Penguin Books

The story of Britain is revealed through its buildings, and yet the language of architecture is a mystery to all but a few. In this enlightening history, spanning castles and cathedrals to factories and railway stations, Jenkins translates the hidden narratives infused in the facades we walk past every day.

Witty, surprising and sparkling, this anthology is an essential exploration of Polish literature. Its thirty-nine superb stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonization by the neighbouring empires) to the present.

'Everyone was everyone's enemy, and no one was sure who would meet death. At whose hands, when and where. And why.' In Luanda, the capital of Angola, an apocalyptic atmosphere prevails as the Portuguese residents hurriedly desert the city. Determined to cover events as four hundred years of colonial rule come to an end, Ryszard Kapuściński hitched a lift on one of the last Portuguese military aircraft flying to Angola. 

Unfailingly wise and often startlingly prophetic, George Orwell’s essays are masterpieces of plain English prose. This stirring new collection brings together his most cherished pieces with lesser-known gems, ranging over everything from tree planting to living with the atom bomb, sleeping rough to the perils of getting what you want in politics.

Collecting two of his most celebrated works – Rescue, written in Warsaw in the shadow of Nazi occupation, and A Treatise on Poetry – a momentous history of Poland, told in four cantos – here lie the sharpest fruits of one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century: the Nobel Laureate who narrates the rise and fall of nations, who ‘voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts’.

Zbigniew Herbert was one of the best-known and most-translated poets of post-war Poland, opposed alike to Communism, Fascism, nationalism and the Church, yet moved, throughout his work, by ‘a powerful sense of right and wrong without a corresponding belief in a system’ (New York Times).

Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in ‘Terminus’, echo the author’s masterpiece Solaris. Then ‘The Mask’ introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, can AI fall in love or refuse its programming? What if the target of its affections is also its prey?