Grove Press

ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST CRIME AND THRILLER TITLES OF 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BARRY AWARD FOR BEST THRILLER 2024 Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in Washington, D.C. with her second husband, but enviable dinner parties aren't the only thing she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is surprised to cross paths with Charlotte, an old flame of his, who, thanks to her gossipy parties, has a packed pocketbook full of secrets she is eager to share. Two decades later, in 1969, Joe Wilderness is stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, held captive by the KGB, a chip in a game way above his pay grade - but his old friends Frank and Eddie are going to try to spring him out of the toughest prison in the world. All roads lead back to Berlin, and to the famous Bridge of Spies... Featuring crackling dialogue and brilliantly plotted Cold War intrigue, Moscow Exile is a gripping thriller populated by larger-than-life personalities in a Cold War plot that feels strangely in tune with our present.

As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty. What Penaluna didn't realize was that philosophy - at least the canon that's taught in Western universities, as well as the culture that surrounds it - would slowly grind her down through its devaluation of women and their minds. Women were nowhere in her curriculum, and feminist philosophy was dismissed as marginal, unserious. Until Penaluna came across the work of a seventeenth-century woman named Damaris Cudworth Masham. Reading Masham's work was like reaching through time: writing three hundred years ago, Masham was speaking directly to her about knowledge and God, but also the condition of women. Her work eventually led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn and Mary Wollstonecraft. Together these women rekindled Penaluna's love of philosophy and taught her how to live a truly philosophical life. She combines memoir with biography to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for beauty and truth. Formally inventive and keenly intelligent, How to Think Like a Woman is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

** Now with three bonus songs** ‘Go Your Own Way’ by Fleetwood Mac ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners Why Can’t We Be Friends?’ by War Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more – iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also alter the direction of music. In this follow-up to his classic Anatomy of a Song, writer and music historian Marc Myers tells the stories behind fifty-five more rock, pop, R&B, country and reggae hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them. Part oral history, part musical analysis, Anatomy of 55 Hit Songs ranges from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ to Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’, The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’. Bernie Taupin recalls how he wrote the lyrics to Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’; Joan Jett remembers channeling her rage against how she had been unfairly labeled and treated into ‘Bad Reputation’ and Ozzy Osbourne, Elvis Costello, Bob Weir, Sheryl Crow, Alice Cooper, Roberta Flack, John Mellencamp, Keith Richards, Carly Simon and many others reveal the emotions and technique behind their major works.

Over more than five decades, legendary architect Moshe Safdie has built some of the world's most influential and memorable structures - from the 1967 modular housing scheme in Montreal known as Habitat to the Marina Bay Sands development in Singapore. For Safdie, the way a space functions is fundamental; he is deeply committed to architecture as a social force for good, believing that any challenge, including extreme population density and environmental distress, can be addressed with solutions that enhance community and uplift the human spirit. If Walls Could Speak takes readers behind the veil of an essential yet mysterious profession to explain through Safdie's own experiences how an architect thinks and works - from the spark of imagination through the design process, the model-making, the politics, the engineering, the materials. Relating memorable stories about what has inspired him - from childhoods in Israel and Montreal to the projects and personalities worldwide that have captured his imagination - Safdie reveals the complex interplay that underpins every project and his vision for the role architecture can and should play in society at large. Illustrated throughout with drawings, sketches, photographs, and documents from his firm's voluminous archives, If Walls Could Speak is a book like no other, and will forever change the way you look at and appreciate any built structure.

I propose to open my mind as wide as possible to allow my readers the first ever glimpse at South Central from my side of the gun, street, fence and wall. After pumping eight blasts from a sawed-off shotgun at a group of rival gang members, twelve-year-old Kody Scott was initiated into the L.A. gang the Crips. He quickly matured into one of the most formidable Crip combat soldiers, earning the name 'Monster' for committing acts of brutality and violence that repulsed even his fellow gang members. When the inevitable jail term confined him to a maximum-security cell, a complete political and personal transformation followed: from Monster to Sanyika Shakur, Black nationalist, member of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and crusader against the causes of gangsterism. In a document that has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Shakur makes palpable the despair and decay of America's inner cities and gives eloquent voice to one aspect of the Black experience today.

