Hamish Hamilton

A beautiful, moving collection of short stories, in many of which Updike revisits the haunts of his childhood from the vantage point of old age. In 'Fiftieth' old friends reconnect at a class reunion, and one of them is left wondering, 'What does it mean: the enormity of having been children and now being old, living next to death.' In the story 'The Full Glass' the protagonist describes somewhat ruefully the rituals of old age. Before going to bed, he raises his nightly water glass 'drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.' In 'Varieties of Religious Experiences' a grandfather, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights, watches the tower of the World Trade Centre fall, and his view of a God is forever altered. Again and again in these memorable stories, Updike strikes to the heart, giving words to what is so often left unsaid. He is at once witty, devastatingly observant, touching – and, of course, a consummate storyteller. This is a collection that will be admired and cherished.

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveller. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerate s 'The Contents of Some Travellers' Bags' and exposes 'Writers Who Wrote About Places They Never Visited'; tracks extreme journeys in 'Travel As An Ordeal' and highlights some of 'Travellers' Favourite Places'. Excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work are interspersed with selections from travellers both familiar and unexpected, including Vladimir Nabokov, Henry David Thoreau, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway and more. The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.

Kate and Albert, sister and brother, are not yet the last two human beings on earth, but Albert is hopeful. The secluded communal farm they grew up on is after twenty years disintegrating, taking their parents marriage with it. They both try to escape: Kate, at seventeen, to a suburbia she knows only through fiction and Albert, at eleven, into preparations for the end of the world which is coming, he is sure. And then there is Don: father of the family, leader and maker of elaborate speec hes. Faced with the prospect of saving his community, his marriage, his son from apocalyptic visions and his daughter from impending men, he sets to work on reunifying the commune by bringing it into the modern age, through self-sufficiency, charisma and a rave with a 10k soundsystem. The last day on earth is coming. Bring your own booze.

According to The New York Times, Noam Chomsky is “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But he isn’t easy to read . . . or at least he wasn’t until these books came along. Made up of intensively edited speeches and interviews, they offer something not found anywhere else: pure Chomsky, with every dazzling idea and penetrating insight intact, delivered in clear, accessible, reader-friendly prose. Published as four short books in the famous Real Story series—What Uncle Sam Really Wants, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, and The Common Good—they’ve collectively sold almost 600,000 copies. And they continue to sell year after year after year because Chomsky’s ideas become, if anything, more relevant as time goes by. For example, twenty years ago he pointed out that “in 1970, about 90% of international capital was used for trade and long-term investment—more or less productive things—and 10% for speculation. By 1990, those figures had reversed.” As we know, speculation continued to increase exponentially. We’re paying the price now for not heeding him them.

In this new collection of conversations, conducted from 2010 to 2012, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: the future of democracy in the Arab world, the implications of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 'class war' fought by US business interests against working people and the poor, the breakdown of mainstream political institutions and the rise of the far right. As always, Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight. The latest volume from a long-established, trusted partnership, this collection shows once again that no interlocutor engages with Chomsky more effectively than David Barsamian. These interviews will inspire a new generation of readers, as well as longtime Chomsky fans eager for his latest thinking on the many crises we now confront, both at home and abroad. They confirm that Chomsky is an unparalleled resource for anyone seeking to understand our world today.

Hello World" is Alice Rawsthorn's definitive guide to design and modern life. Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. When deployed wisely, it can bring us pleasure, choice, strength, decency and much more. But if its power is abused, the outcome can be wasteful, confusing, humiliating, even dangerous. None of us can avoid being affected by design, whether or not we wish to. It is so ubiquitous that it determines how we feel and what we do, often without our noticing. "Hello World" explores design's influence on our lives. Written by the renowned design critic Alice Rawsthorn and designed by the award-winning book designer Irma Boom, it describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists and designers have used design to different ends throughout history: from the macabre symbol invented by 18th century pirates to terrorise their victims into surrender, to one woman's quest for the best possible prosthetic legs and the evolution of the World Cup ball. At a time when we face colossal changes, unprecedented in their speed, scale and intensity - from the deepening environmental crisis, to giant leaps in science and technology - "Hello World" explains how design can help us to make sense of them andto turn them to our advantage.

'Changing My Mind' finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal & cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate & precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books & bad movies, family & philosophy, British comedians & Italian divas.

