Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

Meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations, from vibrant Shanghai to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity and loss against the epic backdrop of a country in turmoil.  

"Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation's out of breath. We ain't running no more.” (Stokely Carmichael). In the town of Greenwood, central Mississippi, on the evening of June 16, 1966, one of the most influential speeches in modern American history was delivered on the grounds of Stone Street Negro Elementary School. Earlier in the day, as a body of marchers tried to set up camp on the grounds of the school, they were approached by local officials and law enforcement with instructions to move on.

From the creator of Brown Badass Bonita comes a guide to revolutionary self-love that can help transform not only your life but the lives of everyone in your community. Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It's a...

"An important and necessary book... a work of honesty and humanity," Mishal Husain "This is a unique and necessary book. The Good Russian takes us inside wartime Russia, to a city that Jana Bakunina knows intimately. She brings us face to face with ordinary Russians, and also tells her own...

First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide - but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. 

Suspended between gang boundaries drawn with red and blue rags, young Norman Anthony Coulter Jr. navigated Inglewood and South Central Los Angeles like a Viking unsure of what lay west. Always slow to “throw” punches in the face of provocation, he later found that the world at large was not any different from the ‘hood. People seek safety by assimilating into tribes. But our true selves allow us to align our behaviors with our core beliefs whereas false versions of ourselves take on the identity of the tribe.

Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated at the end of the Chinese Civil War. One became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist. On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established a trading company, and emigrated to the United States. On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.

Dogs of all shapes and sizes visit Ruth Shaw's three wee bookshops in Manapōuri in the far south of Aotearoa New Zealand. Local dogs, holiday house dogs, travelling dogs – many have great stories, be they funny, sad, strange, bemusing, quirky or sweet. Woven throughout are tales of the very special Hunza, the dog who worked with troubled teens alongside Shaw when she was a youth worker.

In a sharp, witty memoir, iconic trailblazer and legendary journalist Connie Chung pulls no punches in detailing her storied career as the first Asian woman to break into an overwhelmingly white, male-dominated television news industry—"an absorbing look at a pioneering news figure" (TIME)...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “There’s such warmth to Dumas’ writing that it invites the reader to pull up a seat at her table and smile right along with her at the quirks of her family and Iranians and Americans in general.”—Booklist In the New York Times bestselling memoir Funny in...

Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match.

It was 1947 in Celina, Ohio, when Dr. Ralph Beare and his wife, Lou, childless and in their early forties, adopted a four-and-a-half-month-old orphan. “Janice” knew she was adopted, because her mommy read her a book about how the Beare's chose her out of a Home. "We chose you, but we love you as if you were our own." However, her mother never seemed to forget she was adopted, especially on Mother’s Day, when she couldn’t look at Janice without crying.

Embark on a journey of unparalleled resilience and human spirit with Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition. In the icy grip of the Antarctic, Shackleton and his crew set out in 1914 on a quest to traverse the frozen continent. Yet, fate had other plans. As the Endurance became ensnared in the...

The official celebration of All Creatures Great & Small and its incredible setting: the Yorkshire Dales. Featuring an in-depth look at the characters and real-life inspiration for the show, this book tells the fascinating story of the programs main character: the Yorkshire Dales. The official...

The updated edition of a bestselling classic, with a new introduction from award-winning author Chris Hammer. Australia's major river system is collapsing. Parts of it are dying; parts of it are already dead. Australia's most significant river no longer reaches the sea. I look out into the dim autumn light and wonder once again how it has come to this . . . Join award-winning author Chris Hammer on a journey through Australia's largest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin.

Few figures are more seminal in the abolitionist movement in America than John Brown. His firebrand approach to the movement arose out of his religiously inspired and deep-seated belief that slavery was not only morally unjust but that its removal from American society could only be achieved through armed insurrection. Prominent African American W. E. B. Du Bois chronicles the life of John Brown in this 1909 biography. In the words of Du Bois, John Brown was "a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal." 

On the 18th of June 1994, weeks before the end of the massacres in which hundreds of thousands of her fellow Tutsi, Rwanda's Bantu-speaking ethnic group, were slaughtered by the Hutu, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were fortunate to find a safe passage out of Rwanda with a convoy of children organised by a Swiss humanitarian organisation. Fifteen years later, after rebuilding her life and becoming a successful novelist, Mairesse is ready to begin the long process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape.

Although this is a book about life as a flight attendant with the world’s most iconic and glamorous airline, Pan American World Airways, it is not just a chronology of airborne events. Instead it begins with Betty Riegel’s description of leaving her home in the middle of the night, clutching her teddy and running with her Mother to an air raid shelter during war torn London. From humble working-class roots, growing up with a mother who struggled to make ends meet and a father away at war, she had always dreamed of bigger things.

WINNER OF THE FOOTNOTE X COUNTERPOINTS WRITING PRIZE 2023-24 'Vivid, compassionate, captivating' Elif Shafak 'A special and original voice, one for our times' Philippe Sands 'A moving and tender story about love and identity, and a meditation on the people who make us who we are' Dina Nayeri A...

Who was Anaïs Nin? To some, she was a towering literary figure, whose late-life fame following the publication of her diaries changed the reading habits of a generation. To others, she was a failed novelist, better known for her affair with Henry Miller. Readers might know her best for her...