Showing results by publisher "Profile Audio" in Literature & Fiction

Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Wanting to know more, he took it to his English teacher Miss Iles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford's novels. Then Miss Iles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven has no memory of what happened to her.

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost... In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky.

Over the last 60 years, the Marvel superhero comic books have grown into a gigantic mountain in the middle of contemporary culture. They are the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date - and growing. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Every schoolchild recognises its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. And not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing - nobody's supposed to. So, of course, that's what Douglas Wolk did.

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando - before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture - from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank - has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age.

The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm's idyll—with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You'd think after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don't get him wrong—there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard Arthurians, people who confuse bookshops for libraries and the toddlers just looking for a nice cosy corner in which to wee. He's sure there are. There must be some good ones, right?

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers and listeners all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia.