Francis Spufford

"New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do...

A novel set in 1944 London imagines the lives of five children who perished during a bombing at a local store, tracing their everyday dramas as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of twentieth-century London. 1944: A crowd gathers at the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children. In an alternative reel of time, the life...

A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, among others. Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting...

Érase una vez, hace muchos años, un lejano país entero, pueblo y dirigentes, campesinos y ciudadanos, vivió en un cuento de hadas. El truco mágico se llamaba "economía planificada" y con él se iba a conseguir el milagro de la abundancia. Las cosechas, la producción, los bienes y los servicios crecerían año tras año, con una eficiencia y una fiabilidad que nunca iba a conseguir el capitalismo. Y durante unos años maravillosos, a finales...

Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as Bagheera, the graceful black panther, and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. A rich and complex fable of human life, Kipling's enduring classic dazzles the imagination with its astonishing descriptive powers...

"Francis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story-telling and truth-telling. How must a nonfiction writer imagine facts, vivifying them to bring them to life? How must a novelist create a dependable world...

A literary anthology explores the natural wonders of the frozen landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic in a compilation of first-person narratives, cultural histories, science and nature writing, and fiction.