Atlantic Books

London has long been a magnet for aspiring artists and writers, musicians and fashion designers seeking inspiration and success. In London Calling, Barry Miles explores the counter-culture - creative, avant garde, permissive, anarchic - that sprang u p in this great city in the decades following the Second World War. Here are the heady post-war days when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazz bars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Bacon and the legen dary Colony Club, the 1960s and the Summer of Love, the rise of punk and the early days of the YBAs. The vitality and excitement of this time and years of change - and the sheer creative energy in the throbbing heart of London - leap off the pages of this evocative and original book.

In A History of the World Since 9/11 Dominic Streatfeild expertly combines history, biography and investigative journalism to show how a massacre on a clear September day in 2001 has touched the lives of millions of people around the world. In a seri es of brilliantly interlinked chapters he shows how an Afghani wedding party; and a gas station proprietor in Texas; and a planespotter in Mallorca have been affected, sometimes devastatingly, by the American response to the attacks on the Twin Tower s. Streatfeild shows how the sleep of reason and good sense in successive US administrations post-9/11 has brought forth the monsters of extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, extrajudicial execution and wholesale contravention of international law . This is a work that informs as it entertains and induces outrage as it inspires.

This is the bestseller on the credit crunch. In this brilliant short book, Vince Cable, 'the sage of the credit crunch' (

One of the key bands of the Seattle-based grunge movement of the 1990s, Pearl Jam broke on to the world stage with their album, Ten, which went on to become an alternative rock classic. For over two decades Pearl Jam have been one of the most influen tial and popular bands on the planet, but have maintained their personal integrity by refusing the traditional trappings of rock fame. Praised for their rejection of rock star excesses and their fearless advocacy of causes they believe in, even when they risked losing their popularity. They have sold over sixty million albums worldwide and their shows continue to sell out within hours of their tickets going on sale. Now, for the first time, the publicity shy band have decided to tell their extra ordinary story, in their own words, in a book which will be heralded by fans all over the globe.

An international sensation, Sofi Oksanen’s award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them.When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives, gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.

Steve Jobs was an American visionary who immeasurably altered the way the world uses technology. From the Apple II to minimalist iMacs and from the foundation of Pixar to the invention of the iPad, Jobs' products and ideas confounded expectations perpetually redefined markets to make Apple the most successful technology company on the planet. Inside Steve's Brain is a unique and revealing look at one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the internet age. Part biography, part leadership manual, Kahney's book is a rich and insightful examination of a man who was at once a business poineer, and a cultural icon.

Nestling on India's southern coast lies the town of Kittur. Ranging through the city's streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and its outer limits, through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, Aravind Adiga brings an entire world vividly and unforgettably to life.

21st Century Mumbai is a city of new money and soaring real estate, and property kingpin Dharmen Shah has grand plans for its future. His offer to buy and tear down a weathered tower block, making way for luxury apartments, will make each of its residents rich - if all agree to sell. But not everyone wants to leave, many of the residents have lived there for a lifetime, many of them are no longer young. As tensions rise among the once civil neighbours, one by one those who oppose the offer give way to the majority, until only one man stands in Shah's way: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji's neighbours - friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned co-conspirators - may stop at nothing to score their payday...

In this major new history, Gordon Corrigan argues that what we call the Second World War was in fact two separate conflicts: one against Germany (and, for a while, Italy) in Western Europe, Soviet Russia and North Africa, the other against Japan in the Far East and Pacific. Each conflict had distinct causes and had to be fought in different ways against very different enemies, who rarely, if ever, coordinated their efforts. This is a new and cogent account of an immense, exhausting six-year conflict that continues to fascinate. Corrigan examines the agendas of the warring nations and offers fresh and vivid interpretations, Britain's own part in the war comes in for particularly close scrutiny: militarily, the British suffered an agonising series of defeats before the tide turned. The country emerged economically broken, with the loss of her empire a virtual certainty. The Second World War is vast in its erudition and epic in its execution. It will change forever the way we think about the titanic conflicts that dominated the years 1939 to 1945.

