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A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn? Joseph Luzzi found the answer in Dante’s opening of The Divine Comedy: ‘In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.’One cold November morning, Luzzi, a professor and Dante scholar, was told his pregnant wife Katherine had been in a car accident. She did not survive, but their daughter Isabel did, delivered by emergency Caesarean a mere forty-five minutes before her mother died. In one terrible instant, Luzzi found himself both a widower and a father.In the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi turned to the support of his Italian immigrant family but it wasn’t until he turned to Dante’s epic poem – a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching – that he found a way to resurrect his life. Following the same structure as Dante’s epic poem, Luzzi is shepherded out of his own ‘dark wood,’ passing through the grief-stricken Inferno, the Purgatory of healing and learning to be a father to Isabel, and ultimately stepping into the Paradise of rediscovered love.A meditation on the influence of great art and power to give us strength in our darkest moments, ‘In a Dark Wood’ opens the door into the mysteries of Dante’s enduring classic. Beautifully written, poignant and unflinchingly honest, Luzzi’s book is a hybrid of heartrending memoir and meaningful insight into one of the greatest pieces of literature in all history. Drawing us into man’s descent into hell and back, it is Dante’s journey, Luzzi’s and our very own.

‘More chilling than a horror film and more thought-provoking than an HBO doc … I Will Find You is at once hard to read and even harder to put down’ CosmopolitanA hard-hitting memoir about a woman’s search to understand the man who raped herJoanna Connors was thirty years old when she was raped at knifepoint by a stranger.After this horrifying trauma, she became afraid of everything – flying, driving, travelling in a car while someone else drove. She had children, but hovered over them constantly, terrified about what might happen to them as well. Then, when her daughter was sixteen, Joanna began to confront the fear that had ruled her life ever since that day, and decided she needed, finally, to understand.In an act of breathtaking humanity and pioneering journalistic courage, she went in search of the story of her own rapist, determined to find out who he was, where he came from, what his life was like – and what leads a person to do something as destructive as what he did to her.The result of her investigation is I Will Find You, a shocking, moving memoir and a brave, timely consideration of poverty, race, class, education – and how life shapes who we become.

Cathy Glass, the no.1 bestselling author of Damaged, tells the story of the Alice, a young and vulnerable girl who is desperate to return home to her mother.Alice, aged four, is snatched by her mother the day she is due to arrive at Cathy's house. Drug-dependent and mentally ill, but desperate to keep hold of her daughter, Alice's mother snatches her from her parents' house and disappears.Cathy spends three anxious days worrying about her whereabouts before Alice is found safe, but traumatised. Alice is like a little doll, so young and vulnerable, and she immediately finds her place in the heart of Cathy's family. She talks openly about her mummy, who she dearly loves, and how happy she was living with her maternal grandparents before she was put into care. Alice has clearly been very well looked after and Cathy can't understand why she couldn't stay with her grandparents.It emerges that Alice's grandparents are considered too old (they are in their early sixties) and that the plan is that Alice will stay with Cathy for a month before moving to live with her father and his new wife. The grandparents are distraught – Alice has never known her father, and her grandparents claim he is a violent drug dealer.Desperate to help Alice find the happy home she deserves, Cathy's parenting skills are tested in many new ways. Finally questions are asked about Alice's father suitability, and his true colours begin to emerge.

The author of the bestselling Please Daddy No reveals more harrowing experiences of his neglected childhood.Having survived the terrible abuse at the hands of his stepfather, Stuart has to reach within himself again to live through the degradation of prison. He is released back into the world without any support or counselling from the authorities.The child abuse and numerous court cases had almost destroyed him, and Stuart became reliant on drugs and alcohol. With his life spiralling out of control, Stuart attempts suicide a number of times. The last try leaving the doctors that resuscitated him incredulous he had survived.At the point of no-return, Stuart was sent to an hospital in the Scottish highlands to fight the demons that assailed him and rebuild his life. This is the remarkable story of his fight to be his own man.

An urgent call to action from one of Europe’s most well-regarded political thinkers. How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism is a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe – before it’s too late.‘It couldn’t happen here’Ece Temelkuran heard reasonable people in Britain say it the night of the Brexit vote.She heard reasonable people in America say it the night Trump’s election was soundtracked by chants of ‘Build that wall.’She heard reasonable people in Turkey say it as Erdoğan rigged elections, rebuilt the economy around cronyism, and labelled his opposition as terrorists.How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran, identifies the early-warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to define a global pattern, and arm the reader with the tools to root it out.Proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing – and too often paralysing – poltical questions of our time, Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of ‘real people’, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and clear-sighted argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy.No longer can the reasonable comfort themselves with ‘it couldn’t happen here.’ It is happening. And soon it may be too late.

