Esme,
a very young motherless child, spends her days collecting scraps of paper under
the table where her father’s team is compiling entries for the first Oxford
English Dictionary. In my mind’s eye, she is each of my
two wonderful daughters at that age.
Esme matures through the tragedy of
wartime and the fight for women’s suffrage, emerging as a remarkably successful woman, again like my daughters, now in their middle years. It is a book of
great poignancy.
'An enchanting story about love, loss and the power of language' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory
Sometimes you have to start with what's lost to truly find yourself...
Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood at her father's feet as he and his team gather words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.
One day, she sees a slip of paper containing a forgotten word flutter to the floor unclaimed.
And so Esme begins to collect words for another dictionary in secret: The Dictionary of Lost Words. But to do so she must journey into a world…
Lexington was an extraordinary horse in
his own time and remains so today amidst all the living equine competition.
The story of the former slave that raised, rode, and rescued him, the powerful
men who bought, sold, and nearly stole him, the artist who painted him, and the
modern people who ensured his place in history all make their way through this
skein of marvelously reconstructed history.
I spent much of my teenage years on
the back of a quarter horse, and as I read this wonderful book, I could still
feel her changing her gaits.
"Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling." -The New York Times Book Review
"Horse isn't just an animal story-it's a moving narrative about race and art." -TIME
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an…
Only an archaeologist can love this
book like I do, but that is much of what I am.
I’ve travelled to Scotland twice
in the last fifty years, and the ancient Pictish symbol stones there have
fascinated me. What were they for? Marriage contracts? Family seats? Political alliances? Heraldry?
Iain Fraser’s exhaustive
compendium made it possible for me to test these and more propositions and to
come to a few conclusions. Other readers might find their own reasons to enjoy
this beautiful work on a unique prehistoric art form.
This is a revised and expanded version of the RCAHMS publication originally entitled Pictish Symbol Stones: A Handlist. It publishes the complete known corpus of Pictish symbol stones, including descriptions, photos and professional archaeological drawings of each. An introduction gives an overview of work on the stones, and analyses the latest thinking as to their function and meaning.
My book, The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram is about a sixteenth-century sailor who was marooned with a hundred others on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He and two shipmates were the only three who made it back to England. They did it by walking from Tampico to Florida, thence to New Brunswick, Canada, where they were rescued by a French ship in the Bay of Fundy. A dozen years later, when the English finally got interested in colonizing North America, Ingram was the only Englishman who could describe the interior of the country and its inhabitants to the men in the court of Elizabeth I. Ingram's testimony was recorded, but later so garbled by his editor that historians have discounted him as a source for the last four centuries. My research on the original manuscripts revealed that Ingram was not a liar, and that his account gave men like Francis Walsingham and Walter Ralegh what they were looking for, and much more. I am delighted to have been able to set the record straight.
