Showing results by publisher "Picador" in All Categories

This is a story about how the extreme became mainstream. It reveals how the truth became ‘fake news’, how fringe ideas spread and how a candidate many dismissed as a joke was propelled to the presidency by the dark side of the internet. For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded with alt-right propagandists, who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda.

Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday. In After A Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here - at its best and at its delightful worst.

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times.

When 23-year-old Meggie meets distant and enigmatic Sabine, she recognises in her the person she would like to be. Giving up her daytime existence, her reliable boyfriend and the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the same nightshifts as Sabine could be the perfect escape for Meggie. She finds a liberating sense of freedom in indulging her growing preoccupation with Sabine and plunges herself into another existence, gradually immersing herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker.

When an ageing mother allows her 30-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept.

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country’s most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Behrouz Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone in prison. Compiled and translated from Farsi, they form an incredible story of how escaping political persecution in Iran, he ended up trapped as a stateless person.

Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.

Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child. A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest. While foraging for food, the woodcutter’s wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl.

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at an aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (mountain dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager.

By the long-time art critic of The Daily Telegraph, Warhol After Warhol tells the David-and-Goliath story of collector Joe Simon and his struggles with the [Andy] Warhol Authentication Board, a tale of power, corruption and lies, a Bad Blood for the art world.

Revolt is an eloquent and provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is not sustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological achievement and social progress or the breakdown of liberal democracy as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt or simply unresponsive to urgent needs.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, vanishes from the luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X on the last night of her family’s vacation. Several days later Alison’s naked body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the time line against it, and the men are soon released. It’s national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved, but for Claire’s family there is only the sad return home to broken lives.

Acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey turns to poetry in emphatically striking style via a true crime podcast with this, her debut collection. Isdal is comprised of three parts, the first a very funny poetic stalking of the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about a long-unsolved murder mystery, as they ruminate over meagre evidence and reach, well, very few conclusions. It is crafted in Dickey’s intellectually agile and witty rhyming style. At the centre of the book is a prose philosophical enquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, ‘sexiness’, and death.

Since the COVID pandemic forced a great many of us to work from home – whilst not affording that luxury to very many others - there has been an increasing debate about work, what we do, how we do it and what value we assign to it. Is This Working? An Oral History of Work attempts to answer those questions and to shed light on how Britons today view work and its place in their lives.

In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People’s homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, 40 young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground.

Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush is a beautiful insight into the life of outspoken Irishwoman, Augusta Gregory. A remarkable figure in Celtic history, she was married to an MP and land-owner, yet retained an unprecedented independence of both thought and deed, actively championing causes close to her heart. At once conservative and radical in her beliefs, she saw no conflict in idealizing and mythologizing the Irish peasantry, for example, while her landlord husband introduced legislation that would, in part, lead to the widespread misery, poverty and starvation of the Great Famine.

Aeon, a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, is desperate to find his Black roots. He needs to understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his friends and his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, Increase – but they don’t count. Aeon’s dad is intent on ignoring race and climbing the social ladder. And Increase has taken to demeaning all Black culture since the shady and unresolved death of his father, a Yardie gangster.

In each of the short poems in Billy Collins’s Musical Tables, the former United States Poet Laureate tempers his characteristically jocular voice with what he calls the “thrill of mortality” – flashes of profundity amongst the mundane, startling reminders of the wonder of being alive. Through the brevity of these poems, Collins’ knack for coaxing the poetry out of the everyday becomes ever more refined.

A young girl reconnects with her Korean grandmother; an artist considers her connection to the Korean folktale of the green frog; a praying mantis living in a beautiful home overlooking the park finds the New York dating scene leaves her hungering for more; a fox demon seeks revenge for her murdered sister, only for her loyalties to be torn; AI brings a grieving mother’s daughter back to life; at a spa in the mountains, a recently divorced woman has a ghostly encounter; and a recipe book instructs the reader on ‘how to eat your own heart’.