Covering Elizabethan, 18th century, Victorian and 20th London and looking at witches, witchcraft, Nicholas Hawksmoor, secret societies and more, the book describes practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs. London more than any other city has a secret history concealed from view, a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions and forgotten locations. The book rediscovers this history, from the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor, from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. A gazetteer maps the sites of the most resonant occult locations. 224pp, paperback.

A classic blues novel of 1950s America, here in Penguin Classic 25th anniversary edition. Set in Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks called 'Man', a young harmonica-blowing blues singer who creates colourful and amazing music. Painfully torn between his friendship with fellow musician Solly and his great love for and a responsibility to his beautiful wife Cleo and daughter Karina, while struggling with the constraints of racist America, Man seeks relief in 'Dirty Bird' whiskey. He also relocates to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker and singer, but the blues in his heart and mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own troubled depths of alcoholism, Man emerges with fresh awareness of possibility of renewal. He faces responsibilities to the rhythm and rhyme of his lyrics that groove a hollow in his mind and his family, and beneath both is the awful grinding racism he meets daily on the streets which pluck opportunity from his grasp. One of the most influential novels and an extraordinary portrayal of 20th century Black reality, and also an ode to the richness and power of blues music. 288 page paperback. Small remainder mark.

For every bibliophile, a compendium of book chat with tasty nuggets about writers and their editors. We join Rebecca Lee, a professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to the finished, printed books. She reveals the dark arts of ghostwriters, explores the secret world of literary agents, and uncovers the hidden beauty of the typesetter. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little known but often controversial considerations that make a big impact - ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar, and juicy post-publication corrections. A funny and illuminating peek into publishing below stairs, from foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, welcome to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Get your blaps, blovers and blurbs here! 372pp of delight, paperback.

Paris is famous for its art and art bookshops, and Bibliophile struggled to resist this beautiful temptation of a book! The most iconic bookshops such as Delamain or Galignani have passionate booksellers with a vocation to open new horizons to readers and these bookshops feel a little bit like a social club. Sound familiar? The role of bookshops was so essential during the pandemic lockdowns that books were considered an essential need and bookshops were allowed to stay open alongside food shops and pharmacies. Food for thought. Like all of us, Parisians cannot resist stopping at a box of books put out in front of a bookshop. The name of the City of Paris evokes many stories from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo and also as a refuge for authors who fled prejudice, like Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. From the oldest café in Paris, Le Procope, where philosopher Voltaire had his desk, to the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop where so many Americans come on pilgrimage in the footsteps of the Beat Generation, to green book stalls punctuating the banks of the River Seine, you'll be drawn to Paris after reading this book, if only from your armchair, with these delightfully engaging colour photographs on every page. Currently hosting the 2024 Olympics, the City of Light is here explored in a cultural odyssey of its historic bookshops, restaurants and the haunts of writers who have made Paris their home. For example the Drouant restaurant which is inextricably linked with the Goncourt Literary Prize, Le Döme at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse where occultist Aleister Crowley, artist Paul Gauguin and Vladimir Lenin frequented, and follow in the footsteps of Paul Verlaine whose new poetry was published in a weekly review from the nightclub Le Chat Noir and despite an ongoing addiction to absinth was voted 'Prince of Poets' in 1894. The prolific author and self publicist Georges Simenon wrote his Inspector Maigret novels here and added to the glitterati literati list are Marcel Proust, Molière, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alxandre Dumas, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and many more and the places they knew and loved like theatres, Parisian alleyways, the opera house and the riverside booksellers who have been in business in one form or another since the 16th century. We love this book. 160 landscape format pages, packed with colour photos, 23 x 19.6 cm.

The Times: 'The masterpiece of one of the most important and overlooked British women writers of the twentieth century, with a new introduction'. Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of Fascism casting an ever-lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of power, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife, and a seat in Parliament. But the advent of war brings with it his downfall, and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy. "Elegant and muscular, powerful and razor-sharp, here is Greek tragedy and political saga all in one, a glittering exorcism of the inter-war generation's demons". Please do not overlook this superb evocation of that sticky, feverish time which has just the right mixture of doomed fun and faintly lascivious despair. 608pp, paperback.

From baker, beekeeper and birdwatcher, to falconer, farrier and forager, join poet Angus and printmaker Lilly as they explore the British Isles, uncovering and celebrating our crafts and traditions. This collection of poetry and printmaking aims to capture and celebrate the heritage and craftsmanship through 30 poems with accompanying striking mono linocut prints. We read about the salt harvester walking beside the water's edge, the angler watching for hours on end like stooping herons on a rushing bend, the forester whose view is one of a thousand kind in solid spruce or wondering beech, the ploughman trudging in muddied land towing blade and plodding beast, the shepherd from head to source of upland flow. With hand and tool we are invited into the life and craftsmanship that stirs within the great British countryside. With glossary, superb design and illustrations. 96pp.

'It was Nashwa who'd put the rope round my neck, at our first encounter. She alone could bind and loose, she alone controlled the thick rope, which she could jerk on, pulling me to wherever she chose. She might pull violently, dragging me in wherever she felt like it, whenever she wanted me, or let it out a little, according to her mood.' The novel describes the three day sex, drink and drug binge of a 30-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of his native Giza, that pullulating mass of humanity that, like an ugly sister, sits opposite Cairo on the River Nile's West Bank. Pursued by an unshakable sense of impending doom that is only partly attributable to the fear of retribution at the hands of a sadistic police officer with whose wife he is conducting a frenzied affair, the narrator observes with fascinating horror his own stumbling progress through a world of menace and wonder. It is a world inhabited by philosophical prostitutes, nightmarish butchers, serene Quran-readers, pious family members, religious con-men, autistic tissue-sellers and others. Milleresque in its treatment of sex, the novel captures the essence of the phantasmagoric world of the Egyptian mega-city, disintegrating under the pressures of its home-grown horrors, while pining for the sublime. Told with vigorous language, humour and authenticity. 224 pages, paperback.

A prize winning masterpiece, this little book is ruminative, humane and genre-defying. Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, the book weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach was the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature Mimesis in Istanbul. François Fenelon was the 17th century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, named The Adventures of Telemachus, was a veiled critique of the Sun King. It was the bestselling book in Europe for 100 years and resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write his own family saga of the Holocaust and memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father. Haunting tales of oppression and wandering, his book moves to a startling conclusion about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages and centuries. 128pp, paperback.

A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. Is writing the word's greatest invention? Calling it an invention could be misleading unless, like Hildegard of Bingen, an individual in isolation develops a code with symbols. To illustrate the moment when a depiction becomes a name for something, the author takes us back to the palaeolithic period, when a symbol might mean a horse but could also mean a lot of other things. The transitional moment was about five millennia ago, when our ancestors discovered that a sound can be attached to different things and thus exists in its own right. A coherent and ordered system is slowly built up thereafter. The author covers the decipherment of a range of languages including Linear B, the only language whose decipherment, by Michael Ventris in 1952, was achieved solely on statistical analysis of the script's signs, without help from parallel texts in known languages, such as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Linear A remains one of the world's still undeciphered languages, like the Rongorongo language of Easter Island, which the author was working on during the course of writing this book, establishing that it is a logo-syllabary language in which signs represent words, like most invented languages. Another little-known example of a syllabary language is Woleai of the Caroline Islands. Contrary to what we may assume, there are cultures where writing never develops, and codes that have never been cracked, such as the code in the 15th century chimerical Voynich manuscript. The author's argument is that writing is cultural, created by us and transmitted by us. "It is not biological, it is not in our genes. It is, in short, a cultural gizmo." It needs to be learned and eventually the rules of the game become pervasive and seem natural to us. Language, in the sense of face to face communication, is a well-oiled code, but writing is in a different category. 14.7 x 21.7cm, 289pp, photos.

This big anthology celebrates women as writers of SF and links their emergence in the early years of the 20th century to the fact that progressive social ideals, including First Wave Feminism, were opening new doors for women. Most of these writers were middle class and white, and had achieved a degree of independence through education. A survey of 43 magazines that featured SF in the 1920s to 1940s indicated that publishers played safe by directing women to work in genres where female writers were already established, including Gothic romances and fantastic poetry as well as newer genres such as the laboratory monster. This collection includes not just women's sci-fi stories and poetry but also journalism, interviews and essays. The editor offers four main reasons why women were attracted to SF. First and most obviously, because they had an affinity for science as a discipline, for instance Clare Winger Harris whose women's college had a dedicated science building, while L. Taylor Hansen wanted to capture the thrill of scientific discovery. Secondly because they were attracted by SF as a genre, and in the case of Leslie F. Stone this was because her family saw science as a male pursuit and she made a deliberate choice to defy their lack of encouragement. Lilith Lorraine saw it as a form of political expression, a way of making a difference, and finally it was an area of work in which women could compete on equal terms with men and earn the same fees. Part 1, Authors, is a collection of dramatic, action-packed SF tales, often disrupting beliefs about human domination of the universe. A Verse section ranges from Julia Boynton Green's amusing "Radio Revelations" to Lilith Loraine's magnificent "Men keep strange trysts" with its reference to "the thick veil of the commonplace". The work of Journalists and Editors is followed by a final section on women Artists, illustrated in colour. The writing of 20 leading SF women is accompanied by biographies and critical evaluations. Comprehensive selection of works by genre luminaries, including author C. L. Moore, artist Margaret Brundage, and others who were well known in their day, including poet Julia Boynton Green, science journalist L. Taylor Hansen, and editor Mary Gnaedinger. 396pp, paperback, colour illustrations.