Transworld: 509 books

It's 1978, and Jack Sheffield begins his second year as headmaster of a small village primary school in North Yorkshire. There are three letters on his desk - one makes him smile, one makes him sad and one is destined to change his life forever. This is from nine-year-old Sebastian, suffering from...

It's 1980: recession and unemployment have hit Britain, a royal wedding is on the way, and the whole country is wondering Who Shot JR? As Jack returns for his fourth year at Ragley-on-the Forest School, there's a definite chill in the air. Village schools are being closed down all over the...

What if teleportation was really possible? Englishman Richie Fisher is about to find out ... Richie and his wife Clara have won a weekend in New York in a newspaper competition. While Clara is off blowing their spending money, Richie wanders aimlessly, chewing on a veggie-burger, ending up...

'I cannot think of a better biography of a spy chief' Richard Davenport-Hines, The Spectator Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. _________ A farmer’s son from a provincial grammar school who found himself accidentally plunged into the...

This is a re-issue of Blue Nights and Long Nights ISBN 9780552158527. Card-playing corpses, unfaithful husbands and 'flying' ladies - life as an ambulance driver in the 1970s was certainly varied ... At the age of twenty-three, Les Pringle decided to escape from office life, broaden...

Why, with absolutely no idea what Brexit actually meant, did the UK vote for Brexit? Why, rather than vote for the best-qualified candidate ever to stand as US President, did voters opt for a reality TV star with no political experience? In both cases, the winning side promised change and offered...

Weeping Willow was a place that survived by serving long-distance drivers, with petrol, food and girls. The truck driver was badly shaken as he arrived there in the dark and rain, but more shaken when he left. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Madwoman on the Bridge.

Suppose you and I still wondered whether all of the pinpoints of light in the night sky are the same distance from us. Suppose none of our contemporaries could tell us whether the Sun orbits the Earth, or vice versa, or even how large the Earth is. Suppose no one had guessed there are mathematical...

Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable that no book has been written before about John Evelyn. He was a longstanding friend of Samuel Pepys (who wrote of him, ' A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little...

In 2003 a MORI poll for the Royal Horticultural Society revealed that an extraordinary number of us are interested in attracting wildlife into our gardens. It also indicated, however, that many of us have no idea how to go about it. Information is sparse, and public opinion seems to suggest that gardens...

In this remarkable journal of visits to Eden, Mabey transports his reader from Cornwall to the Mediterranean to the Tropics, from Old World to New, from present to personal memory, to new perspectives on our collective artistic and emotional past. Sensuous and evocative, exquisitely written, his new...

What is a black hole? Could we survive a visit to one? Perhaps even venture inside? What would we find? Have we yet discovered any real black holes? And what do black holes teach us about what physicist John Archibald Wheeler called “the deep, happy, mysteries of the universe”? These...

It's a hot, crowded train. Helen Summers is on her way to see her sister Jill to tell her an awful secret. Another passenger, Kerm, is on his way back from his grandfather's funeral. They are strangers, jammed against each other in a crowded carriage. Noisy school kids fill the train - and...

The past they tried to hide. His mother died from cancer in 1955. His father committed suicide shortly thereafter. Paddy Doyle was sentenced in an Irish district court to be detained in an industrial school for eleven years. He was four years old... Paddy Doyle's prize-winning bestseller,...