The Victoria System is Eric Reinhardt's acclaimed and controversial French bestseller. It is nominated for The Prix Goncourt, The Prix Renaudot And The Grand Prix Du Roman De L'academie Francaise. David Kolski never sleeps with the same woman twice - apart from his wife. Then he meets Victoria. Head of people at a multinational company, by day she is a ruthless executive in a lightning-paced, high-pressured whirlwind of power and productivity. By night she likes good wine, luxurious hotel rooms, and abandoning herself to her sexual fantasies. David is soon addicted. Under crushing pressure at work to oversee the construction of a huge Paris tower-block in near-impossible circumstances, he takes new vigour and inspiration from his hard-headed capitalist lover. He works harder, faster and better, and then escapes to indulge in the most intense sexual passion he's ever experienced. But when Victoria offers to use her position to help him in his career, a dark shadow falls over their affair. Is she really capable of helping anyone other than herself, or is she hiding something from him? And who are the two men in the Audi he keeps seeing, always a few cars behind him? Complex, compelling and ambitiously structured, The Victoria System is a daringly sensual story of an obsession. Part erotica; part thriller; part novel of ideas, like a series of slightly angled mirrors held up to our globalised, capitalist society, the twists and turns of its narrative create a dazzling interplay of reflections and compel us to question the assumptions and forces of our modern world. "Dark, twisted and devastating...A big novel of amorous adventures in the era of the blackberry. Eric Reinhardt is the new Alexandre Dumas". (Nouvel Observateur). "We often accuse French writers of navel-gazing and ignoring the world around them, but Eric Reinhardt is one of those who gives the lie to this cliche. The visionary analysis of globalised capitalism which established his reputation in Cendrillon is amplified in The Victoria System, an erotic novel which is raw, violent and vertiginous. The combination of the two is a literary tour de force". (Emmanuel Carrere, author of Liminov). "Part classic, part tragedy, part thriller: Eric Reinhardt merges genres and invokes elusive echoes in this highly contemporary novel of a rare depth". (Liberation). "The Victoria System is a fantastic and sensual modern thriller, like nothing I've ever read". (Christian Louboutin). "A powerful novel about the philosophical and moral consequences of ultra-liberalism, and a subtle reflection on the urges of the powerful". (Marianne). Eric Reinhardt is one of the rising stars of French literature. He is the author of five novels and also a freelance publisher of art books. He lives and works in Paris. The Victoria System was first published in French in 2011 and was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Renaudot and the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Francaise. It is Eric Reinhardt's first novel to be translated into English. Sam Taylor is the English-language translator of HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and the author of the novels The Island at the End of the World, The Amnesiac and The Republic of Trees. He lives in France and the United States.

Back on the terrain of NW, The Embassy of Cambodia is another remarkable work of fiction from Zadie Smith. 'The fact is, if we followed the history of every little country in the world -- in its dramatic as well as its quiet times -- we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming . . . ' First published this Spring in the New Yorker, The Embassy of Cambodia is a rare and brilliant story that takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions. Praise for NW: 'A triumph . . .modern London is explored in a dazzling portrait . . . every sentence sings' Guardian 'Intensely funny, richly varied, always unexpected. A joyous, optimistic, angry masterpiece. No better English novel will be published this year' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph 'Absolutely brilliant . . . So electrically authentic, it reads like surveillance transcripts' Lev Grossman, TIME Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels NW, White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, and of a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People.

Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive. Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness of her sparkling stories. With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', the stories in this new collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising. Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage.

No Place to Hide is the story of one of the greatest national security leaks in US history. In June 2013, reporter and political commentator Glenn Greenwald published a series of reports in the Guardian which rocked the world. The reports revealed shocking truths about the extent to which the National Security Agency had been gathering information about US citizens and intercepting communication worldwide, and were based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden to Greenwald. Including new revelations from documents entrusted to Greenwald by Snowden, this essential book tells the story of Snowden and the NSA, explores the extraordinary cooperation between private industry and the NSA and examines the far-reaching consequences of the government's surveillance program, both in the US and abroad.

Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it. Praise for The Old Ways: "A magnificent meditation on walking and writing. An astonishingly haunted book' Adam Nicolson, Daily Telegraph 'Sets the imagination tingling ...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems". (John Carey, Sunday Times). "A wonderful book. He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy". (John Banville, Observer). Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind. His second, The Wild Places, won three prizes and was adapted for the BBC. The Old Ways was joint winner of the Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and eight other awards. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Discontent and its Civilizations collects the best of Mohsin Hamid's writing on subjects as diverse and wide-ranging as Pakistan; fatherhood; the death of Osama Bin Laden and the writing of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Unified by the author's humane, clear-headed and witty voice, the book makes a compelling case for recognizing our common humanity while relishing our diversity - both as readers and citizens; for resisting the artificial mono-identities of religion or nationality or race; and for always judging a country or nation by how it treats its minorities, as 'Each individual human being is, after all, a minority of one'.

Powerful and necessary, a state-of-the-nation portrait of America under Obama from the prize-winning, bestselling author of Between the World and Me From 2008-2016, the leader of the free world was a black man. Obama's presidency reshaped America and transformed the international conversation around politics, race, equality. But it attracted criticism and bred discontent as much as it inspired hope - so much so, that the world now faces an uncertain future under a very different kind of US President. In this essential new book, peerless writer Ta-Nehisi Coates takes stock of the Obama era, speaking authoritatively from political, ideological and cultural perspectives, and draws a sophisticated and penetrating portrait of America today.

An essential guide to geopolitics in 2017 -- and how we should be fighting back -- from the world's leading public intellectual What kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren? How are the discontents kindled today likely to blaze and explode tomorrow? From escalating climate change to the devastation in Syria, pandemic state surveillance to looming nuclear war, Noam Chomsky takes stock of the world today. Over the course of ten conversations with long-time collaborator David Barsamian, spanning 2013-2016, Chomsky argues in favour of radical changes to a system that cannot possibly cope with what awaits tomorrow. Interwoven with personal reflections spanning from childhood to his eighth decade of life, Global Discontents also marks out Chomsky's own intellectual journey, mapping his progress to revolutionary ideas and global prominence.

Fresh, sharp and wickedly funny, a tragicomic tale of modern living from the author of Submarine Ray is not a bad guy. He mostly did not cheat on his heavily pregnant wife. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. And though his career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal and he spends his afternoons churning out third-rate listicles in his boxer briefs, he dreams of making a difference. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse. Brace yourself for a wickedly funny look at the modern everyman. The Adulterants is an uproarious tale of competitively sensitive men and catastrophic open marriages, riots on the streets of London and Internet righteousness, and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties. With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial.