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Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Northern Europe

• Scandinavia
• Great Britain
• Ireland

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  Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  Drawing on years of interviews and conversations with Leigh Fermor and his closest friends, this beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - widely considered to be the greatest travel writer of our time.

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  Country Girl by Edna O'Brien

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Edna O'Brien's debut novel The Country Girls was banned, burned, and denounced upon it's publication in 1960. Since then, O'Brien has been hailed as doyenne of Irish fiction by the Guardian and the "most gifted woman writing in English” by Philip Roth.
  
  Her honest, emotional, and beautifully crafted memoir follows her from degradation in 1930's Ireland, convent schools, elopement and divorce, the 'swinging' London of the sixties and encounters with the great and the good of Hollywood, Music and Literature. A truly remarkable life, and a remarkable book.
  
  Read the New York Times review here.

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  Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  An immensely entertaining and often very moving account of the Double Cross System; a core team of five double agents who successfully convinced the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force. It was one of the oddest military units ever assembled: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is here revealed for the first time.

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  Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwoood

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  This fortuitously-timed account, released in paperback only weeks after the announcement of the discovery of Richard III underneath a car park in Leicester, guides us through the events that shaped the history of our Island Nation. The conflict is usually explained in terms of the great men of the White and Red Roses, Henry VI, Edward IV and Henry VII, as well as the ignominiously-entombed defeated Richard. Here, Sarah Gristwood redresses the balance, the scheming Elizabeth Woodville, and the zealous Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, Anne Neville, the Kingmaker's pawn and Elizabeth of York, whose marriage brought peace to England, are brought to life in all their infamy and sympathy.

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  The Men Who Lost America by Andrew O'Shaughnessy

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  A fascinating exploration of British command during the Revolutionary War and the preservation of the Empire. It reveals the talents as well as the human foibles of a rich cast of intriguing characters.

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  Modernity Britain 1957- 1959 by David Kynaston

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  David Kynaston continues the labour of love he began with Austerity Britain and Family Britain, chronicling the postwar state of the nation. Drawn from the diaries of everyday members of the public, observations, famour memoirs and public records, the delightful detail brings to life the cultural, social and political atmosphere of the 1950's.

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  Caught by the River: A Collection of Words on Water by Various

  Price: £12.00    Add to Basket

  An charmingly intricate word-map of Britain's waterways from writers as diverse as Roger Deakin and Jarvis Cocker. Combining travelogues, reminiscences and meditations, this is a life-affirming treasure-trove of stories.

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  Holland House by Linda Kelly

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century - when the Whig party was almost constantly out of office - the home of the third Lord Holland became the unofficial centre of the Opposition. Devoted to the ideals of statesman Charles James Fox and enriched by the progressive views of a new generation of writers, critics and politicians, the influence of Holland House permeated the political climate. At a time when revolutions threatened to engulf Europe, the Whig tradition of aristocratic liberalism proved to be one of the chief factors in the peaceful achievement of parliamentary reform. Presided over by the beautiful and famously intelligent Lady Holland and combining discussion of politics and the arts, the salon attracted the greatest names of the age - Byron, Talleyrand and Madame de Stael were all frequent visitors. In this book, Linda Kelly brings to life the colourful world of Holland House.

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  The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A sublime exploration of geography, memory, pilgrimage and adventure. Macfarlane sets out to follow the vast network of old paths and routes that criss-cross Britain and its waters, and connect them to countries and continents beyond. His tracks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird-islands of the Scottish northwest, and from the disputed territories of Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts. He discovers that paths offer not just means of traversing space, but also of feeling, knowing and thinking.

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  Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards

  Price: £14.99    Add to Basket

  Holloway - a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock.
  
  n July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness.
  
  Six years later, after Deakin's early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards.
  
  This spectacular book, illustrated hauntingly by Dan Richards, is about those journeys and that landscape.

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  London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

  Price: £15.99    Add to Basket

  A rich, whirling history of London written by the biographer Peter Ackroyd. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, it includes chapters such as drinking, sex, poverty and crime and punishment, making it the perfect informative bedside book.

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  GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  An exhaustive history of the code-breaking arm of British intelligence. The author describes eccentric characters and details of eavesdropping from the Cold War to today's terrorist threats.

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  The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

  Price: £14.99    Add to Basket

  A not inconsiderable history of the British Secret Service written with open access to its archives from the last 100 years. A fascinating and unprecedented book.

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  City of Sin by Catherine Arnold

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  This anecdotal history of London's scandals throughout the ages is an entertaining read.

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  Villages of Britain by Clive Aslet

  Price: £30.00    Add to Basket

  A history of the 500 villages that make up the Great British countryside. Aslet is a storyteller, so each brief entry weaves the most notable political, geographical, economic, architectural and social facts into a charming, anecdotal paragraph. Illustrated with black and white photographs and fine drawings.

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  Stet by Diana Athill

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Here, the fascinating and lively Diana Athill, describes a life in editing. Working alongside the likes of V. S. Naipaul, Gitta Sereny and Jean Rhys, Athill's memoir makes intriguing, gossipy and literary reading.

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  On Nature: Unexpected Ramblings on the British Countryside by Selected authors

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  Offering inspiration for eager urban naturalists everywhere, this fantastic collection of essays, snapshots and memories celebrates everything from angling to music, nature to pubs.

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  Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  As much a biography of the Fitzwilliam family and their house, as a social history of the English upper-classes and the mining industry throughout the 20th century. Gripping and informative.

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  The Peregrine by J. A. Baker

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  The best piece of nature writing of all time republished in this lovely hardback edition alongside Baker's only other work The Hill of Summer and his diaries. This mysterious librarian's elegant style and ferocious intensity has prompted comparisons with Ted Hughes.

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  Raw Spirit by Iain Banks

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Author Iain Banks embarks on a journey around Scotland in search of the Holy Grail of Scottish whisky. A travelogue distilled in eccentric characters, traditions, out-of-the-way glens and the most prized spirit in the world.

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  Letters from London by Julian Barnes

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Over the early 1990s Julian Barnes wrote a series of Letters from London for the New Yorker magazine. Collected here, these entertaining and informative pieces document British news from the fall of Margaret Thatcher to the fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie.

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  Medical London by Richard Barnett

  Price: £24.00    Add to Basket

  A wonderful, treasure trove of medical history beautifully presented in a box set with maps, walks and sights. The perfect present for any doctor.

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  A Year in Lapland by Hugh Beach

  Price: £15.99    Add to Basket

  A lyrical and thoughtful account of one young American's time amongst the Saami herders of Swedish Lapland.

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  Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell

  Price: £10.00    Add to Basket

  A lovely new edition of Adrian Bell's travels through rural East Anglia during the 1930s and 1940s. A precious literary monument to traditional farming and a lost way of life.

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  Writing Home by Alan Bennett

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A collection of Alan Bennett's often hilarious diaries which span the years from 1980 until 1995.