THE GREAT WESTERN BEACH

AS GREEN AS GRASS

Emma Smith recalls in evocative detail the quality of England in the thirties and forties, with her customary verve, precision and humour.

THE FAR CRY

Fourteen-year-old Teresa is taken by her father from England to India on hearing that his ex-wife wants custody of the child. As Theresa experiences the long sea voyage and then India, she grows from a child to an interesting young woman.

MAIDENS' TRIP

In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure, freed from a middle-class background, learning how to handle a pair of 72 foot-long canal boats.

PORTABLE MAGIC: A HISTORY OF BOOKS AND THEIR READERS

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form—their 'bookhood'—that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper's Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways. Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal—and more turbulent—than we tend to imagine.

THIS IS SHAKESPEARE

An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard's inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing - not resolving - the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality.