Apollo imprint: 88 books

Julia Kelly met a charismatic and successful artist, Charlie Whisker, while she was working on her first novel. He was twenty years older than her. Their relationship was passionate and extraordinary; each of them inspired the other. Their friends were writers, artists and rock stars; they lived a...

Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet... Hagar Shipley – an irascible, independent nonagenarian – has lived a quiet life full of rage. As she approaches her death, she retreats from the squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect...

When they buried the Old Warrior there was only one small wreath to go on the coffin... John Hamer Shawcross never forgot that moment. Hamer Shawcross is born into a poor but aspirational working-class family in Manchester. Studious and hard-working, he becomes a socialist activist, goes into...

From the author of the bestselling Motherfoclóir, Non-fiction Irish Book of the Year. A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR. What do we talk about when we talk about Irish? When we talk about saving or supporting a language do we mean the musical combination of syllables, or something more profound? How...

The story of an engineering marvel of the twenty-first century, from Britain's bestselling railway writer. In autumn 2019, Europe's biggest infrastructure project – a state-of-the-art cross-London railway – will finally come to fruition. From Reading and Heathrow in the west, the Elizabeth...

The town governors... all flogged the inhabitants, but the first flogged them pure and simple, the second explained their zeal by referring to the needs of civilization, and the third asked only that in all matters the inhabitants should trust in their valour. One of the major satirical novels...

Few buildings carry such a freight of historical symbolism as the Palace of Versailles. First built as a hunting lodge by Louis XIII in the early seventeenth century, then radically repurposed by his absolutist son Louis XIV, Versailles became the focus of that king's centralised power. Drawing...

Founded in 1884 to promote Irish identity and revive the traditional sports of hurling, football and handball, the GAA enjoyed an intimate relationship with the nationalist movement from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. In 1914, the Irish Volunteers drilled with hurley sticks in the absence...

In 1623 the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as The First Folio. In doing so they preserved literature's most dramatically vital and poetically rich account of our human world. Endlessly reinterpreted...

Unquiet Women is an exquisitely crafted patchwork of the forgotten lives of some of the most remarkable women in history. Wynflæd was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who owned male slaves and badger-skin gowns; Egeria a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire was collapsing; Gudrid...

A STORY OF SABOTAGE, BETRAYAL AND THE TERRIBLE SADNESS OF EXILE. **'Remarkable'**The Times. **'A magnificent novel'**The Times. **'Gripping'**The Spectator. Scotland, 1940: The Fronsac, a French warship, blows up in the Firth of Clyde. The disaster is witnessed by three locals. Jackie,...

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 'Francis Pryor brings the magic of the Fens to life in a deeply personal and utterly enthralling way' TONY ROBINSON. 'Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' GUARDIAN. Inland from the Wash, on England's eastern cost, crisscrossed by substantial...

A meticulous, compellingly readable reconstruction of those three summer days that ignited the civil war – the defining event of modern Irish politics. The Irish Civil War began at around four o'clock in the morning on June 28, 1922. An 18-pounder artillery piece began to fire on the thick...

'A classic of historical fiction' HILARY MANTEL. 'By widespread assent, one of the finest historical novels ever written. It may even be the finest' TLS. Sir John Uvedale had business at Coverham Abbey in Wensleydale, lately suppressed, so he sent his people on before him to Marrick,...