Showing results by publisher "Picador" in All Categories

In 2012, two weeks before her thirty-second birthday, Jo Cheetham attended her first ever protest and it changed her life for ever. She didn’t consider herself especially political or assertive. She often apologized to people who barged into her on the street and was too polite to tell the man at the pub that he’d been calling her the wrong name for two years. Her days were ‘filled with routine, boredom and the occasional panic attack’. But soon after that first protest she joined the No More Page 3 campaign team.

This wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie charts Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Revealing fascinating untold stories of the colourful characters who ascended in their wake, it tells the story of how the era of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day began to fade.

When Guy Stagg decided to walk from Canterbury to Jerusalem, he spent the next 10 months following medieval pilgrim paths across 5,500 km. He began the journey after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. Travelling alone and without support, he had to rely each night on the charity of strangers.

Azzy Williams is ready. Ready to smoke, pop pills, drink wine and ready to fight. But most of all, he’s ready to do anything for his friends, his gang, his young team. Round here, in the schemes of the forgotten industrial heartland of Scotland, your mates, your young team - they’re everything. Azzy Williams is 14; a rising star, this is his life, and he loves it. Azzy Williams is 17; he’s out of control. Azzy Williams is 21; he’d like to leave it all behind. But a way out isn’t easy to find....

A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story—of greed, love and betrayal—is about to slip from his grasp. Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s work has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize in the UK for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

A family cohabits with a horse; three riots are tucked up safely in their beds; a tumbleweed takes up a career in comedy; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those underneath; a rampaging fifty-foot poem brings terror to a city… As always in Paul Farley’s work, the quotidian and the cosmic are braided together in surprising, funny, or disconcerting ways. And as always, his poems inhabit and explore intermediate, uncertain spaces, a fertile terrain found between the obscurity of the cave and the light of knowledge linked to power.

Sara hasn't seen or heard from her childhood best-friend, Lejla, in years. She's comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can't say no. What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla's brother, who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive.

The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier's mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation. Percival Everett's novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn't know what to do with him.

1866. In a coastal village in southern England, Nell picks violets for a living. Set apart by her community because of the birthmarks that speckle her skin, Nell’s world is her beloved brother and devotion to the sea. But when Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders arrives in the village, Nell is kidnapped. Her father has sold her, promising Jasper Jupiter his very own leopard girl.

The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies - Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him - and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.

On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms as men.

When Carolyn Hays’s child made clear to the family that they were all wrong, he was not a boy, but, in fact, a girl, the Hays shifted pronouns, adopted a nickname and encouraged her to dress as she felt comfortable. One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on their door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this threat that instilled in them a deep-seated fear for their child’s safety in the Republican state they called home. And so, they uprooted their lives.

Most of us think the law is only relevant to criminals, if we even think of it at all. But the law touches every area of our lives: from intimate family matters to the biggest issues in our society. Our unfamiliarity is dangerous because it makes us vulnerable to media spin, political lies and the kind of misinformation that frequently comes from other loud-mouthed amateurs and those with vested interests. This 'fake law' allows the powerful and the ignorant to corrupt justice without our knowledge - worse, we risk letting them make us complicit.

Migraine is an age-old – the first recorded instances date back over two thousand years – and often debilitating condition, affecting a 'substantial minority' of the population across the globe. In Migraine, Oliver Sacks offers at once a medical account of its occurrence and management; an exploration of its physical, physiological, and psychological underpinnings and consequences; and a meditation on the nature and experience of health and illness.

Set in the author’s native Belfast, the ten stories in Sweet Home lay bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a middle-aged teacher becomes obsessed with a young Gaelic football player; and an employer covers for his two employees caught having sex in a public toilet.

On 26th November 1922, Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, wonderful things.' In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt.

Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the traditions of the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother’s last moments, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: ‘Eat me’. This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions. Of practical concern, she’s six-foot-two and weighs over 30 stone - even divided up between Seventh and his 11 brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan and Sixth is dead.