Bookfinder

Prince is a maverick. He is a prolific maverick. You have probably only heard 20% of the music he's made. And that's if you're a huge fan of his. He spans funk, rock'n'roll, r'n'b, soul, electro and so much more. He has influenced every musician from the moment he started out to today. He is truly a genius.

Westoll explores Surinam's bloody past, the allure of its wild places, the legends and rituals of its extraordinary people. An honest and beautiful writer he conjures a place of golden light and impenetrable shadow, of long-held secrets and sacred stories.

The Answer Me This! Podcast has been running for the last three years, delivering a series of hilarious answers to frankly bizarre questions. Great reading from Britain's sweetest funny podcasters.

This collection of poems about the women forgotten by history is witty, intelligent and funny, but it also tackles serious themes such as loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, and domestic tragedy.

Harriet Sergeant's three year friendship with a teenage gang, and in particular the gang leader, Tuggy Tug began when she was researching a report on why so many black Caribbean and white working class boys are failing

The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life- making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles.

Shakespeare and genocide, football and third-world exile, joke Nazis and real Nazis, the most unimaginable fears of a parent and David Bowie in the tropical clouds. It's all here.     

Stewart Lee is one of the country's most respected comedians, a tireless generator of new material and the inspiration for 'national treasure' Ricky Gervais, which is the cue for the start of this part-memoir/part-show transcript.

The seventieth anniversary of Penguin Books is a timely moment to look back not only on the life of its energetic founder but also on a publishing world that was founded more on great personalities than budgetary restrictions.

Suketu Mehta's impressive and expansive non-fiction book about modern Mumbai is the definitive book about this massive city.

Tina Fey, the creator of 30 Rock, one of Saturday Night Live’s best stalwarts and she of the uncanny Sarah Palin impressions in the run-up to the 2008 USA elections, may not be as widely known here as she should be

This charming tale of finding a community in a world of internet connections and fast-moving city lives and fear and suspicion is a wonderful look at people and the small ripple effects they have on each other's lives.

This grandiose manifesto was written by one of archaeology's lesser known heroes, a tactiturn man, who - as Kitty Hauser shows in this remarkable book - devoted most of his life both to his work and a twentieth-century political ideal, but ended his days disillusioned by the rapidly changing world around him.

In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road.

David Wild, a Rolling Stone journalist, guides us through this most American of pop stories with the verve and affection of a die-hard fan. 

So much has been written about London, from Dickens to Ackroyd to Monica Ali to Patrick Hamilton and on and on and more and more. Craig Taylor, the brilliantly funny author of A Million Tiny Plays About Britain has taken on the task of the definitive state of the nation (city). He has interviewed people from all walks of life, from economic migrants to middle-class poshos to refugees to tourists to artists, and everyone you can think of, in order to write Londoners, one of the most authentic books about London.

Joe Sacco is one of the most unique graphic novelists of his time. I wonder if he would even be satisfied with the label, graphic novelist. His works encompass so much more. He tells oral histories of our times. He writes journalism.

Ultimately, Askwith's message is simple: in our complicated and frenetic world, there is much to be said for taking off into the beautiful hills and mountains of our country and running until your legs turn to jelly. 'Success depends on what you have in your head and your heart; the less you have in your beackpack the better.'

How straight-laced and, let's face it, clean, twenty-first century London seems in comparison to its bawdy and filthy eighteenth-century cousin. The gap between the rich and poor was as great then as it is now, and the public's obsession with gossip about royalty and the aristocracy was as intense, but the well-to-do were not averse to visiting low-life taverns and brothels in search of adventure.

Published to coincide with the eponymous blockbuster film, Roberto Saviano's groundbreaking and compelling book is a major international bestseller.

Eating Animals takes the Fast Food Nation/Waste premise of exploring where our food comes from and beats you over the head with it. You may emerge from this vegan.

...a dazzling brilliant book that is subtly political, never heavy-handed and always cast with a fair eye.

Grossman's notebooks record with candour the horrors wrought by the mighty Nazi war machine as it advanced on Moscow in 1941 and their relentless push towards the Volga in 1942. He was in Stalingrad for the desperate and brutal last-ditch defence of the city at the end of the year, and the subsequent Red Army's encirclement of the German Sixth Army.

