4th Estate If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things McGregor Jon

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come • On a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence – street cricket, barbecues, painting windows… A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever

Welcome to the Museum of Dead Things! • Your expert guides are here to introduce you to the exhibits, from FIERCE DINOSAURS to EXPLODING DEAD STARS • The Big Book of Dead Things is a funny, stylishly-illustrated non-fiction guide to all things dead and gone • Meet Ancient Egyptian mummies and learn their secrets; romp through prehistoric worlds with dinosaurs, and learn all about the death of stars as you travel through the Museum of Dead Things! • Longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Awards 'Best Book with Facts' 2020

Celebratory tenth anniversary edition, with black and white illustrations, two new short stories - Cinderella, A Version and The Rat King, the latter introducing the Crooked Man who is central to the world of The Book of Lost Things - and an afterword from the author • 'Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother . . .' • As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves and monsters in his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things

Meet the 'Keeper of Lost Things' • Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before • Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners • But the final wishes of the 'Keeper of Lost Things' have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters

The fox family are back to explore the Museum of Slimy Things! • Following a successful adventure through the Museum of Dead Things, the foxes have returned to explore the world of slime. Curated by the slipperiest experts, this special museum introduces slime found all over the natural world, from the creatures in the depths of the ocean to the slime hiding inside the human body • Learn about the science of slime, meet the gelatinous hagfish and romp through the museum's swamp in this fully illustrated, non-fiction adventure

Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers pockets - and for their secrets and lies • As he helps Akeel to make a new life out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that converge at the junction. Humming with life, packed tight with detail, The Room of Lost Things is a hymn of love to a great and overflowing city, and a profoundly human story that holds us in its grip from the first sentence until the last

Sensible, serious Norbert Norris knows all the important things: dinosaurs, planets, shapes and sums • But when the Museum of Marvellous Things is in trouble, Norbert doesn't know what to do. Only magic can save it - and he knows nothing about magic! • Norbert must learn to believe, because when you imagine incredible things, almost anything can happen

‘That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .’ • This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna’s unwritten account of what happened • Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies • In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel

Lindy Morris is stuck. She lives in rural Ireland, banished to a lonely bungalow by her Granda Morris, with only her Auntie Bell and the TV for company • But one day Lindy realises that life is not quite what she thought it was: her mother's disappearance and her own lost years need to be brought out into the light. Suddenly Lindy is awake, uncovering the very secrets that will release her from her past • Told with devastating wit and poignancy, The Saint of Lost Things is the triumphant story of an unlikely heroine as she makes her bid for freedom

‘If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination. …imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes.’ So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a prose piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo’s insistently modern culture • Of the ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are – by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past

The highly anticipated new novel from the Costa-award winning, three-times Booker-longlisted author of Reservoir 13 • When an Antarctic research expedition goes wrong, the consequences are far-reaching - for the men involved and for their families back home • Robert 'Doc' Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues to what happened, but he is no longer able to communicate them. While Anna, his wife, navigates the sharp contours of her new life as a carer, Robert is forced to learn a whole new way to be in the world • Award-winning novelist Jon McGregor returns with a stunning novel that mesmerizingly and tenderly unpicks the notion of heroism and explores the indomitable human impulse to tell our stories - even when words fail us

Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home • Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed • The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must • An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger’s tragedy refuse to subside