From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today – written as a letter to a friend.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response.
Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
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As his 50th birthday dawned, Peter Dunne had a life-changing conversation with a friend and realised that, while he may not have invented the internet or found a cure for cancer, he had nonetheless fathered three remarkable and beautiful children.
Inspired by that fact, he set out to leave a trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs for them, so that if they ever needed to know what their father might have had to say on a particular subject, it would be set down for them.
The result is a book of letters from a father to his children, and though the stories are firmly set in a place and time, the themes and the tone are universal and timeless. From Compromise to Compassion, from Democracy to Sacrifice, THE 50 THINGS explores the social mores and morality of our time and tries to answer the eternal questions that line the path to peace of mind.
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Camp Chippewa, 1962. Thirteen-year-old Nelson, loner and over-achiever, is nicknamed the Bugler as he proudly sounds the reveille each morning. This is the summer that everything changes, marking the beginning of Nelson's uncertain friendship with a popular boy named Jonathan, and the discovery of his father's betrayal, which tears his family apart.
As time moves on, Nelson, irrevocably scarred from the Vietnam War, becomes Scoutmaster of Camp Chippewa, while Jonathan marries, divorces, and transforms his father's business. When something unthinkable happens during a visit from Jonathan's grandson and daughter-in-law, the aftermath tests the depths - and the limits - of Nelson's selflessness and bravery.
Nickolas Butler's The Hearts of Men is a powerful, wise and deeply affecting novel about the slippery definitions of right and wrong, family and fidelity, and the redemptive power of friendship.
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We tend to assume that we are the only living things able to experience feelings but have you ever wondered what’s going on in an animal’s head? From the leafy forest floor to the inside of a bee hive, The Inner Life of Animals opens up the animal kingdom like never before. We hear the stories of a grateful humpback whale, of a hedgehog who has nightmares, and of a magpie who commits adultery; we meet bees that plan for the future, pigs who learn their own names and crows that go tobogganing for fun. And at last we find out why wasps exist.
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1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need.
Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann.
Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind ...
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How far would you travel to find your way home?
Jamie Allenby wakes, alone, and realizes her fever has broken. But could everyone she knows be dead? Months earlier, Jamie had left her partner Daniel, mourning the miscarriage of their baby. She’d just had to get away, so took a job on a distant planet. Then the virus hit.
Jamie survived as it swept through our far-flung colonies. Now she feels desperate and isolated, until she receives a garbled message from Earth. If someone from her past is still alive – perhaps Daniel – she knows she must find a way to return.
She meets others seeking Earth, and their ill-matched group will travel across space to achieve their dream. But they’ll clash with survivors intent on repeating humanity’s past mistakes, threatening their precious fresh start. Jamie will also get a second chance at happiness. But can she escape her troubled past, to embrace a hopeful future?
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After more than a decade and following his celebrated adventures in drama, translation, travel writing and prose poetry, Simon Armitage's eleventh collection of poems heralds a return to his trademark contemporary lyricism. The pieces in this multi-textured and moving volume are set against a backdrop of economic recession and social division, where mass media, the mass market and globalisation have made alienation a commonplace experience and where the solitary imagination drifts and conjures.
The Unaccompanied documents a world on the brink, a world of unreliable seasons and unstable coordinates, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction, where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire, and where alarm bells for ailing communities go unheeded or unheard. Looking for certainty the mind gravitates to recollections of upbringing and family, only to encounter more unrecoverable worlds, shaped as ever through Armitage's gifts for clarity and detail as well as his characteristic dead-pan wit. Insightful, relevant and empathetic, these poems confirm The Unaccompanied as a bold new statement of intent by one of our most respected and recognised living poets.
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It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.
Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears.
The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Echoing the depths of Possession, the elegance of The Stranger's Child and the ingenuity of Longbourn, Larchfield is a beautiful and haunting novel about heroism - the unusual bravery that allows unusual people to go on living; to transcend banality and suffering with the power of their imagination.
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Tenth century England: a divided and broken country of misrule. Yet King Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, seeks to unite the kingdom under one crown. By his side is Dunstan of Glastonbury - priest, soldier, visionary and, some insist, traitor - whose task is to steward seven kings through fire, war, murder and fury to see Athelstan's dream come true. But what stain will it leave on his mortal soul?
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This book is bursting with cars, buses, planes, trains, trucks, diggers and many more things that go. Add to that a text that is read aloud to the tune of 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' and ... What a combination!
Car, car, truck, jeep,
have you any fuel?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
three tanks full.
One for the red bus,
one for the train,
and one for the pilot
in her jumbo jet plane.
With bold, colourful illustrations by the instantly recognisable Nick Sharratt and text by talented newcomer Katrina Charman, vehicle-obsessed little ones will never want to put this book down.
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Quentin is a wolf with a very unusual hobby. He loves to bake! So when he accidentally receives an invitation to take part in a Great Bunny Baking competition he'll do anything to enter. Masterfully disguised (ahem) as a bunny, Quentin sails through round after round with his peerless pastry and heavenly honeybun tower. But soon he has to contend with a jealous fellow contestant. And when he slips and drops his Showstopping Chocolate Cake it looks like all his work has been in vain . . .
But all is not as it seems in this tale of hidden identity, bravura baking and unexpected kindness.
An irresistible picture book from fabulous new talent, Ellie Snowdon, with witty text and stunning classic-yet-contemporary illustrations.
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Take a journey through the seasons in this beautiful book, made entirely from hand-pressed plants.
Artist Helen Ahpornsiri transforms petals, leaves and seeds into bounding hares, swooping swallows and fluttering butterflies. Turn the page to watch flowers unfold, see birds take flight or peek inside animal homes. Marvel at the magic of each moment and rediscover the wonders of a year in the wild...
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Whatever you've heard about Darius Drake... it's wrong.
Some of the stories are lies, some are mistakes, and the rest were invented by Darius to fool his enemies.
And I do mean ENEMIES. Not school bullies or mean kids. I'm talking about real, grown-up enemies who would stop at nothing to find the legendary Dunbar diamonds before Darius and I did.
So whatever you've heard - forget it. Because THIS is what really happened.
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Izzy O'Neill here! Impoverished orphan, aspiring comedian and Slut Extraordinaire, if the gossip sites are anything to go by . . .
Izzy never expected to be eighteen and internationally reviled. But when explicit photos involving her, a politician's son and a garden bench are published online, the trolls set out to take her apart. Armed with best friend Ajita and a metric ton of nachos, she tries to laugh it off - but as the daily slut-shaming intensifies, she soon learns the way the world treats teenage girls is not okay. It's the Exact Opposite of Okay.
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