Granta Publications: 150 books

England, in the mid-fifties. Meg Bailey has always aspired to live a respectable life. With her best friend, Roxane, she moves from secondary school to an un-Bohemian art college in Oxford. Under the watchful eye of Roxanne's mother, Mrs Wheeler, the two girls flourish in Oxfordian society. But Meg...

Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on an estate in London's East End. Writing with passion, humour and a sense of history, she recounts the rise of social housing a century ago, its adoption...

Tim Phillips' book tells the human story of the siege - of the terrible toll that thirst, hunger and sleeplessness took on the hostages, of the bravery of those who dealt with the terrorists, such as the elderly headmistress of the school and the doctor who tried to relieve the suffering of the young...

Jason Cowley: it wasn't a 'Brexit' murder David Flusfeder: the last shopkeepers of London Charles Glass: in Palmyra Stephen Sharp: Mother's death Sana Valiulina: remembers her father, a Gulag prisoner Anthony Doerr: on Edward Burtynsky New fiction from: Brian Allen Carr, Joshua Cohen, Ho Sok...

Every new mother has a story to tell - and this is Jane de la Rochefoucault's. It's a story that contains all the familiar yet magical landmarks of feeding, teething, toddling, and measuring stuff in and out of Tupperware. But, as an expat living in Paris, Jane also faces some challenges they never...

Ronald Blythe's 1969 book Akenfield - a moving portrait of English country life told in the voices of the farmers and villagers themselves - is a modern classic. In 2004, writer and reporter Craig Taylor returned to the village in Suffolk on which Akenfield was based. Over the course of several months,...

Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance Survey map – the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, and Map of a Nation is, amazingly, the first popular history to tell the story of the map and...

A drug panic. Murder. Terrifying and mysterious black and Chinese immigrants. Dope Kings. Jazz. War. An actress dead of an overdose. Dope Girls is about the transformation of drug use into a national menace. It revolves around the death in 1918, in the last furious stages of the First World War, of...

Geoffrey Beattie grew up in the notorious 'murder triangle' in North Belfast, where during thirty years of the Troubles more than six hundred people were killed. Many of his childhood friends ended up dead or in prison, while Beattie himself moved to England, at first to study and eventually to build...

animal (noun): 'Any such living organism other than a human being' human being (noun): 'A man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance' LOLcat (noun): 'A photograph of a cat accompanied...

What do the English think? Every country has a dominant set of beliefs and attitudes concerning everything from how to live a good life, how we should organize society, and the roles of the sexes. Yet despite many attempts to define our national character, what might be called the nation's philosophy...

At the beginning of the 1990s, Linda Grant’s mother, Rose, was diagnosed with Dementia. In Remind Me Who I Am, Again Linda Grant tells the story of Rose’s illness and tries to reconstruct the history of their Jewish immigrant family, stalking them from Russia and Poland to New York and London....

Through the personal story of Yasmin's family and the food and recipes they've shared together, The Settler's Cookbooktells the history of Indian migration to the UK via East Africa. Her family was part of the mass exodus from India to East Africa during the height of British imperial expansion, fleeing...

'As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with a Great Writer and his house.' Great Writer's Household Tips covers all your household needs, indoors and outdoors, from pruning a rose bush with Pablo Neruda to mending a dripping tap with Jean-Paul Sartre. Throwing...