Social Sciences
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From £31.99
£41.99 -
A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides
The sexual assault that rocked the world. A courageous woman’s rallying call for ‘shame to change sides’. For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story.
‘An emblem of resilience for women everywhere’ VOGUE
‘The bravest woman in the world’ DAILY MIRROR
** A best book to look out for in 2026 in The Guardian, Telegraph, Financial Times, Observer, Daily Mirror and BBC **
One November day, Gisèle Pelicot was called to a local police station and life as she knew it ended. Her husband of fifty years had been caught by a supermarket guard filming up women’s skirts. But on his computer was shattering evidence: for nearly a decade, he had been secretly drugging and raping her and inviting dozens of strangers into their home to abuse her.
Four years later, he and fifty other men were put on trial and Gisèle’s courage in waiving her right to anonymity made global headlines. ‘Shame must change sides,’ she declared, giving voice and hope to millions. Her words became a rallying cry and her decision marked a turning point in public feeling about sexual violence.
For the first time, and with unwavering honesty and grace, she describes a difficult childhood, first love, her career and motherhood. It is a life in determined search of happiness, both before and after her devastating discovery. She is an ordinary person who faces extraordinary catastrophe, whose example changes the world.
Ultimately, Gisèle Pelicot emerges with a renewed passion and reverence for living, and for love. A Hymn to Life is an unforgettable testament and promise: that victims have no reason to feel ashamed; that even after unimaginable betrayal we can go on; and that colour will always return to life.
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From £9.49A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides
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Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future
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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From £4.73Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future
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From £16.21
£20.00Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement
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Bimbo: Ditch the Labels. Find Your Voice. Reclaim Your Confidence.
‘Ashley is a much-needed force.’ Jameela Jamil
‘Essential reading for every woman’ Em Clarkson
‘Raw and gloriously unapologetic … a rallying cry for every woman’ Carol Vorderman
‘A smart, brave and unapologetic reclaiming of female power’ Katie Piper OBE
Bossy. Frigid. Spinster. Sl*t. Mumsy. Milf. Bimbo. The English language has a seemingly infinite number of judgemental and hypocritical words to describe women and their life choices. We can’t win, no matter what we do.
Whether it’s on the sofa of ITV’s This Morning or online, Ashley James is a fierce advocate for women. In Bimbo, she unpacks the labels that box women in, and the systems that keep them there. From ‘bossy’ little girls, ‘tarty’ teens, to mothers who ‘let themselves go’, and ‘left-on-the-shelf’ single women, Ashley dissects the systems that try to confine us and asks: what if we broke free?
Told through raw personal stories, humour and with a fierce feminist lens, this is a battle cry for every woman who’s ever felt too much ― or not enough. This is a call to women to stop shrinking, stop competing, and start rising ― together.
This is a book to be shared, discussed, and cherished, and a beacon of hope for a better future.
‘Ignore this Bimbo at your peril.’ Ellie Taylor
‘The book I’ve been waiting for my whole life.’ Bryony Gordon
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Modern Standard Arabic Grammar, Revised and Updated: A Comprehensive Reference and Guide
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 useAlready 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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My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
‘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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From £13.93My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
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Sahidic Coptic: An Introductory Textbook (Textbook of World and Minority Languages)
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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Tears from the Mother of the Sun: A Secret History of the World
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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The Eights: The captivating debut historical novel following the first women to study at Oxford University
‘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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