“My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book”

Life Of Pi

Yann Martel

“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking”

Stay With Me

Ayobami Adebayo

“I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.”

How to Stop Time

Matt Haig

“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock”

The Living Mountain

Nan Shepherd

“Most of the time she thinks that she can work it out for herself in the end. The end is nigh but she’ll keep on trying. It’s not too late”

The Dark Flood Rises

Margaret Drabble

Sum Poster
David Eagleman Possibilianism

Neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman introduces the concept of Possibilianism, a new philosophy that simultaneously embraces a scientific toolbox while exploring new, unconsidered uncertainties about the world around us.

Sum Video Trailer

In the afterlife you relive all your experience, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together…

Drawing the Kitten - Simon's Cat

Simon Tofield walks us through how to draw the kitten from Simon’s Cat: in Kitten Chaos

Timekeepers

Simon Garfield

“Garfield is an engaging writer who has stuffed Timekeepers with some fascinating material…thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating. Timely, you could even say”

Read the full review

Robin McKie

The Guardian

To the River

Olivia Laing

“To the River is a constant delight: dreamy and lyrical, meditative and wry… A beautiful - and beautifully written - book, every bit as enchanting as its watery subject.”

See on Olivia's site

Stephanie Cross

The Lady

“Dear Santa Claus, How have you been? How is your wife? I am not sure what I want for Christmas this year. Sometimes it is very hard to decide. Perhaps you should send me your catalogue”

Life According to Linus

Charles M. Schulz

“What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart”

The Lieutenant

Kate Grenville

“Dick leaves us in September and I feel sure he will receive your grateful prayers in his journey south, with the prayers of the faithful, that one day he shall return to Scotland and serve our Church in this dear land with perseverance, holiness, obedience and sacrifice”

Leaving Alexandria

Richard Holloway

“Hot blood smoked in the calcified winter air. Jack crouched on the ground like a muddy toad, cradling the rife and watching the stream of crimson like liquid fire”

Lawless

Matt Bondurant

“I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is”

Laidlaw (Laidlaw 1)

William McIlvanney

“He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland”

Jerry Lee Lewis

Rick Bragg

“Losing your innocence has very little to do with virginity, you know. Loss of innocence comes when you have to deal with the real world by yourself, when you learn that the first rule of life is kill or be killed”

Lace

Shirley Conran

“I, the being in question, having spent nearly three hundred years lost as a pomegranate pip in a lake of aspic, amnesiac, bodiless and comatose, a nugget of spirit but nothing else, found myself quickening, gaining form and weight and, finally, consciousness”

Jacob's Folly

Rebecca Miller

“Islands are potent places, and for five hundred years this exemplary sea of islands in the imagination has proved irresistible to adventurers and poets and protestors and hedonists alike”

Island People

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

“I hit play and heard a piece by Bach that I’d not heard before. And it took me to a place of such magnificence, such surrender, hope, beauty, infinite space, it was like touching God’s face”

Instrumental

James Rhodes

“This planet requires us to take actions to make our projects fly”

Insanely Gifted

Jamie Catto

“In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection”

Incognito

David Eagleman

“I really can’t believe what a state the pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they’re like a massive game of Jenga that’s got out of hand”

An Idiot Abroad

Karl Pilkington

“Ghosts, werewolves and witches are just nonsense to frighten mugs like you. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters”

I'm Not Scared

Niccolò Ammaniti

“I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye”

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

“I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist”

The Humans

Matt Haig

“Don’t be satisfied until you’re too smart for your own good!”

How to be a Grrrl

Charles M. Schulz

“It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves – they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation”

How Music Works

David Byrne