Vowell’s secret is that she never gets bogged down in her numerous and varied subjects. She is particularly adept at including personal anecdotes that somehow always appear to be relevant. In one 14-page chapter, she manages to write about President Theodore Roosevelt, the low self-esteem of North Dakotans, her sister Amy and her nephew Owen, bagels, an encounter her father once had with a rattlesnake, bison and Broadway Danny Rose.

An antidote to the broadsheet commentariat, this street-level view of the defining moment of the Summer of Unrest finds much to inspire hope and confidence for our future.

A 200-page survey of the history of the city, from Roman times to the present.

People around the world have found inspiration in the story of Lance Armstrong- a world-class athlete nearly struck down by cancer, only to recover and win the Tour de France

The acronym GULAG means, prosaically, Main Camp Administration, but of course it has come to symbolise in its entirety the system of prisons and industrial camps that were scattered across the most inhospitable regions of the Soviet Union. The Nazi concentration camps may have exhibited a greater fascination upon the imagination, but the horrors of the German lagers took place over a much shorter period of time. In stark contrast, as this book amply and painstakingly explains, the Soviet system initially came into being in the 1920s, but it wasn't until February 1992 that the last camps were finally closed for good.

This, then, was daily life on the Western Front: boredom, routine, fear, shock, death. It was Mary Borden's supreme achievement not only to save as many men as she did - and nurse the others gently to the end - but to put down on paper some of what it felt like to be there, living and dying in the mud.

In the wake of the extremely bloody First World War, the new genre of crime fiction began to flourish and was eagerly embraced by the reading public. A century later, as the bloody twenty-first century limbers up, crime writing has become the most popular fiction genre of all. How come?

42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season.

In 1943, two Gestapo officers in possession a deportation order arrived at the home of the Strauss family in Essen, Germany.

Long Walk to Freedom discloses a strong and generous spirit that refused to be broken under the most trying circumstances - a spirit in which just about everybody can find something to admire.

A droll and informative anti-pseudo-science book from Fine that essentially debunks the Mel Gibson-film What Woman Want.

Shields draws together his own experiences, his observations of his ageing father, the wisdom of great thinkers, and the bulging research of medical science to trace a narrative of life, from painful birth, through the extraordinary vigour and potential of youth, through slow, long years of decline to the ultimate destination - the 'D' word.  

Lawrence Osborne’s new book of travel writing, The Wet and the Dry, begins and ends at ten past six in the evening. This is the precise hour which Osborne – novelist, travel writer, bon viveur, expat and permanent exile – believes to be the perfect moment for the night’s first drink.

This graphic novel presents Cash as we know him: dangerous, possessed and full of music.

The Drowned and the Saved was written towards the end of Primo Levi's life, and unlike his earlier memoirs If This is a Man and The Truce, it doesn't explicitly narrate his experiences in Auschwitz and after liberation.

Another strange and defiant book from Will Self, to be enjoyed and endured in almost equal measure.

We get John Jeremiah Sullivan, writing with the ease of Hemingway, or S Thompson. We get a journalist and essayist for our times.

A nice idea, this: a jaunt around the streets of London immortalised on the Monopoly board, looking back to their hectic heydays as well as at the present state of them, with a little bit of Monopoly history and folklore thrown in for good measure.

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past.

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs.

Dave Eggers' second book in as many months is another oral history of unspoken Americans, this time dealing with survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

HHhH, the debut novel from Laurent Binet, tells the story of Operation Anthropoid, two Czechoslovakian parachutists' mission to assassinate Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich. With skill Binet guides us through Heydrich's cruel ascent to power, the Resistance fighters' preparations and the crucial showdown in Prague.

Another great collection of stories, journalism, photos and poems from Granta, this time, loosely on the theme of 'Aliens'.

Big Ray is a true accomplishment: sparse, beautiful and heartwrenching.

The author of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary returns with a magisterial and entertaining study of how English became English, and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages, many originating from the most unlikely places.

Macfarlane's talent lies in completely immersing the reader in the place he is writing about. We see, feel, hear and taste the air he breathes and we do so off the back of some startlingly beautiful prose.