On the Eighth Day, God Created Allotments

Boyle, David

The Real Press

The New Materialism: How Our Relationship with the Material World Can Change for the Better

Andrew Simms

Scandal: How homosexuality became a crime

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

A darkly brilliant debut novel by Fanny Calder, and arguably essential reading for the feminist hedonist woman in your life. City life in the 1990s. Anonymous, intense, paradoxical and sometimes lonely. A young, haunted woman falls in love with a singer. She finds she has been consumed by the relationship and when it ends - as it inevitably does – she feels unable to quite rediscover herself. Cities can draw you into even darker places, and she embarks on a series of intense relationships with thirteen men of very different types, from a rough sleeper to a millionaire, and from a transvestite to a leading politician. As she is propelled through a series of extraordinary adventures and wild parties she finds she begins to lose her own identity. Is there a way out? A raw and unflinchingly honest narrative with stripped down language that is liberating and sometimes challenging. It is a tale of urban human connections crafted with no judgement or deep introspection – a window on the author’s own life at that time that will resonate and stay with you. “This is a quite extraordinary book. The stripped-down language matches the raw, openness of the unflinchingly honest narrative. A naked tale of urban human connections, told darkly, with both cool detachment and warm wit. You're drawn into the twisted spell of the wonderfully wild parties, recognising scenes we've all seen played out (in our naughtiest dreams?!), and catching glimpses of one's own behaviour in the complex but compelling characters that stalk off the page and into your imagination. It is a liberating, sometimes challenging, but deliciously evocative read, crafted with great passion and aplomb. An assertive debut and arguably essential reading for the feminist hedonist in your life...” see Amazon review below

The Men

Literature & Fiction

Calder, Fanny

Women's Fiction

Human beings are born story-tellers, but perhaps no story teller that ever lived had quite the ability to move and inspire as Rudyard Kipling. And of all his stories, The Jungle Book has captured the imaginations of successive generations by bringing the Indian jungles alive, and has gone on to do it all over again through Walt Disney and other film-makers. But there is a mystery at the heart of the book, both books - because Kipling wrote two of them. There is a tale hidden in the very conception of the book and its characters, for Kipling was richly enriching his Mowgli stories with the symbolism of Indian mythology. How did an Englishman, dismissed as an imperialist, who wrote the books in Vermont, and is credited with believing that "East is East and West is West/And never the twain shall meet", manage to conjure such authenticity from a mixture of Indian folk tales and dialect words, and weave them into such a magical and compelling mixture? It isn't just that Kipling spent so long in India or that he felt so at home there. This book tells the real story behind Mowgli, Shere Khan and Baloo and the Jungle itself. Anyone who loved the characters and adored the Jungle Books as children, whether in film or book form, needs to read Swati Singh's journey into the soul of Kipling, and his own journey into the soul of India. Do that, and you will open up the real meaning of the Jungle Books, and it is as profound as it is unexpected. It will also change the way you see The Jungle Book forever.

The Secret History of the Jungle Book: How Mowgli could save the world

Singh, Swati

Asia

Featured in the new film Mad to be Normal, the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing took the world by storm in the 1960s and 1970s with his ideas about madness, families and people's need for authenticity. At the height of his fame he could fill stadiums like Bob Dylan, and often did so. He became an icon of the movement that held psychiatry to be an agency of repression, his phrases on a million hippy T-shirts. Then he fell from grace, flung out of the medical profession, and his influence has been waning since. His basic ideas have been regarded as having been discredited. Yet, despite this, his influence is also everywhere - but largely unnoticed and unremarked. This book tells the extraordinary human story of his struggle, first with the authorities as a psychiatrist in the army and then a series of mental hospitals. It explains his extraordinary influence in the context of the upheavals of those psychedelic days - and it looks at what we can still learn from Laing today. Boyle finds he still has an unexpectedly potent message.

Ronald Laing: The rise and fall and rise of a radical psychiatrist

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Bunkeya: How Danny Rook left home, acquired a history, and failed to stop Mao getting the H-bomb. (Danny Rook Secret Histories)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Handley, A P

Thrillers & Suspense

Little Outside-in-the-Snow and other fairy tales

Mythology & Folk Tales

Beef Every Day but No Latin: The eleven-year-old boy who started his own school

Newman, Kevin

Genre Fiction

Pedro Miguel: How Danny Rook fails to hide his past (Danny Rook Secret Histories)

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