Ned Boulting

One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was . . . just beauty, you know?" Sullivan didn't know, not really: the track had always been a place his father disappeared to once a year on business, a source of souvenir glasses and inscrutable passions in his Kentucky relatives. But in 2000, Sullivan, an editor and essayist for Harper's, decided to educate himself. He spent two years following the horse-both across the country, as he watched one season's juvenile crop prepare for the Triple Crown, and through time, as he tracked the animal's constant evolution in literature and art, from the ponies that appeared on the walls of European caves 30,000 years ago, to the mounts that carried the Indo-European language to the edges of the Old World, to the finely tuned but fragile yearlings that are auctioned off for millions of dollars apiece every spring and fall. The result is a witty, encyclopedic, and in the end profound meditation on what Edwin Muir called our "long-lost archaic companionship" with the horse. Incorporating elements of memoir and reportage, the Wunderkammer and the picture gallery, Blood Horses lets us see--as we have never seen before--the animal that, more than any other, made us who we are.

Succumb to one churchman's apocalyptic vision in this prophetic tale by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, William Golding (recorded by Benedict Cumberbatch as an audiobook). There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in. Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire. His master builder fearfully advises against it, for the old cathedral was miraculously built without foundations. But Jocelin is obsessed with fashioning his prayer in stone. As his halo of hair grows wilder and his dark angel darker, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, watched over by the gargoyles - until the stone pillars shriek, the earth beneath creeps, and the spire's shadow falls like an axe on the medieval world below ... 'Astounding ... So recklessly beautiful, so sad and so strange ... Holds such a place in my soul that it's more or less a sacred text.' Sarah Perry 'A kind of miracle ... Genius.' Guardian 'Quite simply, a marvel.' NYRB 'Superb ... A classic.' Rebecca West 'A master fabulist .. An iconoclast.' John Fowles 'A visionary ... His masterwork [of] faith, folly and desperate desire ... Golding at his best.' Benjamin Myers

The 1928 Ravat-Wonder team from New Zealand and Australia were the first English-speaking team to ride the Tour de France. From June through July they faced one of toughest in the race’s history: 5,476 kilometres of unsealed roads on heavy, fixed-wheel bikes. They rode in darkness through mountains with no light and brakes like glass. They weren’t expected to finish, but stadiums filled with Frenchmen eager to call their names. The winner of the 2016 Hubert Church Award for Fiction, The Invisible Mile is a powerful re-imagining of the tour from inside the peloton, where the test of endurance, for one young New Zealander, becomes a psychological journey into the chaos of the War a decade earlier. Riding on the alternating highs of cocaine and opium, victory and defeat, the rider’s mind is increasingly fixed on his encounter with his family’s past. As he nears the battlefields of the north and his last, invisible mile, the trauma of exertion and disputed guilt cast strange shadows on his story, and onlookers congregate about him waiting for revelation.

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, the biography of Robert Enke, the international footballer with the world at his feet who took his own life Here, award-winning writer Ronald Reng pieces together the puzzle of his lost friend's life. On November 10, 2009, the German national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, stepped in front of a passing train. He was 32 years old. Viewed from the outside, Enke had it all. He was a professional goalkeeper who had played for a string of Europe's top clubs, including Jose Mourinho's Benfica and Louis Van Gaal's Barcelona, and was destined to be his country's first choice for years to come. But beneath the bright veneer of success lay a darker story. Reng brings into sharp relief the specific demands and fears faced by those who play top-level sport. Heartfelt, but never sentimental, he tells the universal tragedy of a talented man's struggles against his own demons.

Journalist Tim Judah’s classic account, now brought fully up to date to include the overthrow of Miloševic, the assassination of Zoran Djindic, the breakaway of Kosovo, and the arrest of Radovan Karadžic. Praise for the first edition: "A lively and balanced history of the Serbs."Aleksa Djilas,New York Times Book Review "Judah writes splendidly. . . .The story he tells does much to explain both the Serb obsession with the treachery of outsiders and their quasi-religious faith in the eventual founding, or rather reestablishment, of the Serbian state."Mark Danner, New York Review of Books "Judah's book is probably the best attempt to date to explain the calamitous situation of the Serbs today through a meticulous consideration of the Serb past."David Rieff,Toronto Globe and Mail Tim Judah was Balkans correspondent for the London Times and theEconomist, and has been a frequent contributor The New York Review of Books.

Excellent Book