From Evelyn Waugh to P. G. Wodehouse and Lawrence Durrell, a sweeping celebration of literature set in and inspired by the suburbs of London. The London suburbs have, for more than two hundred and fifty years, fired the creative literary imagination: whether this is Samuel Johnson hiding away in bucolic preindustrial Streatham, Italo Svevo cheering on Charlton Athletic Football Club down at The Valley, or Angela Carter hymning the joyful “wrongness” of living south-of-the-river in Brixton. From Richmond to Rainham, Cockfosters to Croydon, this sweeping literary tour of the thirty-two London Boroughs describes how writers, from the seventeenth century on, have responded to and fictionally reimagined London’s suburbs. It introduces us to the great suburban novels, such as Hanif Kureishi’s Bromley-set The Buddha of Suburbia, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, and Zadie Smith’s NW. It also reveals the lesser-known short stories, diaries, poems, local guides, travelogues, memoirs, and biographies, which together show how these communities have long been closely observed, keenly remembered, and brilliantly imagined.

From its origin as the Roman city of Londinium through to its latest incarnation as a super-diverse World City in the twenty-first century, London's history and culture has been shaped by migration. This book expresses and celebrates the plurality of the capital's cultures and affirms the importance of migration in the making of the modern city through thirty-three short essays written by academics, artists, broadcasters and curators. Subjects range from the mediaeval to the contemporary: buildings and institutions, individuals and communities, objects, visual art, street performances and literary texts. Some contributors focus on famous people and places, like Shakespeare and St Paul's, while others explore less well-known subjects, like the Free German League of Culture (1939-46) or Ignatius Sancho, the eighteenth-century musician, grocer and man-of-letters. It is not only London's cultures which are diverse, migration is also plural. This book engages with the very many human migrations from across the globe and within the British Isles that have taken place over the last two-thousand years, as well as with the movements of plants, animals, and ideologies from other countries and continents, and the movement of natural resources and manmade toxins into and through the city. Composed of a vivid collection of snapshots, the volume offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the city and provides new insights into the successive migrant communities that have come to London and made it their own.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG BREAKTHROUGH AUTHOR AWARD Kae Tempest's critically acclaimed debut novel, the literary companion to their Mercury-Prize nominated album Everybody Down, takes us into the beating heart of the capital in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire and belonging 'Soaring ... Tempest's flair for language is tempered by their sense of rhythm and pace ... Deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity ... Tempest's voice – by turns raging and tender – never falters' New York Times Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in south-east London – the place they have always called home. ________________________ *This book has been printed with two different cover designs. We are unable to accept requests for a specific cover. The different covers will be assigned to orders at random*

Although Katherine Mansfield was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf, her stories suggest someone writing in a different era and in a vastly different English. Her language is as transparent as clean glass, yet hovers on the edge of poetry. Her characters are passionate men and women swaddled in English reserve -- and sometimes briefly breaking through. And her genius is to pinpoint those unacknowledged and almost imperceptible moments in which those people's relationships -- with one another and themselves -- change forever. This collection includes such masterpieces as "Prelude," "At the Bay" "Bliss," "The Man Without a Temperament" and "The Garden Party" and has a new introduction by Jeffrey Meyers.

Ten stories from the ‘brilliant’ Katherine Mansfield on the theme of sex and lies. As Vincent O’Sullivan states, those encountering Mansfield’s stories for the first time have invariably found they ‘were alive, they were witty, they were moving, they covered new ground’. But with about 70 stories to choose from and a vast array of themes and approaches, where do you start, and how do you begin to understand and best appreciate her writing and achievements? This series features selections of her best stories, grouped by subject and introduced by Mansfield scholar Vincent O’Sullivan, who is also a writer of fiction in his own right. Each volume offers a different way to view Mansfield’s work. This selection includes her exploration of sex and lies, a favourite theme that she tackled in varied ways in her stories. As O'Sullivan explains, his choices cover ‘everything of importance that happened to her, that she observed and experienced, between childhood in Wellington’s wooden houses, to her deciding in Switzerland in July 1922, that her final paragraph about a singing bird was the place for her to stop’. Other titles in the MANSFIELD SELECTIONS series: In Bavaria: ISBN 978-1-77553-498-3 Marriage & Families: ISBN 978-1-77553-501-0 New Zealand Stories: ISBN 978-1-77553-500-3 Women Alone: ISBN 978-1-77553-502-7

This is a collection of the 7 best short stories of one of the most iconic female writer ever to have been published, Katherine Mansfield. This selection specially chosen by the literary critic August Nemo, contains the following stories: The Garden Party The Daughters of the Late Colonel Bliss Prelude At the bay Je ne parle pas francais How Pearl Button was Kidnapped

The time is 1920. The place is Greenwich Village, where food and wine are cheap, talk and ideas are rich, and love is free. This heady atmosphere has drawn actors, artists, and writers from all over who call the winding streets of the Village home. And it is here, amid the hot jazz and cool gin, that a free-spirited young poet finds her perfect milieu—and deadly danger... FREE LOVE Olivia Brown feels she has nothing left. Tragically, she has lost her fiance in the Great War and her beloved guardian in the flu epidemic. Yet much to her surprise, her attorney informs her that she does, indeed, have something: an inherited brownstone on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Her building is uninhabited except for one tenant, the strange, nocturnal man who has a lifelong lease on the ground-floor flat. He is, of all things, a private detective. In no time at all, Olivia is working cases with him, selling her sonnets to Vanity Fair, breaking hearts, and flaunting Prohibition at a speakeasy called Chumley's. Then one evening after too many martinis, she literally trips over the body of a woman. Not only is the woman dead, but her face is shockingly familiar, for she bears an uncanny resemblance to Olivia Brown herself! Thus begins a mystery that pits the girl from Bedford Street against a keen-witted killer. Her only hope is to somehow smoke out the murderer before everyone in the Village is lamenting the fate of the poet Olivia Brown—the one with so much promise, the one who died so young...

Colin Hitchin's got problems. He's too short, he's got the highest IQ in his year and he's psychic. He sees things before they happen. He sees dead people too. No one believes him, his mum's too busy with her boyfriends, and his best friend Polly just humours him. It all started a couple of years back, before his dad died. That's when Colin got sent to Dr Juvanji who gave him drugs to calm him down ...Then his Uncle Jimmy turns up on the doorstep. Uncle Jimmy believes Colin, in fact he positively encourages him to pursue his special powers. Turns out Jimmy sees things, too. He sees into people's souls, he knows who they really are. Then Polly goes into a coma, and only Jimmy and Colin know why. Polly's soul - her 'lamia' as Jimmy calls it - has been attacked. And weird things are happening to kids at school, too. Something or someone is trying to suck the life out of them ... and with Jimmy's help, Colin is the one to stop it happening. On top of everything else, he's got to be a superhero, too.