Canongate Books: 273 books

To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never...

Princeton. New Jersey. 14th March 1954 'Albert Einstein speaking.' 'Who?' asks the girl on the telephone. 'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I have the wrong number.' 'You have the right number,' Albert says. From a wrong number to a friendship that would impact both their lives, Albert Einstein Speaking begins...

A Matter of Life and Death tells fascinating stories of mysterious illnesses and miraculous scientific breakthroughs. But it is also crammed full of extraordinary characters – from the forensic anthropologist with his own Body Farm in Tennessee to the doctor who had a heart-and-lung transplant and ended up using her own lungs for research.

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors...

I wonder what you'd think of me if you found out that I've done something really serious . . .' So begin the confessions of Thomas Quick - Scandinavia's most notorious serial killer. In 1992, behind the barbed wire fence of a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, Thomas Quick confessed to...

An easy-riding, ball-busting comedy of bad manners, this is one of the most surprising and entertaining literary debuts of recent years. Pablo Baloo Miralles, a fat, useless and flatulent thirty-year-old, is the black sheep of his obscenely wealthy family. While he dedicates his days to online philosophy...

The acclaimed writer, respected thinker and outspoken former bishop Richard Holloway recounts a life defined by the biggest questions: Who am I? And what is God? At fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home in the Vale of Leven, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained...

This pamphlet is for anyone alarmed by the present British government. It argues that the component nations of the United Kingdom can become true democracies only by declaring themselves republics. The authors are Alasdair Gray, writer of fiction and pamphlets such as Why Scots Should Rule Scotland,...

Kate Grenville's The Secret River was one of the most loved novels of 2006. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the story of William Thornhill and his journey from London to the other side of the world has moved and exhilarated hundreds of thousands of readers....

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its creatures. His memoir The Dun Cow Rib is the story of a boy's awakening to the wonders of the natural world. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays - spent scrambling through hedges and ditches...

Robert the Bruce had himself crowned King of Scots at Scone on a frozen March morning in 1306. After years of struggle, Scotland had been reduced to a vassal state by Edward I of England and its people lived in poverty. On the day he seized the crown Bruce renewed the fight for Scotland's freedom,...

Seven European Cup finals. Seven fans. Seven amazing adventures following the team they love. This book celebrates the achievements of Liverpool FC in Europe, and in particular a love affair with Old Big Ears - the European Cup. It's an ongoing affair that began with the legendary and, in those days,...

The untimely death of Dougal Haston in 1977 robbed climbing of one of its most charismatic, controversial and enigmatic figures. A man of extremes, who managed to combine a rock star's lifestyle with a career at the cutting edge of world mountaineering, Haston remains a cult figure whose deeds have inspired...

AS SEEN ON BBC’S WINTERWATCH WITH CHRIS PACKHAM AND MICHAELA STRACHAN 'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that...