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  So Brightly at the Last: Clive...

  Ian Shircore

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  Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and the Syrian dictator’s wife, Asma al-Assad, rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley – and with the Trouser Thief Clive met while spending weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward – in this unconventional and affectionate biography. 
   
  In 2010, Clive was told he only had months to love. Since then he has shuttled between the hospital and the writing desk, pouring out a stream of books, articles and poems in a sustained burst of dazzling productivity. 
   
  The poems he’s written in these last years show an impressive range and depth – sometimes light, witty and paradoxical, sometimes sad, heartfelt and regretful. All are packed with the unexpected ideas, inventive imagery and uniquely thrilling way with words that have helped him achieve his avowed ambition of becoming ‘a fairly major minor poet.’

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  Migraine Survivor

  Jyrki Mäkelä

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  Migraine Survivor is childhood and youth story of manual migraine specialist Jyrki Mäkelä. His childhood and youth was a full of violence and bullying. This is his story and how he survived.

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  Margaret the First - A Novel

  Danielle Dutton

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  Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-century duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England; at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years. 
   
   
   
  Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

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  American in the Making the Life...

  Marcus Eli Ravage

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  “The sweat-shop was for me the cradle of liberty. . . It was my first university.” Attending lectures and the New York theatre at night; by day sewing sleeves into shirts in a ghetto shop, Marcus Eli Ravage (1884-1965) began his transformation from “alien” to American. His 1917 autobiography is a paean to the transformative power of education.  Ravage emigrated from Rumania in 1900, at the age of 16.  After working for several years as a “sleever” to save money, he enrolls in the University of Missouri (the least expensive school he can find), where culture shock overwhelms him at first.  “I was not sure whether it was a pig or a sheep that bleated, whether clover was a plant and plover a bird, or the other way around.”  But he adapts, and eventually embraces “the bigger and freer world” outside the immigrant ghetto.  He writes that, because of his university experience, he was no longer “a man without a country.”  He had become an American. - Summary by Sue Anderson

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  Tally Ho! - From the Battle of...

  Norman Franks, R W Foster

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  A memoir of the life and World War II service of Battle of Britain veteran, RAF fighter pilot Bob Foster. Bob Foster's flying years began shortly before WWII, when he learned to fly with the RAFVR. Called up for war service in September 1939, he completed his training and was posted to 605 Squadron, equipped with Hawker Hurricanes. By early September 1940 he and his Squadron were in the thick of the air fighting over southern England, operating from Croydon. Surviving the Battle, he later became an instructor, but shortly after joining 54 Squadron, which had Spitfires, he and his unit were sent to Australia to defend the Darwin area from Japanese incursions. Awarded the DFC for his efforts, he returned to the UK and was given an assignment with a RAF public relations outfit, ending up in Normandy within three weeks of the invasion of 1944. Often serving right up in the front lines, Bob saw the war at very close hand, and then quite by chance became one of the first, if not the first, RAF officer to enter Paris with the liberating French army, and again, by chance, was in General de Gaulle's triumphant procession down the Champs-Élysées. His memoir is an entertaining collection of stories and reminiscences of two distinct areas of WWII, which also shows how luck often shaped the lives of the fighter pilots involved. Bob Foster later became a successful sales manager with Shell-Mex and BP, as well as serving with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. He now lives with his wife Kaethe near Bexhill in East Sussex.

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  The Cooking of Books

  Ramachandra Guha

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  It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring.  
  The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir. 
  It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories which have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible. 
  Four decades later, though he no longer publishes his books, Advani remains Guha’s most trusted literary adviser. Yet they also disagree ferociously on politics, human nature, and the shape of their commitment to India. They usually make up – because it just wouldn’t do to allow such an odd relationship to die. 
  Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness. 
  THE COOKING OF BOOKS by Ramachandra Guha is a captivating journey through the publishing industry, the history of editors, and the art of memoir writing. His command of language and personal storytelling make this a top pick in the autobiography genre. 
  For fans of Amartya Sen (Home in the World), Sathnam Sanghera (The Boy with the Topknot), and Kai Bird (The Outlier). 
  HarperCollins 2024

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