Showing results by publisher "John Murray" in All Categories

A best-selling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In 'A Song from Afar', a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. 

 Jungle Nama is a beautiful verse adaptation of a legend from the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest. It tells the story of the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey and his mother; it is also the story of Dokkhin Rai, a mighty spirit who appears to humans as a tiger, of Bon Bibi, the benign goddess of the forest, and her warrior brother, Shah Jongoli.  

Set in the decades between the two World Wars, the captivating story of one man who banishes himself to a solitary life in the Arctic Circle and is saved by good friends, a loyal dog and a surprise visit that changes everything.

You've got questions: about space, time, gravity and the odds of meeting your older self inside a wormhole. All the answers you need are right here. An eminent physicist at CERN and the cartoonist behind the hugely successful PhD Comics answer the most important, most outrageous and funniest questions about everything.

It is the summer of 1994. In a small town on the Irish border, Maeve and her two friends have just secured summer jobs in the local shirt factory. They plan to make as much money as they can while waiting for their A Level results before getting out of town and away to the UK. As the summer progresses and the marching season begins, tensions in the factory start to rise between the Catholic and Protestant workforce and events escalate putting Maeve's chance of escape in jeopardy.

Surprisingly little has been written about second-generation Bloomsbury who tantalised the original 'Bloomsburies' at Gordon Square parties with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, 'who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet', sculptor Stephen Tomlin and writer Julia Strachey.

Cezair-Thompson conjures the tragic glamour of golden age Hollywood against the backdrop of lusty, turbulent Jamaica in her dual generational coming-of-age saga. Ida Joseph is 13 years old when Errol Flynn is nearly shipwrecked off the coast of her hometown of Port Antonio in 1946. Flynn instantly loves Jamaica and, eager to find a refuge from stateside scandal, purchases an island across from the port. Navy Island becomes the setting for his glittering parties, movie projects

Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale 'crisis of democracy' - with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent - a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew. In this narrative of the events that have shaped our times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and Western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended.

The neurotypical world doesn't always work for autistic people who often feel they're on the same planet but live in a different world. Autistic World Domination is here to rewrite normal. By helping listeners write their own blueprint for life, this audiobook empowers autistic people to create the world they want for themselves. This guide blends motivational writing based on Jolene Stockman's own experiences as an autistic woman with practical exercises and actionable plans to help the listener identify who they are, what is important to them and how they might achieve their goals.

Growing up, it was always the three of them: Miller and Olly and Ash. They stuck together, like they were keeping a secret. They needed each other. As teenagers, they drove to LA, lived in a ramshackle place on the beach in Malibu, set up a record label. They were successful, best friends and Olly and Miller fell in love. Before it fell apart, it was beautiful. Then Olly stopped looking at Miller the way he used to. Miller spent a night with Ash, which turned into a marriage.

10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution. An Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert. The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Updates on their progress, sent by telegram, are eagerly devoured by millions in one of the first ever global news stories. Their destination: Paris.

On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The following day, his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, also killed himself, and the crumbling Third Reich passed to Admiral Karl Dönitz. The Nazis' position seemed hopeless. Yet remarkably, the war in the rest of Europe went on for another 10 days. After Hitler looks at these days as a narrative day-by-day countdown but also as a broader global history of a European war that had seen some of the most savage battles in history.

Spring 1593. England is a powder keg of rumour and fear. Plague rages, famine is rife, the ageing Queen's couriers scheme: Elizabeth's Golden Age is truly tarnished. Meanwhile Spain watches and waits - and plots. Into this turmoil a small cart clatters through the streets of London, carrying a deadly load. It is the first in a wave of horrific bombing attacks on the Dutch immigrant community that will change John Shakespeare's life for ever.

You lose your virginity to a boy from your gender theory seminar, and the first person you tell is Ella. Ella's with you at the party when you first kiss a girl. And Ella takes you to the hospital the first time you're diagnosed. Over the next few years you have a string of relationships and jobs, but you can always count on Ella to be there for you - until the drinking and the parties, the hospital visits and late-night calls, blur the lines of your friendship into something unbalanced and fragile, at risk of breaking altogether.

Georgian England had a large and distinctive black community. Yet all of them, prosperous citizens or newly freed slaves, ran the risk of kidnap and sale to plantations. Their dramatic, often moving story is told in this audiobook. The idea that Britain became a mixed-race country after 1945 is a common mistake. Even in Shakespeare's England, black people were numerous enough for Queen Elizabeth to demand their expulsion. She was, perhaps, the first to fear that whites would lose their jobs, yet her order was ignored without ill effects.

Beginning with examples of the mathematician who out-predicted wine buffs in determining the best vintages, and the sports scouts who now use statistics rather than intuition to pick winners, Super Crunchers exposes the world of data-miners, introducing the people and the techniques. It illuminates the hidden patterns all around us.

The epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers. At a time when global change has eradicated thousands of unique cultures, The Last Whalers tells the stunning inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a volcanic island so remote it is known by other Indonesians as 'The Land Left Behind'. They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the modern world.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Newstead Abbey was one of the most prosperous and fashionable aristocratic homes in England. It was the abode of William the 4th Baron Byron - a popular and successful composer and artist - and his teenage wife, Frances. But only a few decades later, at the end of the century, the building had become a crumbling and ill-cared-for ruin.

One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester.

On a series of coastal walks, Lisa Woollett takes us on an illuminating journey, bringing to life the places where mythology and reality meet at the very edges of Britain and Ireland. From Bronze Age settlements on the Isles of Scilly and submerged prehistoric forests in Wales, to a Victorian amusement park on the Isle of Wight and castles in the air off County Clare, Lisa draws together archaeology, meetings with locals and tales from folklore to reveal how the sea has forged, shaped and often overwhelmed these landscapes and communities.