies & Memoirs

Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin

Community & Culture

Home to all the major religions, India is also, inevitably, host to virtually every type of religious fanatic. No other nation has witnessed as much proselytization or heard as many war cries in the name of God as India. For centuries, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and Muslims have waged bloody wars, sought violent conversion, and declared jihad against their enemies, as their religions have been hijacked by the forces of fundamentalism. Here British-Indian journalist Edna Fernandes travels to the country’s recent and past theatres of religious extremism—from Kashmir to Gujarat, Punjab to Goa—to meet the generals and foot soldiers of communal wars who assert their faith in rhetoric and rage. Theirs are stories of bigotry and bloodshed, insecurity and despair, but Fernandes listens with understanding, tolerance, and a deft sense of humor, and paints a uniquely vivid and clear-sighted picture of a country divided by dogma.

Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism

History

Fernandes, Edna

Asia

The summer Elvis and Marc Bolan die, a new star is born, and this is his story. A tale of fate, loss, and rock 'n' roll, Diamond Star Halo shows what happens when a family and a farm become the breeding ground for fame. Growing up in a rural recording studio, Halo Llewellyn is rarely star-struck, but when one of the visiting singers gives birth to Fred, she knows right away that he's special. As the golden child grows into the gilded man, she remains dazzled by his ambition and his talent. Up on stage, being screamed at by hundreds of teenage girls, Fred will always turn his spotlight on Halo in the crowd. But that's the problem with falling in love with your charismatic almost-brother—it can never be a secret. In the end, the whole world has to know.

Diamond Star Halo

Literature & Fiction

Murray, Tiffany

Literary

For Charles Fernyhough, the birth of his daughter Athena was an opportunity to view the psychological development and growth of a child first hand. Integrating scientific research with careful observation and questioning, this unique study investigates what it is like to be a newborn baby, an infant on the threshold of language, and a toddler testing out autonomy. Using Athena as a case study, Fernyhough vividly describes the huge amount of mental work children undertake right from birth, including the newborn’s task of learning about objects and people; the toddler’s forging of a self; the development of a sense of time and space; and the process of coming to grasp with the transforming power of the imagination. En route, he explains in simple terminology the ideas of the great child psychologistsincluding Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bowlbyand introduces some of the latest neuroscientific and developmental research. Written with a father’s tenderness and a keen scientific eye, this funny, touching, and fascinating investigation will allow parents and all those interested by child development to understand the extraordinary journey a child makes during the first three years of life.

The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three

Health, Fitness & Dieting

FERNYHOUGH, CHARLES

Psychology & Counseling

Eva Figes and her family fled the horror of Nazi Germany when Eva was only six, forced to leave behind them friends, relatives, and their housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, Edith suddenly re-emerged in their lives. Having miraculously survived wartime Berlin, she had reluctantly emigrated to hostile, volatile Palestine. Recounting Edith’s story, Figes boldly argues that Israel was a product of U.S. foreign policy and continuing and widespread anti-Semitism. Part memoir, part brave polemic, this is both a moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America’s role in the Middle East.

Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land

FIGES, Eva

Françoise, an Australian photographer, travels to Bhopal in India, where 20 years earlier a gas leak killed thousands. There she meets Naga, a Tibetan refugee whose family died in the disaster, and Arkay, a Scottish traveler battling addiction, who has found solace in Buddhism. As a testament to their time together Françoise assembles photographs from their lives into an album, the Red Book. The photographs tell their stories of love, struggle and transformation—pointing to the people they have been and who they will become. The three narrators'beautifully realized voices show how lives entwine and split apart, and the story captures the irresistible lure of India for outsiders, the promise of its spirituality, and its layered history.

The Red Book

Delahunt, Meaghan

A powerful, taboo-shattering medical and social history that redresses the myths and delivers the truths about menopause Meticulously researched and always entertaining, this book traces the history of "the change of life" from its appearance in classical texts and the medical literature of the 18th century to up-to-the-minute contemporary clinical approaches. For more than 2,000 years, attitudes to menopause have created dread, shame, and confusion. Its progression from natural phenomenon to full-blown pathological condition led to bizarre treatments and often dangerous surgery, and formalized a misogyny which lingers in the treatment of menopausal women today. Delving into the archives, the boudoir, and the doctor's bag, this book reveals the elements that formed the menopause myth: chauvinism, collusion, trial, error, and secrecy. Absurd assumptions that have persisted through history are challenged here, such as the idea that sex stops at menopause, or that aging should be feared.

Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause

Foxcroft, Louise

Women's Health

Teeth are, for those of us who keep them until we die, our final message across the centuries to posterity—our smile or grimace of rage to the person rummaging in the dust, who finds the remains of our fleeting presence on earth. This is the tragicomic account of one man’s life through the fate of his teeth, from the loss of his first milk tooth swallowed by his father in a prison camp to the eventual fixture of a set of dentures. In 32 chapters—each devoted to a particular tooth—the unnamed narrator, an Italian Jew, charts 50 years of Eastern European history. Swept up in its agitated course, he finds himself immersed in secret plots, covert missions, and a ceaseless reflection on the meaning of life.

Teeth & Spies

Pressburger, Giorgio

Fishing for Amber dazzles with its weave of narratives and the sheer pleasure taken in unwinding the three narrative strands: ribald telling of tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, dark and disturbing Irish fairy stories, and fantastic tales of 17th-century Dutch painting. The universal theme is that of transmutation and the power of art—of light captured on canvas, experience immortalized in narrative. Stories branch infinitely into other stories, each connecting, and each fishing for the truth. The central image of amber, of light or creatures captured in it, transformed by it, is sustained throughout the book. Ciaran Carson lives in Belfast. He has been awarded the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, as well as the Yorkshire Post Prize for The Star Factory.

Fishing for Amber

Carson, Ciarán

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