From the award-winning author and journalist, How To Fail is a brilliantly funny, painfully honest and insightful celebration of the things that haven’t gone right. The biggest, most transformative moments of my life – those pivotal points where I learned important and necessary truths about myself – came through crisis or failure. They came when I least expected them, when I felt ill-equipped to deal with the fallout. And yet each time, I had survivedBased on Elizabeth Day’s hugely popular podcast, and including fascinating insights gleaned from her journalistic career of celebrity interviews, How to Fail is part memoir, part manifesto. It is a book for anyone who has ever failed. Which means it’s a book for everyone.Including chapters on success, dating, work, sport, relationships, families and friendship, it is based on the simple premise that understanding why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. It's a book about learning from our mistakes and about not being afraid.Uplifting and inspiring and rich in personal anecdote, How to Fail reveals that failure is not what defines us; rather it is how we respond to it that shapes us as individuals. Because learning how to fail is actually learning how to succeed better. And everyone needs a bit of that.

'Adrian has a unique gift for understanding drivers and racing cars. He is ultra competitive but never forgets to have fun. An immensely likeable man.'

Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you? Julie Myerson did, and set out to learn as much as she could about their fascinating lives.This is the biography of a house, the history of a home. It’s an ordinary house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived there for over a century. But start to explore who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated and as fascinating as anyone.That is exactly what Julie Myerson set out to do. She lives in a typical Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed. As she scraped the years away, underneath she found herself embroiled in a detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal servant, the Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining former occupants of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost 130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence, poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance.Most of us are dimly aware that we are not the first person to turn a key in our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows that inhabit our homes. But once you do – and Julie Myerson shows you how – you will never bear to part from their company again. This is your home's story too.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERWaterstones Nonfiction Book of the Month (June)‘THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR’ Sunday Times‘You will not read a more important book about America this year’ Economist‘A memoir of life in the Trump-voting white working class is the political book of the year’ Sunday Times‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis – that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of the United States that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.But as the family saga of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of the country.

Irish Sunday Times BestsellerA true story of war, peace and friendship: a Nazi colonel and an Irish priestThe story begins in Rome at the outbreak of WWII, when ardent Nazi Herbert Kappler, SS Obersturmbanführer, and Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty would become adversaries in a real-life game of 'cat and mouse' of epic proportions. Hide and Seek chronicles the intimate and intensely personal war between them. A fiercely fought rivalry that would culminate in failed attempts by Kappler to kidnap and then murder his Irish opponent.In July 1943 Rome was bombed for the first time during the war. As the swastika flew above the city, it was a time of fear, and a moment of choice: collaborate and compromise, or resist and revolt. O'Flaherty decided to quietly resist and fight the new rulers.Dubbed 'Ireland's Oscar Schindler', he masterminded a large-scale operation from within the Vatican, to help Jews and escaped Allied prisoners on the run from the Nazis. He used a series of safe houses and church buildings and sheltered around 500 Jews in the Holy See, and it is believed that sanctuary was found for some 4000 Jews across Rome, and 4000 Allied escapees.After the Resistance killed 32 German soldiers in a bombing, Hitler was enraged, and declared that he wanted a revenge attack to «make the world tremble». He instructed Kappler to draw up plans. Eventually, 335 people would be executed in the Ardeatine Caves, a labyrinth of tunnels outside the city. The massacre would become the worst atrocity committed on Italian soil during WWII.Kappler's handiwork would remain secret until Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944. The Nazi Colonel was found guilty on all the charges relating to the caves massacre. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole. Amazingly, O'Flaherty would continue his relationship with Kappler, going to see his former rival in prison. The discussions of the two men would become intense and searching, and a friendship grew between them. In later life, after much soul-searching Kappler became a Catholic, and was baptised by the Irish Monsignor.

The explosive sequel to #1 Sunday Times bestseller Bad Blood.Set 18 years later, Hidden Sin is the story of Joey, his girlfriend Paula and Rasta Mo, the man he is to discover is his dad.Joey Parker is a young man with big dreams. Almost eighteen, he’s desperate to escape the shackles of his window cleaning round, so when’s offered the chance to try out as a drummer in a local Blondie tribute band he jumps at the chance. But it isn’t just the music that moves him. It’s also the fact that Paula Foster is the lead singer. The daughter of his mum’s old mate, Josie, she was once a childhood friend. They’ve not seen each other in years, and their mutual attraction is immediate.Meanwhile, notorious local drug overlord, Rasta Mo, has recently returned to Bradford after a spell inside and years in Marbella. He is instantly enamored with the good-looking drummer he discovers is his son. He decides that his new club is in need of a house band – and so begins his attempts to woo him.This book charts a journey between two men into a future neither visualized. And, in Joey’s case, into a dangerous criminal world he’s never known. And, while his mother and step-father can only look on in horror as Joey potentially becomes the one thing she’s always dreaded – his father’s son.Joey is oblivious to who Mo is. The truth has always been hidden from him. All he cares about is that his and Paula’s dreams are all starting to come true. But will the cost of achieving them be too high to pay?