Literature: history and criticism

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius

‘I relished every page … This is the best book on Jane Austen I have ever read’Spectator

‘Compelling … a delightful and engrossing book … Byrne’s passion is nothing if not persuasive’Sunday Times

Was Jane Austen a woman of prim manners and genteel calm? Or someone who behaved outrageously, filled with sharp wit and wild comedy?

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘It is good to meet the real Jane Austen at last’ Independent on Sunday

‘Brilliantly illuminating … by focusing, chapter by chapter, on one thread or another of Austen’s experience, Byrne allows us to grasp the richness of her inner life’ Guardian

Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses

A Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Bookseller and at Waterstones

‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all’

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

‘An absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDE

A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022

An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022

An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

A Preface to Paradise Lost

In Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis presents an illuminating reflection on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the seminal classic that profoundly influenced Christian thought as well as Lewis’s own work.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER

Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer

A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021

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