She tells herself an hour is not so long to wait, and steps outside. The street is empty. Then she hears the car. Police Captain Riedwaan Faizal has just been told that his six-year-old daughter has been abducted. He's desperate to start looking for her. But the squad believe he is her kidnapper. She keeps still. That saves you if you are in danger. Her daddy says so. Suspended from the force, Faizal watches helplessly as the search for his child is called off. Frantic, he turns to investigative journalist Dr Clare Hart. She tries to feel her surroundings. If she knows where she is, her daddy can find her. Clare knows that mounting a search without the police will be dangerous, and illegal. She knows that the odds of the child's survival worsens with every minute that passes. But she also knows she'll do anything to help this desperate father - even if it puts all their lives at risk. For now, she would listen to the quiet. The dark can last a long, long time...

Ralph Steadman - artist of distinction, caricaturist of brilliance and long-time unsentimental cat-lover here shows us cats everywhere. Cats in furniture, cat dictators, T. S. Eliot cats and Samuel Johnson cats, fashion cats and CATalogues, blot cats, splat cats and fallen-from-skyscraper cats. There are bugs that live on cats and uninvented cats, too. Ranging from the fierce and furious to the whimsical and wistful, the whole world of feline life is here. In a cat book like no other, there is nothing soppy about Steadman's eye as he exposes the heart and bone and sinew of these most independent and lovable pets.

Travel the world in timeless recipes that follow in footsteps Phileas Fogg and his journey around the world in 80 days. Featuring dishes from chefs and cookery writers including Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Gennaro Contaldo, Heston Blumenthal and Sybil Kapoor - Around the World in 80 Dishes is a treasure-trove of treats, lovingly compiled and beautifully photographed by one of the world's foremost food photographers. In a narrative that unites the joys of discovering world cuisine with an expert 'how-to' guide, this is the dream anthology of world cuisine for committed cooks and amateurs alike - dipped into or read from start to finish, this is a unique book about food and flavour, taste and culture.

For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the Critiques of Immanuel Kant, or his unformed sense of the line of thought that descends from Hegel through Marx to 20th-century Soviet state socialism, or who struggles to call to mind the key strands in the thinking of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida - help is at hand. It comes in the comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World, a concise history of modern thought from the Enlightenment to the present day. Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World opens with a substantial introduction that outlines the history of human ideas from the philosophers of classical Antiquity to the European eighteenth century, via the Christian scholastics of the Middle Ages and the development of Renaissance thought, culminating in the philosophy of Descartes and the development of scientific method. Having thus set the scene, Stephen Trombley traces the development of modern thought through a sequence of accessible profiles of the most influential thinkers in every domain of intellectual endeavour since 1789. No major representative of any significant strand of post-Enlightenment thought escapes Trombley's attention: the German idealists Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; founder sof new fields of inquiry such as Weber, Durkheim and C.S. Peirce; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; political leaders from Mohandas K. Gandhi to Adolf Hitler; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics."

CC is trapped by a job she no longer loves in an unfriendly city. So when her new boyfriend decides it's time to sell up and move to the South of France, she decides in seconds to change her life. After all, who wouldn't pick an azure sea, aperitifs and sunshine over a dreary commute and a rainy climate? She hadn't expected a tumbledown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Or a motley assortment of surly builders, eccentric farmers and a resentful, terrifying neighbour - who happens to be her boyfriend's aunt. Suddenly, CC's dream of a place in the sun is looking more like a nightmare. Does she have the courage to stick it out, and make a home of her French house?

In Crybbe, only strangers walk at twilight...For four hundred years, the curfew bell has tolled nightly from the church tower of the small country town, Crybbe's only defence against the evil rising unbidden in its haunted streets. Radio reporter Fay Morrison came to Crybbe because she had no choice. Millionaire music tycoon Max Goff came because there was nothing left to conquer, except the power of the spirit. But he knew nothing of the town's legacy of dark magic - and nobody felt like telling him...

Hercules is a dachshund, and his new mistress Caroline is the greatest human being on earth. She's the one who rescued him from the animal shelter, who smells of summer and strawberries, and who laughs when the little pup snuggles up with her on the sofa. So when Caroline is badly treated by her bossy, dog-hating boyfriend, Hercules decides it's high time he rescued his mistress for a change. And so begins an epic quest to find his favourite woman the perfect man. Touching, original, and very funny, Puppy Love is a story about love, life, and the best friend a girl could ever have.