Profile Books A Voyage for Madmen Nichols Peter

A rich collection of classic Christmas mysteries • Christmas is a season of overindulgence. For most of us, that means an extra mince pie, a second helping of turkey, or perhaps a third glass of mulled wine. But for some, the festive season is a time to settle old scores, dispatch new enemies and indulge ... in murder • Here, ten masters of the genre serve up mystery and mayhem aplenty. From a dowager's missing jewels to a festive dinner gone horribly wrong, these classic crime stories will delight, puzzle and satisfy long after the last strands of tinsel have been cleared away

Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies • His story is a classic. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life

In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett's garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years • This account of those years was first published in 1989 in the London Review of Books. The play premiered in 1999, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Dame Maggie Smith, who reprise their roles in this new film adaptation. Shot on location at Bennett's house, Alex Jennings plays the author, alongside household names including Frances de la Tour, Jim Broadbent and Dominic Cooper

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism • But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese

Murder never takes a holiday • A rock pool with a deadly secret. A bank holiday heatwave dominated by the murder of an unknown man • A sun-drenched picnic that ends in a sinister locked-room mystery. And an Adriatic holiday interrupted by a beautiful couple ... who aren't quite who they seem to be • All these, and many more, can be found in these classic stories of summertime murder and mayhem, featuring masters of the genre from Dorothy L. Sayers to Arthur Conan Doyle. From St Mark's Square in Venice to the English seaside, their tales will puzzle, entertain and prove that - no matter how far you travel - there's no rest for the wicked

Meet Liz: all she wants is some peace and quiet so she can read a book with her cat Henry, love of her life, by her side. But trampling all over this dream is a group of wild things also known as Liz's family. Namely • Richard - a man, a husband, no serious rival to Henry • Thomas - their sensitive seven year old son, for whom life is a bed of pain already • Evie - five year old acrobat, gangster, anarchist, daughter • And as if her family's demands (Where are the door keys? Are we made of plastic? Do 'ghost poos' really count?) weren't enough, Liz must also contend with the madness of parents, friends, bosses, and at least one hovering nemesis. Are We Having Fun Yet? is a year with one woman as she faces all the storms of modern life (babysitters, death, threadworms) on her epic quest for that holy grail: a moment to herself

Murder served ice-cold • Midwinter. As snow falls softly outside and frost sparkles on tree branches, it's time to curl up before a roaring fire, wrap your hands around a steaming mug of mulled wine, and forget your worries for now. Everything is as it should be • Or is it? • As the temperature drops outside, old grudges and new motives rise to the surface - and a murder's tracks can easily be covered by freshly fallen snow. From a poisoned box of glittering chocolates to an inexplicably invisible murder weapon, let ten of the greatest crime writers in history surprise and delight you with twists and turns as shocking as an icicle in the heart

However far you travel, trouble has a way of finding you out • The summer holidays are a chance to escape from it all, to shrug off the troubles and cares of everyday life, and lounge on warm sands or sip a cool drink in the shade of a city square. But, as the characters in this murderously good collection of classic crime stories discover to their cost ... sometimes it's not that easy to escape your fate • An impossible murder on a Cornish beach. A honeymoon in the Italian lakes that becomes a desperate search for the truth. An African safari that ends with the tables being turned. Even in a heatwave, these tales of murder and malice will chill you like a shadow sliding across the sun

Following up 2016's hit Go Figure and 2018's Sunday Times bestseller Seriously Curious, another collection of astonishing bite-sized explainers from the Economist • The world can be an amazing place if you know the right questions to ask • How did carrots become orange? What's stopping us from having a four-day week? How can we remove all the broken bits of satellite from orbit? If everything is so terrible, why is the global suicide rate falling? • The keen minds of the Economist love to look beyond everyday appearances to find out what really makes things tick. In this latest collection of The Economist Explains, they have gathered together the juiciest fruits of their never-ending quest for answers. For an uncommonly interesting read, take a peek at some Uncommon Knowledge - and pass it on! The world only gets more amazing when discoveries are shared

Here are Alan Bennett's four hugely admired, triumphantly reviewed and bestselling stories, brought together in one book for the first time • Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics • The Laying on of Hands • The painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous • The Clothes They Stood Up In • The comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare • Father! Father! Burning Bright • The savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed • The Lady in the Van • The true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden

A quirky language-lovers tour of the twenty most-spoken languages in the world - what puts them a cut above the other six thousand? • If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues? • Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview • Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters

Murder is best served ... ice cold • It's only the afternoon, but dusk is already falling and a log fire burning in the grate. Outside, frost coats the tree branches and snow sparkles on the ground. And somewhere in the darkness, a murderer is making plans • Here are ten classic crime stories for the winter months, from the greatest minds of the mystery genre. So bundle up, grab a glass of mulled wine, and get ready to be puzzled, astonished and entertained by these festive stories of murder and mayhem