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there. Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise. Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances, spanning the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colourful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Almost nine million people from all over the world flock to the Louvre in Paris every year to see its incomparable art collection. Yet few, if any, are aware of the remarkable history of that location and of the buildings themselves, and how they chronicle the history of Paris itself-a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly tells for the first time. Before the Louvre was a museum, it was a palace, and before that a fortress. But much earlier still, it was a place called le Louvre for reasons unknown. People had inhabited that spot for more than 6,000 years before King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191 to protect against English soldiers stationed in Normandy. Two centuries later, Charles V converted the fortress to one of his numerous royal palaces. After Louis XIV moved the royal residence to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre inherited the royal art collection, which then included the Mona Lisa, given to Francis by Leonardo da Vinci; just over a century later, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly established the Louvre as a museum to display the nation's treasures. Subsequent leaders of France, from Napoleon to Napoleon III to Francois Mitterand, put their stamp on the museum, expanding it into the extraordinary institution it has become. With expert detail and keen admiration, James Gardner links the Louvre's past to its glorious present, and vibrantly portrays how it has been a witness to French history - through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to this day - and home to a legendary collection whose diverse origins and back stories create a spectacular narrative that rivals the building's legendary stature.

'Without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced' Eric Clapton 'No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues' President Barack Obama 'One part of me says, "Yes, of course I can play." But the other part of me says, "Well, I wish I could just do it like B.B. King."' John Lennon King of the Blues is the story of the first and only superstar of American blues. But it is also a chronicle of the African-American experience. B.B. King grew up in the Deep South, a few generations after the end of slavery, imprisoned within a cruel system of wage slavery known as sharecropping. King of the Blues will also tell the larger story of the birth of modern popular music. B.B. King's boundless ambition and tireless toil gave him initial success, topping the charts in the 1950s and early '60s. But then his career hit a wall when his version of classic blues music could not break through to the mainstream. But then, after years of being out of the limelight, B.B.'s music was rediscovered by new listeners, who saw that he had inspired their guitar rock heroes. From the 1970s on, each time his popularity faded, his music was given new life: fronting for The Rolling Stones, acclaimed by Eric Clapton, praised by U2 and Bono. His last concert was performed in late 2014, six months before he died at age 89.

Vogue's Best Books of the Year Sunday Times' Best Memoirs of the Year A New York Times Book of the Year New Yorker Book of the Year A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs. __________________________________________________ Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents - artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs - Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, holidays and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be. Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs's poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. Scrappy, wise and funny, young Lisa is an unforgettable guide through her parents' fascinating and disparate worlds. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is an enthralling book by an insightful new literary voice.

The accomplished and evocative first novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript was finally published twenty years after Toole's death. The Neon Bible opens with the narrator, a young man named David, on a train, leaving the small Southern town he's grown up in for the first time. What unspools is the tender and tragic coming-of-age story of a lonely child, a story that revolves around David's unorthodox friendship with his great-aunt Mae - a former stage performer who is fiercely at odds with the conservative townspeople - and the everyday toll of living in an environment of religious fanaticism. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.

Pages of a weathered original sonata manuscript - the gift of a Czech immigrant living in Queens - come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. The gift comes with the request that Meta find the manuscript's true owner - a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart - and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorak and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn't the only one seeking the music's secrets.

The H LYW OD sign presides over a Los Angeles devastated by a weaponized microbe that has been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Inside the Fence, life for the new aristocracy, a society of the partially rehabilitated who call themselves the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless Drifters, Shamblers and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift economy until no longer needed. The ruler, Chief, takes his guidance from gigantic effigies of a man and a woman in the heart of the Fence. They warn him of trouble to come, but who is the person to watch: the elusive Eckmann, holed up with the last functioning plane at LAX; Shannon Squier, the chisel-wielding pop superstar from the pre-NK3 world, pulled from the shambling masses; a treacherous member of Chief's inner circle; or Hopper, the uncommon Drifter compelled by an inner voice to search for a wife whose name and face he doesn't know? Each threatens to upset the delicate power balance in this fragile world. In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around this melee of despots, prophets and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.

The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labour and sterilized. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to help her doll-like sister, Manna.Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chilli peppers. Then Manna disappears, and Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chilli so hot that it is rumoured to cause hallucinations. Does this chilli have effects that justify its prohibition? How did Finland turn into the North Korea of Europe? And will Vanna succeed in her quest to find her sister, or will her growing need to satisfy her chilli addiction destroy her? Johanna Sinisalo's tautly told story of fight and flight is also a feisty, between-the-lines social polemic - a witty, inventive, and fiendishly engaging read from the queen of 'Finnish Weird'.

Leaving Las Vegas, the first novel by John O'Brien, is the disturbing and emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it. Sera is a prostitute, content with the independence and routine she has carved out for herself in a city defined by recklessness. But she is haunted by a spectre in a yellow Mercedes, a man from her past who is committed to taking control of her life again. Ben is an alcoholic intent on drinking his way towards an early death. Newly arrived from Los Angeles, he survived the four-hour intoxicated drive across the desert with his entire savings in his wallet and nothing else left to lose. Looking to satisfy hungers both material and existential, Ben and Sera stumble together on the strip and discover in each other a respite from their unforgiving lives. A testimony to the raw talent of its young author, Leaving Las Vegas is a compelling story of unconditional love between two disenfranchised and lost souls - an overlooked American classic.