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Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’ and ‘small masterpieces'. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche.

For every moment in your life there is a poem. In Dancing by the Light of the Moon, we have a remarkable collection of over 250 best-loved poems in the English-speaking world. Allow Gyles Brandreth to be your guide to not only the wonders of poetry - and there are many - but also its practical uses in everyday life.

The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart.

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood.

A fascinating new volume of messages about fatherhood, from the author of the best-selling Letters of Note collections. In Letters of Note: Fathers, Shaun Usher collects together remarkable correspondence by and about fathers, including proud parental words of love, advice from experienced dads to new ones, as well as letters from both frustrated and adoring offspring.

The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot, read by Edoardo Ballerini. To mark the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, in association with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, commissioned this new recording of T. S. Eliot's major poems, narrated by Edoardo Ballerini. Ballerini is widely regarded as the brightest star of the audiobook era, one of the finest narrators of literature today.

Jack Underwood's debut collection, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting...weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and current riots; the limits of masculinity and complexities of fatherhood; as well as uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of 15 babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.

Maurice Riordan's keenly anticipated new collection continues his agile exploration of time, both in its depredations and rewards, while also bringing a sceptical, enquiring intelligence to bear on the anxieties and vanities of our age. Here we have disquieting songs of a mutable self; a projected online deathbed confession; the soul haranguing the body; while encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Old English. These poems pulse with mischief and macabre humour, making for a pungent and haunting listen.

The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year AD 600. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the Angles, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down in early Welsh by two medieval scribes. It is composed of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics.

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

Spirits in the Forest is the first collection of poetry from award-winning Irish writer/poet, Kevin McManus. The poems have a common thread running through them - the stark but beautiful setting of Ireland's western landscapes, the isolation felt by some in a rural existence, and the strength of spirit that survives within the human soul to endure and find eventual joy and solace.

This collection of 35 poems is a sequel to a volume of lyrical ballads first published in 1798. While the first volume was a collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this anthology contains verses by Wordsworth only. Generally, the poems are less well-known than those of the earlier volume but do include major narrative pieces, like "The Pastoral Epics", "The Brothers", and "Michael".

The Frozen Deep was originally written as a play by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. With Dickens himself gracing the stage as Wardour, the play was met with success, drawing audiences to tears night after night, and even performing for Queen Victoria herself. Drawing on reports of the real-life Franklin expedition of 1845, in which a crew had set out from England to discover the North Passage and disappeared without a trace, Collins and Dickens recreated the events of the ill-fated journey.

The industrial past. Stories of real people. Arts and culture. History and contemporary life. Merseyside provides almost an embarrassment of riches enough to inspire any poet! I sought for these poetic tales to do justice to the uniqueness of Merseyside and all the while during the writing of this collection my sense of humour was never too far away (I think it must be imprinted within the DNA of the region!)

This play is a fictionalized account of the life of William Shakespeare, beginning from his humble origins in Stratford-upon-Avon with his wife, Anne Hathaway, to his life as a successful playwright in London. This play uses several biographical speculations about Shakespeare's life to tell a fascinating tale, such as his relationship with his wife (to whom he famously left his "second-best bed" in his will), his friendship with fellow playwright and competitor Christopher Marlowe, his interactions with Queen Elizabeth I, and an extramarital dalliance with the queen's maid of honor.

"If-" is a timeless classic, a masterpiece about keeping your balance in a topsy-turvy world and maintaining personal integrity. A phenomenal poem by English Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), written circa 1895 as a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson, it is a literary example of Victorian-era stoicism. Among other nuggets, it advocates the idea of not allowing your successes to go to your head or allowing your failures to go to your heart.

Idealistic parson's son Jim goes to sea thirsting for adventure as the mate of the pilgrim ship Patna. However, when disaster looms, Jim is persuaded by his crewmates to abandon the ship, leaving the vessel and hundreds of passengers to their fate. But with his life in ruins, Jim alone has the courage to face up to the public censure which follows, piquing the interest of Captain Marlow, who befriends Jim and relates the tale of the young man's attempts to come to terms with his guilt and make an honorable future for himself.

It’s not been easy. She’s fought against me every step of the way, she’s fought against loving me, letting me love her, fought against a relationship, fought against our future, and then, when she finally concedes, when she finally gives in and sees the future I see for us, this happens. This is a story of bravery and overcoming immense obstacles. It's about choosing to trust again when your every instinct tells you not to.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a poet, novelist, and literary critic. He created the enchanting world of fairyland inhabited by characters like the snow-queen, the mermaid's son, ogres, dwarfs, monsters, magicians, and giants. The Pink Fairy Book contains 41 tales from Africa, Japan, Scandinavia, and Europe. They range from familiar stories like "The Snow-Queen" and "The Fir-Tree" to the obscure tales of the Tanuki. This collection contains stories like "The Cats' Elopement", The "Princess in the Chest", "Snowflake", and more....