The Lighthouse Stevensons

‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. ‘When the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father!’

Robert Louis Stevenson was the most famous of the Stevensons, but not by any means the most productive. The Lighthouse Stevensons, all four generations of them, built every lighthouse round Scotland, were responsible for a slew of inventions in both construction and optics, and achieved feats of engineering in conditions that would be forbidding even today.

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A chilling and subversive debut novel about adolescent girls forging their identities - at any price. A group of teenage schoolgirls are on a field trip to the Forest of Dean. Vain, spoilt and interested primarily in sex, alcohol and outfits, the girls squabble and smoke, skive and bitch, torment their teachers and betray their friends, and the reader bears witness to the development and disintegration of relationships. So far, so typical. But this world of teenagers is a hall of mirrors, where the everyday can become monstrous, and nothing is quite what you expect. Soon enough something dark and sinister begins to move underneath the surface.

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The Wreckers

A fine shipwreck has always represented sport, pleasure, treasure, and in many cases, the difference between living well and just getting by. Though it is the Cornish who became most notorious for wrecking, coastal communities throughout Britain regarded as the 'sea's bounty' as an impromptu way of providing themselves with everything from grapefruits to grand pianos. Some plunderers were supposed to be so skilled that they could strip a ship from stem to stern before the Coastguard had left port, some were supposed to lure ships onto the rocks with false lights, some simply waited for winter gales to do their work. 'For a fully laden general cargo to run to ground in an accessible position is more or less like having Selfridges crash-land in your back garden,' writes Bella Bathurst, 'a Selfridges with the prices removed'.

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The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta

In 2001 a group of authors including Andrew O'Hagan, Tony Hawks and Irvine Welsh were given the opportunity to visit Sudan, one of the world's most inaccessible countries. The resulting book: The Weekenders - Travels in the Heart of Africa was an award-winning triumph, combining fiction and non-fiction into a compelling travel narrative that was both entertaining and illuminating. Now the Weekenders are back, joined by some new faces and taking on one of the world's most fascinating and contradictory cities - Calcutta.

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The Bicycle Book

A rip-roaring narrative celebration of the 21st century’s great transport success story: the bicycle. Millions of us now cycle, some obsessively, and this glorious melee of history, contemporary anecdote and lycra-clad pedallers is the perfect read for two-wheelers of all kinds.

Two wheels. A frame. Two pedals. What could be simpler than a bicycle?

And yet the bike--old, and cheap, and slightly comic--continues to inspire a passionate following. Since the millennium, its use in Britain has doubled, and then doubled again. Thousands now cycle to work, and more take it up every day. In trial after trial, it is the bike which reaches its urban destination faster than the car, the bus, the underground or the pedestrian. Self-reliant and straightforward, cycling has recycled itself. It is an antiquated idea, and its time has finally come.

But what is it about the bicycle that so enchants us? And why do its devotees become so obsessed with it?

Acclaimed author Bella Bathurst takes us on a journey through cycling’s best stories and strangest incarnations, from the bicycle as weapon of twentieth-century warfare to the secret life of couriers and the alchemy of framebuilding. With a cast of characters including the woman who watercycled across the Channel, the man who raced India’s Deccan Queen train and several of today’s top cyclists, she offers us a brilliantly engaging portrait of cycling’s past, present and world-conquering future.

The result is a story of passion and obsession, of exultation, endeavour, and risk. Above all, it is the story of partnership between man and machine, perfectly balanced--a story of love and souplesse.

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