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Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt. When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever - writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it. Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .

This book tells the story of our greatest invention. Or, it almost does. Almost, because while the story has a beginning – in fact, it has many beginnings, not only in Mesopotamia, 3,100 years before the birth of Christ, but also in China, Egypt and Central America – and it certainly has a middle, one that snakes through the painted petroglyphs of Easter Island, through the great machines of empires and across the desks of inspired, brilliant scholars, the end of the story remains to be written. The invention of writing allowed humans to create a record of their lives and to persist past the limits of their lifetimes. In the shadows and swirls of ancient inscriptions, we can decipher the stories they sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create and be remembered. The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research and the faint, fleeting echo of writing’s future. Professor Silvia Ferrara, a modern-day adventurer who travels the world studying ancient texts, takes us along with her; we touch the knotted, coloured strings of the Incan khipu and consider the case of the Phaistos disk. Ferrara takes us to the cutting edge of decipherment, where high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye, and further still, to gaze at the outline of writing’s future. The Greatest Invention lifts the words off every page and changes the contours of the world around us – just keep reading.

In seventh-century Ireland, a priest has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks with him – young Trian and old Cormac – he travels down the Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a new place of worship. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?

On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, wonderful things.’ In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt – its geography, history, culture and legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again – not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact. Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs.

I want to sing you early songs. Go deeper. I want to take you back where you began, Find the scraps of you you hid in secret And bring them back to life beneath my tongue. Divisible by Itself and One is the powerful new collection from our foremost truth-teller Kae Tempest. Ruminative, wise, with a newer, more contemplative and metaphysical note running through, it is a book engaged with the big questions and the emotional states in which we live and create. Some of the poems experiment with form, some are free, and yet all are politically and morally conscious. Divisible by Itself and One is also a book about human form, the body as boundary and how we are read by the world. Taking its bearings - and title - from the prime number, Divisible by Itself and One is concerned, ultimately, with integrity: how to live in honest relationship with oneself and others.

Lisbet is pregnant, and frightened she will lose this child, too, when the arrival of a stranger upends her world, and promises to change her understanding of love forever. Ida's life seems simple - she is married, her family fully formed - but a buried secret threatens to destroy her peaceful existence. Nethe has just returned from years in exile, punishment for a crime no one will name. As a mysterious dance plague takes hold of the city of Strasbourg, all three women become entangled in a web of deceit and clandestine passion that has them dancing to a dangerous tune.

Lia has only one child, Iris; her magical, awkward, endlessly creative daughter who has just entered the battleground of her teenage years. Lia and Iris have always been close, but there is a war playing out inside Lia's body, too, and everything is about to change. As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family's deepest fears. But Lia hopes: for more time, for more love, for more Iris.

Now with a new afterword covering the months-long landmark trials of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani. Winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2018 The riveting true story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup ‘unicorn’ promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: the technology didn’t work. In Bad Blood, John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, and plays with the very line along which time should run. Lives separated by time and space have collided, and an exiled Englishman, a writer trapped far from home, and a girl destined to die too young, have each glimpsed a world that is not their own. Travelling through the centuries, between colonies on the moon and an ever-changing Earth, together their lives will solve a mystery that will make you question everything you thought you knew to be true. From the award-winning author of Station Eleven

The extraordinary, powerful second novel from the Booker prizewinning author of Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo is both a vivid portrayal of working-class life and the deeply moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons. As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the meaning of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

In Politics, Carol Ann Duffy, one of the English language's best-loved living poets presents from her own archives, in chronological order, her favourites among her poems on the theme of politics and protest, drawing on work written over four decades. Duffy also adds to the selection her poem written for Danny Boyle's Pages of the Sea memorial for The Great War. It makes for a sequence that is searching, memorializing, healing.

One of the English language's best-loved living poets, in Green: Natural World Carol Ann Duffy presents us with her favourites among her poems on the natural world. Drawing on work written over four decades and arranged chronologically, Duffy also adds to her selection one wholly new poem.

In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown, managed a multimillion-dollar business smuggling people. In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the inner workings of Cheng Chui Ping aka Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of undocumented immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.

In the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an immensely powerful historical novel about the first encounters between Danish colonists and Greenlanders in the early eighteenth century, of brutal clashes between priests and pagans and the forces that drive each individual towards darkness or light. 1728: The Danish King Fredrik IV sends a governor to Greenland to establish a colony, in the hopes of exploiting the country's allegedly vast natural resources. A few merchants, a barber-surgeon, two trainee priests, a blacksmith, some carpenters and soldiers and a dozen hastily married couples go with him. The missionary priest Hans Egede has already been in Greenland for several years when the new colonists arrive. He has established a mission there, but the converts are few. Among those most hostile to Egede is the shaman Aappaluttoq, whose own son was taken by the priest and raised in the Christian faith as his own. Thus the great rift between two men, and two ways of life, is born. The newly arrived couples - men and women plucked from prison - quickly sink into a life of almost complete dissolution, and soon unsanitary conditions, illness and death bring the colony to its knees. Through the starvation and the epidemics that beset the colony, Egede remains steadfast in his determination - willing to sacrifice even those he loves for the sake of his mission. Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Kim Leine's The Colony of Good Hope explores what happens when two cultures confront one another. In a distant colony, under the harshest conditions, the overwhelming forces of nature meet the vices of man.

A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her husband from his former students – a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own... When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me. And so we meet our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic professor at the same small liberal arts college, is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extramarital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our unnamed narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder-box world comes dangerously close to exploding. Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the restrictions of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Darkly funny and moving, Vladimir maps the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the messy contradictions of power and desire.

The stunning short story collection from the bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. A widow whisks her daughter away for a holiday she can barely afford, desperate to help the two of them grieve. A neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students. A proud man rages helplessly at his granddaughter's hospital bedside. A writer receives a visit from all of the men who have tried to suppress her voice. The romantic but brutally raw stories in Five Tuesdays in Winter explore desire, heartache, moments of shocking cruelty and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. This profoundly tender collection confirms Lily King as one of our most beloved chroniclers of the human heart.