A rollicking, rapid read, written so compellingly that the reader will feel the swell of the sea on every page.
“A timely and absorbing account of the 3,000 mile, 65 day voyage through storms and headwinds of a small, converted cargo ship which landed, much further north than intended, on November 11th 1620, in Plymouth Harbour, Cape Cod. Jackson’s balanced narrative steers a well-researched course through fact and fable, taking us safely to the arrival of the intrepid Saints and Strangers in New England.” —Sir Christopher Frayling
A riveting account of the voyage of the Mayflower that looks at the reality behind the mythical status and the journey that created the New World. Most of the voyagers of that famed 1620 crossing of the Atlantic were not in fact religious pilgrims but people intent on forging a better life for themselves in the virgin territory of America’s east coast. 130 hardy souls were confined in a space no bigger than a tennis court, braving the “Northern Crossing” without any firm idea of what awaited them in the New World.
Kevin Jackson is an English writer, broadcaster and film-maker. He has also been a Teaching Fellow of Vanderbilt University, Nashville; a radio producer and television director for the BBC; and Associate Arts Editor for The Independent.
The first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a single mission.
“This is history as you long to read it, charismatic, concise and unputdownable.”
—Horatio Clare, award-winning author of Down to the Sea in Ships
For more than four centuries, Sir Francis Drake has been world-famous for his feats as a master mariner—the captain who “singed the King of Spain’s beard” with his daredevil attack on the fleet at Cadiz, and who led the British Navy to victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588.
But Drake’s exploits in his earlier years, though less well known, are even more remarkable. Born into a poor, obscure family, he worked his way rapidly up in the maritime world to his first captaincy. Before long, he was the most successful of all English pirates, admired by his countrymen, hated and feared by the Spanish. Queen Elizabeth and her ministers saw his potential, and gave him their blessing for the first British venture into the Pacific Ocean. The success of this voyage, which lasted for three years, exceeded their wildest hopes. Not only did Drake come home with a vast treasure of captured gold, silver and jewels; he also brought most of his crew home alive and well.
Kevin Jackson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Companion of the Guild of St. George, and a Regent of the College de Pataphysique. He lives in Cambridge, England.
The young Charles Darwin was like a young Indiana Jones.
For five years in his mid-twenties, he sailed on the Beagle around the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains, trekking across deserts. With every new landfall, he had new adventures: he rode through bandit country, was thrown into jail by revolutionaries, took part in an armed raid with marines, survived two earthquakes, hunted, and fished. He suffered the terrible cold and rain of Tierra del Fuego, the merciless heat of the Australian outback and the inner pangs of heartbreak. He also made the discoveries that finally led him to formulate his theory of Natural Selection as the driving force of evolution. The five-year voyage of the Beagle was the basis for all Darwin’s later work; but it also turned him from a friendly idler into the greatest scientist of his century.
Kevin Jackson’s books include Constellation of Genius (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a history of modernism which was a Book of the Week in the Guardian and a Book of the Year in the Express; Invisible Forms (Picador); Carnal (Pallas Athene); and the authorised biography Humphrey Jennings (Picador).
Nelson was a smooth operator with ruthless ambition who used his considerable political instincts to great success.
“Kevin Jackson’s thrilling sea stories, told with verve, wit and dash, make the most gripping reading. Here are the men, women, ships and adventures which made so much of the modern world.” —Horatio Clare, author of Heavy Light
The fourth title in Kevin Jackson’s magnificent maritime history series, Nelson’s Victory, explores the remarkable achievements of the British naval and national hero Horatio Nelson and his victory and death at The Battle of Trafalgar. As with other titles in the series, Jackson demolishes the myths that abound about Nelson’s nature and reveals the real man behind the hyperbole.
Kevin Jackson has collaborated with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson on several projects, including Bloke’s Progress (Ruskin Comics), a comic fable inspired by the writings of John Ruskin; a version of Dante’s Inferno (Knockabout); and, most recently, Lives of the Great Occultists (Knockabout), and a long narrative poem, Greta and the Labrador (Holland House Books).
Weaves together the London of that terrifying summer of 1666 and the London of 2018, sweltering under a dizzying heat, building towards a seemingly inevitable crescendo.
“A slow burn in its purest form—Petherick’s fiery prose evokes a city smouldering with impassioned tensions that build towards an incendiary denouement.”
—Jake Arnott, author of The Long Firm
London is experiencing a heatwave in the summer of 2018. A disparate cast of characters are drawn together under the gaze of a mysterious mystic as they try their best to survive in the new contemporary capital, a city of changing rules, privatised streets, gig economies, fractured traditions. And reaching across the centuries is the story of Lily Cadyman, trying to survive in the heaving city: scraping by as maid to Thomas Farriner, whose bakery in Pudding Lane was the source of the first flames which caused the Great Fire of 1666.
Like Fire Unbound is a novel about survival, where the city itself emerges as a character alongside all the others: essentially democratic, an egalitarian character like our cast who struggle to maintain their integrity in the early years of the twenty-first century, and a transformative year of the seventeenth.
Simon Petherick is based between London and Cornwall and is the author of three novels. In the 1990s he ran Hardy Amies, the Queen’s dressmaker—and would go to the Palace to take orders from her personally. He is currently writing a novel set in Arizona.
What would Kafka think of modern America? Find out in this buoyant and brilliantly written book.
From the winner of the 2016 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize comes the third book in The Milagro Mystery Series, poignant pictures of contemporary rural America through an outsider’s lens. Unlikely lawman Franz Kafka (aka K) and maverick Navajo cop Robbie Begay continue their fateful collaboration. A dead horse, a vanished park ranger and a macabre find take Officer K right to the edge of the abyss. Charged with mediating the seemingly innocuous dispute about the slain miniature horse, K becomes caught in the merciless clash between Old and New West in small-town Milagro.
As his heroes morph into villains and his villains stay villains, K’s customary position between rock and hard place suddenly becomes much more precarious.
Katayoun Medhat is a medical anthropologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her first novel The Quality of Mercy, Milagro Mystery #1, was inspired by PhD fieldwork in the Southwest US and the Navajo Nation. Katayoun was born in Tehran and raised in Iran and Germany. She lives in the south of England where she channels her yearning for wide Southwestern skies into writing the next Milagro Mystery.
Winner of the 2020 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and past winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for Rough Translations.
“The reader experiences an immediate immersion into the story and characters’ lives . . . This partially comes about through masterful first lines.” —Cris Mazza, 2020 LGFP Judge, author of How to Leave a Country
The characters in this collection of short stories lead lives of quiet despair and fleeting triumphs. Angry teenagers face down traffic; women enter relationships toxic from the start; parents surrender futures to children who will only ever leave. Like a street magician’s trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet victory only to replace it seamlessly with another.
Molly Giles is the award-winning author of six story collections and one novel. She has taught fiction writing around the world and now lives in Northern California.
Enter the world of the predatory dinosaurs—if you dare.
“A first-class adventure story, an effortless read as engaging as vintage Jules Verne.”
—Natural History magazine
The era of Jurassic Park? Over. It’s time to enter Cretaceous Dawn.
This page-turner hurls its characters 65 million years through time, to the Age of the Dinosaurs. They must embark on a thousand-mile trek from the Epicontinental Sea to the foothills of the infant Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, back in South Dakota, a police chief must solve the mystery of a lab left empty but for the lower half of a human body. The survivors must face dinosaurs, mammals, reptiles, and terrain a world away from the one they have left behind.
Lisa M. Graziano, PhD, is a freelance editor and writer, and a former professor of oceanography at Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. Lisa lives in western New York State with her family. Michael S. A. Graziano, PhD, is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and the author of a number of books with Leapfrog Press and OUP. He lives in Princeton, N.J., with his family.
An astonishing concentration camp survival memoir and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
“A shockingly honest and hopeful book.” —Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winning author of The Noonday Demon
A first-person account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent times—from a childhood cut short when Irene and her family are transported to Nazi-controlled prison camps; to Bergen-Belsen, where she is a fellow prisoner with Anne Frank. This is the genuine story of a girl coming to terms with a terrible event and choosing to see herself as a survivor. A celebration of the persistence of love and empathy even in the face of inhumanity. Irene is a very active speaker; she was the Key Speaker at the UN’s 2021 International Holocaust Memorial broadcast, as well as at community and school events, for which Reader’s and Teacher’s Guides are available.
Irene Butter is a peace activist, Holocaust survivor, and a professor emerita of Economics at the Univeristy of Michigan’s School of Public Health. She is a co-founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Medal & Lecture at the University of Michigan and also Zeitouna, an organisation of Jewish and Arab women working for peace.
A stunning elegy to a vanished time, this dual memoir reminds us of the astonishing sustaining power of literature.
“It is a feat of passionate, radical integrity.” —Leah Hager Cohen, author of No Book but the World
Caroline Heller brings to life the story of her parents, her uncle, and their circle of intellectuals and dreamers from central Europe on the eve of World War II to present-day America. Heller evokes pre-war Prague, where her parents lived, loved, and studied, and the darkest years of Hitler’s rule, when they turned time and time again to literature to help them survive—a practice their daughter continues.
A profound meditation on the mysteries of our pasts, and a window into understanding the ones we love.
Caroline Heller is the Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Educational Studies at Lesley University and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her family.
The secrets and struggles of how one Muslim entrepreneur disrupted the charity sector, and proved how a pocket full of pennies really can transform the world.
Penny Appeal founder Adeem Younis shares the secrets behind the monumental success of one of the fastest-growing charities. Struck by personal tragedy with the death of his father when he was just six years old, Small Change, Big Difference follows Adeem’s unlikely story, from growing up in poverty to becoming a dotcom millionaire and award-winning
philanthropist. Finding a role model in his resilient single parent mother, Adeem takes us behind the scenes, through the blood, sweat and tears that it took to beat the odds, escape the vicious
cycle of poverty and help millions more, at home and abroad, do the same.
Adeem Younis is a multi-award- winning entrepreneur, community leader, and philanthropist. Adeem funded his university studies by starting his first business, SingleMuslim.com, aged seventeen, above a pizza shop (four million users plus around the world). His inspired vision built a global industry-leading technology company and the Penny Appeal charity, which has raised over $150 million for good causes around the world.
“A masterpiece. An enthralling analysis of PGW’s writing and humour.” —Sir Edward Cazalet, P.G. Wodehouse’s grandson
“[A] delightful work . . . the best part of reading this is the tone that somehow simulates Wodehouse’s.” —Gary Hall, Editor, Plum Lines, the journal of The Wodehouse Society (US)
Granted unprecedented access to P.G. Wodehouse’s papers and library, lifelong enthusiast Paul Kent takes us on a comprehensive tour of Wodehouse’s unique comic world and the imagination that created it. P.G. Wodehouse is widely acknowledged as the greatest English comic writer of the 20th century. The creator of Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and Blandings, Ukridge.
The consistently upbeat tone of his hundred or so books represents one of the largest ever literary bequests to human happiness by one man. Volume I focuses on where that world came from and how Wodehouse has shaped it, covering the full range of his achievements—not only his novels and stories but his musical comedies, song lyrics, poetry, journalism, and dramas.
Paul Kent began reading Wodehouse at the age of twelve, and is now much older than that. He has published works on Montaigne, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, and a guide to creative writing, How Writers Write.
