"Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as 'my shelter and my storm'.

Distraught and even a "little ashamed" at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace - a memoir like no other." (Publisher's description).

"Napoleon warned 'Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world'. Lawrence James's magisterial history analyses the relationship between Britain and China between the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1839 and the transfer of power in Hong Kong in 1997.

The Lion and the Dragon reveals the part that Britain played in the awakening of China, then covers relations between the two countries during the period when an aroused China did indeed shake the world. Lawrence James also follows the parallel trajectories of four competitive empires - the British, the Chinese, the Russian and the Japanese - during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then the fortunes of a fifth imperial power, the United States.

Successive British governments saw China as a source of wealth which needed to be protected. Local objections were seen off by force (the 'Opium' wars of 1839-42, 1856-7 and 1859-60) whose results proved that the Qing emperors could not protect their country. Indian troops were deployed in each campaign and manned Britain's small garrisons in Hong Kong, Shanghai and other Treaty ports. Yet Britain never sought to make China into another India. Rather it allowed the emperors and their officials to govern, so long as they were docile and amenable to British needs. Paramount were the internal stability and fiscal responsibility that were the lubricants of trade.

A unified nation with economic and military muscle, and aware of its distant past as one of the great nations of the world, has been intent on reversing her recent history. Lawrence James vividly chronicles a time when this huge nation's divisions encouraged foreigners to treat her as a treasure-house to be plundered at will. This warning from history explains why China's present rulers brook neither dissent nor popular unrest." (Publisher's description).

"The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have tried to call your own. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019 Xiaolu travelled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatens her sense of identity and throws her into a crisis - of meaning, desire, obligation and selfhood.

This is a memoir about separation - by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. Xiaolu uses her exploration of language (one of the meanings of the word 'radical' is the graphic component, or root, of Chinese characters), and her own life, to create this unique text. At once a memoir, a dictionary, and an ardent love letter, it is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between. An archive of an artist's search for creative freedom, it is above all else an intimate account of her efforts to carve out a life of her own." (Publisher's description).