Portobello Books imprint: 8 books

Slavery in Britain did not end with William Wilberforce at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They may be largely invisible to us, but living in our midst are thousands of slaves. Rahila Gupta seeks out five escapees and persuades them to tell us their stories in this compelling book. We meet...

Every few months there’s a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It’s easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable...

Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel leader: he is said to take his orders directly from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalized child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Joseph Kony is now an internationally...

Years ago, Madame Verona and her husband built a home for themselves on a hill in a forest above a small village. There they lived in isolation, practising their music, and chopping wood to see them through the cold winters. When Mr Verona died, the locals might have expected that the legendary beauty...

JO BAKER was born and grew up in Lancaster, educated at Oxford and Belfast, and now teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. She is the author of two previous novels, both published by Heinemann. She is also a script writer, whose adaptation of Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley, has just won funding from the Irish Film Board.

David Bainbridge is a vet with a particular interest in evolutionary zoology - and he has just turned forty. As well as the usual concerns about greying hair, failing eyesight and goldfish levels of forgetfulness, he finds himself pondering some bigger questions: have I come to the end of my productive...

When the Sex Pistols swore live on tea-time telly in 1976, there was outrage across Britain. Headlines screamed. Christians marched. TVs were kicked in. Thirty years on, all those words are media-mainstream - bandied about with impunity on TV and in the papers. This is the story of our bad language...

It is 1953, and the last great transcontinental air race from London to Christchurch is about to begin, but even before the KLM plane has left the runway, it has already become famous as the 'bride flight'. Of its sixty emigrating passengers, many are brides-to-be flying out to join their fiancés...