‘In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both’ Atlantic Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius ― a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together― an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.

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Esoteric legends that track history across multiple continents and planes of existence • Synthesizes ancient mythologies across time, space, and cultures to resacralize the human experience • Written as a novella interspersed with metered quatrains in the tradition of medieval Persian belles-lettres • Includes full-color paintings of key figures and motifs, including Sita, Yggdrasil, the Minotaur, Quetzalcoatl, and the Three Marys In this globe-spanning chronicle, Pir Zia Inayat Khan, leader of the Inayatiyya, sets forth an astonishing sequence of legends revealing little-known connections between ancient cultures and spiritual lineages. Framed as a dialogue between the Iranianepic poet Firdausi and his tutelary daimon, this novella follows the tradition of medieval Persian belles-lettres in which prose passages are punctuated with metered verses. The daimon reveals to the hitherto depressed poet the inner history of the world as reflected in the missions of a succession of sages moving through Earth’s lands and ages. Readers will learn of the creation of the universe, the war of the angels and the jinns, the exile of Adam and Eve, and the deeds of Melchizedek and Enoch. They will also explore the rise of the Nephilim, the advent of ancient civilizations, the origins of the Abrahamic faiths, and the history of the Grail and Emerald Tablet. Beautiful paintings by Amruta Patil bring the legends to life. The cumulative effect of the traditions synthesized here is a resacralization of the human experience across time, space, and cultures, achieved through an unexpected marriage of myth and history.

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Phil is ordinary. A mid-level Washington lobbyist for a decidedly unsexy organization, unhappy in the way all mildly successful, minimally influential men are. That is until the spring of 2019, when Phil's picks for the NCAA March Madness Tournament start panning out, and heads begin to turn his way. He really may do it: predict a perfect bracket, for a billion-dollar prize. At first, Cassandra is just along for Phil's soaring rise - she had foreseen it happening, after all. Despite moving in different circles since their shared university days and Cassandra never much liking him, she recognizes in Phil the making of a legend worthy of the highest art. What Cassandra fails to predict, though, is just how much she'd grow to care about Phil's wife, Raleigh - and that the grandest narrative arcs sometimes unfold at the steepest of personal costs. Dazzling in its absurd comedy, Medium Rare is not only a gambol through the upper echelon, but also a shrewd examination of madness, desire, and credibility - why don't we listen when prophetic women speak? A. Natasha Joukovsky delivers a story as layered and incisive as it is high-flying fun.

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This comprehensive guide to Arabic grammar is an essential resource for the first five years of language learning and beyond, now in a revised edition

Thorough and carefully organized, this book covers all the basic structures and grammar that students need for the first five years of learning Modern Standard Arabic, from beginner through to advanced proficiency levels.

- Filled with diagrams, tables, and examples for ease of learning
- Provides straightforward explanations of the all the key grammar points, avoiding overly jargonistic language
- Presents grammar rules and structures in order of frequency and communicative functional use

Already a time-proven favorite among students and teachers alike, this classic book now has a new chapter as well as updates and new material throughout.

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This concise textbook provides beginner students with the knowledge and skills required for reading primary sources and teaches the grammar of documents written in Sahidic Coptic.

The text enables students to study the historical and cultural context of Coptic through studying informal documents as well as more formal and religious texts. There are 20 language lessons followed by 7 chapters of sample reading and a detailed vocabulary list.

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From the acclaimed writer and journalist, a vivid and wide-ranging portrait of love, sex and loneliness in contemporary Japan

No sex. No kids. No future?

When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come – but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning.

This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation.

Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples’ homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks – and the opportunities – of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond.

Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. It is an electrifying portrait of a nation on the brink by one of the most original reporters working today.

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We think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things.

Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel’s groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture.

Custody is the story of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.

It’s a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times – and struggles – of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too – writers, lovers, or activists – and they and their children were punished for these attempts.

Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she’s been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.

This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women’s roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.

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"Incredibly well sourced... One of the most plugged-in voices in modern warfare" - THE TELEGRAPH

"Reads like a real-life geopolitical thriller ... The fact it doesn't feel like scaremongering says a lot about the state of the world" - Jonn Elledge, author of A History of the World in 47 Borders


The Next World War takes readers behind the scenes of the most dangerous era of international tensions since the end of the Cold War, as countries and military forces prepare for potential large-scale combat on a scale unseen since 1945.

From the corridors of power in Washington, Whitehall, Moscow and Beijing to the new frontlines of conflict in Ukraine, Taiwan, cyberspace and even the far side of the moon, Peter Apps unflinchingly explores the fault lines where global peace is already starting to unravel.

Featuring the voices of the commanders, diplomats and technologists already shaping history, as well as the nervous conscripts and ordinary people directly caught up in events, The Next World War examines the real-world effects of this new era of global confrontation. For some - including millions of citizens told to stockpile food and water and prepare for potential mass disruption - it still may not feel entirely real. But for Russia, China and their growing 'axis of upheaval', today's conflicts represent a growing opportunity to reshape the world as they would like it - leading to potential disaster for the West if it cannot heed the warnings in time.

From the return of Cold War-style atomic threats to new forms of sabotage and 'hybrid warfare', the battle for global dominance is already firmly underway. The Next World War is the book you need to understand the growing precariousness of our current situation - and the unending battle to stop it escalating past the point of no return.



"Gripping and important ... A warning order for the future" - General Sir Tim Radford KCB DSO OBE

"Sweeping and compelling, with plenty of human stories that really pull you in. A must-read book from the expert I go to when I really want to get a sense of where things might be going" - Anna-Joy Rickard, Great British Foreign Affairs podcast

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‘Entertaining and moving…I came to love these four women as though they were my sisters’ TRACY CHEVALIER

‘I ADORED it. What a fantastic read. My book of the year’ JILL MANSELL

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They knew they were changing history.
They didn’t know they would change each other.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.

Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.

But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

The Eights is a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination, courage, and what it means to come of age in a world that is forever changed.

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'Beautifully captures the power of friendship ... A pleasure to read' PIP WILLIAMS, author of A Dictionary of Lost Words

'I so enjoyed The Eights' CLARE CHAMBERS, author of Small Pleasures

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