A selection of books to tempt you this summer
PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
One of life’s great pleasures is a leisurely read of a captivating tome – particularly in a shady corner on a summer’s day. We’ve gathered a varied medley for you to dip into, including musings from exuberant film director Pedro Amóldovar, an insight into the life of the extraordinary musician Neneh Cherry, an exploration of the meaning of freedom and a tribute to the ordinary people who helped put together the Oxford English Dictionary. What will you choose?
And for your chance to win all ten books, scroll down to find the link to our competition page.
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life – one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves.
Reflecting on ideas drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores practical tools and shifts in perspective. The result is a bracing challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.
To be read either as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind’ or devoured in one or two sittings, this will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.
Order the bookThunderclap by Laura Cumming
On the morning of 12 October 1654, in the Dutch city of Delft, a sudden explosion was followed by a thunderclap that could be heard more than seventy miles away. Carel Fabritius – now known across the world for his exquisite painting, The Goldfinch – had been at work in his studio. He, along with many others, would not survive the day.
This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap, a sudden clarity of sight. This is also a book about the precariousness of human life – the way it may be snatched from us in an instant. What can art do to sustain us? The work that survives tells its own compelling story in these pages.
Order the bookThe Wine Flavour Guide by Sam Caporn
Do you love to have good wine, but feel unsure of how to tell a Pinot from a Merlot? Do you every find yourself wondering which option will suit your meal best? The Wine Flavour Guide will teach you how to pick the best bottle for every occasion.
From Proseccos to Sauvignons, orange wines to rosés, there’s an endlessly fascinating world of wines for you to explore, and The Wine Flavour Guide is your chic and simple map to understanding your palate and discovering delightful new favourites. Whether you’re new to wine or a devoted connoisseur, this book will help you elevate your wine knowledge and think about flavour in a brand new way with helpful infographics and tips for picking an excellent bottle for every occasion at any price point.
Order the bookThe Last Dream by Pedro Almódovar
The Last Dream brings together for the first time twelve unpublished stories from Almodóvar’s personal archive in a tantalising glimpse into Almodóvar’s creative mind. This intimate and mischievous collection reflects Almodóvar’s obsessions and many of the themes of his cinematic work, and spans many genres. The title story, ‘The Last Dream’, is a beautiful chronicle of the death of Almodóvar’s mother, and other stories include: a love story between Jesus and Barabbas; a cult film director out in search of painkillers on a bank holiday weekend; and a gothic tale of a repentant vampire among monks.
A celebration of the relationship between life and art, fiction and reality from an artist unafraid to write about our most intimate moments, these stories explore desire, mortality, loneliness and the pain and glory of artistic creation, laced with playful humour and a deep love of literature and culture.
Order the bookNexus by Yuval Noah Harari
From renowned historian and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari comes the story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?
Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity.
Order the bookA Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry
Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry.
But navigating fame and family wasn’t always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy.
Musician. Songwriter. Collaborator. Activist. Mother. Daughter. Lover. Friend. Icon. This is her story.
Order the bookOn Freedom by Timothy Snyder
A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival.
Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means. Many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.
Order the bookThe Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star. The Wolves of Eternity, set between Norway and Russia, is an intimate journey into the experiences of two estranged half-siblings in the decades before the star rises. Now, in The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.
Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams – the star is back, and the limitless scale and ambition of Karl Ove’s new universe is clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the opportunity to bring readers in on the realtime creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.
Order the bookThe Echoes by Evie Wyld
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died.
As a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, Max watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, The Echoes is a novel about stories and who has the right to tell them, asking what of our past can we shrug off and what is fixed forever.
Order the bookThe Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie
What do three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people.
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED, tracing the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language.
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