Picador imprint: 544 books

Henry Hobhouse was the first to recognise plants as a causal factor in history in his Seeds of Wealth. In this new book, he examines four plants: rubber, timber, tobacco and the wine grape, each of which enormously increased the wealth of those who dealt in them, created great new industries and changed...

Breaking a Rainbow, Building a Nation is a first-hand account of the university protests that gripped South Africa between 2015 and 2017, widely better known as the #FeesMustFall. Chikane outlines the nature of student politics in the country before, during and after the emergence of #MustFall politics,...

How long does it take for scars to heal? How long does it take for a scarred memory to fester and rise to the surface? For Marubini, the question is whether scars ever heal when you forget they are there to begin with. Marubini is a young woman who has an enviable life in Cape Town, working...

On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on 12 May 1969, security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Mandela and detained her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged eight and ten. Rounded up in a group of other anti-apartheid activists under Section 6 of...

A contemporary fable, this book shows that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living. In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known...

David Parker’s new start in LA isn’t going entirely as he had hoped. London feels a million miles away, and even his loving marriage is beginning to look shaky. Drawn, through an alcoholic haze, into the orbit of Astrid and her friends, he spends a night on Malibu Beach that shocks him to the...

Twin brothers Michael and Kieran are visiting their grandparents in County Cork. It’s 1982 and the summer is oppressive, the community tense and the family chaotic in a way that only outsiders find enchanting. At sixteen the boys are on the brink of life – but the entanglements of the holiday...

How much do we know about the people we love? And would you want to know the truth? 'An engrossing read' Sunday Times There’s a bar at the crossroads on the way out of town. Or the way in, depending on whether you’re coming or going. Marcie and her husband have run it for years....

Bantubonke is an accomplished and revered jazztrumpeter, composer and band leader in decline – an absent present and inadequate spouse. He lives for art at the expense of all else, an imbalance that derails his life and propels him to the brink of madness and despair. A story of direct and implied...

Wilbur McCrum has always been a drifter. Abandoned by his parents, one after the other, and subsequently passed from pillar to post, he was still a young lad when he first took to the road, and somehow he's never settled anywhere since. When he meets Ida May, however, that looks set to change: finally,...

Gillian is fifteen, crippled by a tragic accident but dreams of swimming across oceans. Jacob is fourteen and yearns for his brother's life. Frankie is fifteen and in love with the new deckhand on her father's boat. As the story of these three desires intertwine over the course...

On the wild clifftop of the coastal town of Mangowak, Ron McCoy lives an almost marsupial existence with his elderly mother. He hunts and gathers while the town sleeps; he is acutely shy, but in the privacy of his imagination, fostered as it is by his love of music and the oceanscape of his birth,...

It is summer in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thomas is a young theatre director at the Royal Shakespeare Company who is desperately in love with Lucy, the leading actress in a production of The Tempest. Their experiences are woven into the life of a theatre presided over by Harry, an ageing South African...

Standing on the beach watching the early morning-mist roll in off the sea, Fin is thinking about the day when he can escape to the mainland. His sister got away, but no one has heard from her in two years. Fin's thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a car on the bridge above him. He hears doors...