Showing results by publisher "Canongate Books" in All Categories

If magic has a beginning, can it also have an end? When Amelia wants a wish to come true she knows just the man to ask - Father Christmas. But the magic she wants to believe in is starting to fade, and Father Christmas has more than impossible wishes to worry about. Upset elves, reindeers dropping out of the sky, angry trolls and the chance that Christmas might be cancelled.

When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival. Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world's largest seed bank. Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn't telling the whole truth about why she's there.

You are about to listen to the true story of Father Christmas. If you believe that some things are impossible, you should stop considering listening right away. Because this audiobook is full of impossible things. Are you still there? Good. Then let us begin. A Boy Called Christmas is a tale of adventure, snow, kidnapping, elves, more snow and an 11-year-old boy called Nikolas who isn't afraid to believe in magic.

It isn't always easy growing up as a human in Elfhelm, even if your adoptive parents are the newly married Father Christmas and Mary Christmas. For one thing, Elf School can be annoying when you have to sing Christmas songs every day - even in July - and when you fail all your toy-making tests. Also it can get very, very cold. But when the jealous Easter Bunny and his rabbit army launch an attack to stop Christmas, it's up to Amelia, her new family and the elves to keep Christmas alive. Before it's too late....

When retired Maths teacher Grace is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were. For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice. He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything.

Nora's life has been going from bad to worse. Then at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth she finds herself transported to a library. There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived. Which raises the ultimate question: with infinite choices, what is the best way to live?

She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.

The Collected Blandings Short Stories. Blandings Castle is the home of Lord Emsworth, who likes nothing better than to potter at home in his enormous castle garden. But his rural idyll is once again set to be disturbed in these nine hilarious fables. No peace is possible when his sister Constance is let loose, and she is constantly trying to reorganise the household and its inhabitants! Without great success…

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day and then ages out. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable.

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.

This is a tale of mice and magic. It is also a tale of great love (of cheese) and great danger. And learning the lesson that what matters most - when it comes to cheese and life - is not how strongly you smell but how strong you are on the inside.

The Complete Short Stories is a collection to be loved and cherished, from one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century. From the cruel irony of A member of the Family to the fateful echoes of The Go-Away Bird and the unexpectedly sinister The Girl I Left Behind Me, in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark coolly probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability, displaying the acerbic wit and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her unique talent.

Edinburgh, 1850. Despite being at the forefront of modern medicine, hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. But it is not just the deaths that dismay the esteemed Dr James Simpson - a whispering campaign seeks to blame him for the death of a patient in suspicious circumstances. Simpson's protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher are determined to clear their patron's name.

When an American sailor from the Holy Loch Base goes missing, Harry McCoy is determined to find him. But as he investigates, a wave of bombings hits Glasgow - with the threat of more to come. Soon McCoy realises that the sailor may be part of a shadowy organisation committed to a very different kind of Scotland. One they are prepared to kill for.

Diagnosed twice with ADHD, Jordan Stephens found his teens and twenties a whirl of career success and nurturing friendships but also a brutal pattern of self-harm, hedonism, destructive coping mechanisms and heartbreak. When he tried to live up to his own damaged expectations and his world exploded, he stepped away from his previous existence completely and allowed himself to explore the pain he'd repressed his entire life.

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old history teacher, but he’s been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen it all. As long as he keeps changing his identity, he can stay one step ahead of his past – and stay alive. The only thing he must not do is fall in love. But what if the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him?

Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. Among the people we encounter is a man who ran out of words, a woman who stopped caring what others thought of her and another who, losing her memory, started to believe she was having an affair with the man who was really her husband.