I’m an author because I was a reader who loved to be transported to a world and land outside my own. My favorite books are the ones that introduce me to a place and time I’ve never been, an immersive read that brings me somewhere new. I believe in the power of story and the magic of its transport. Come along with me and discover a few books that do this very thing.
Julia Whalen is also a renowned audiobook narrator, and I listened to this book in her melodic voice, being carried to Oxford. Julia attended Oxford for a year, and she takes us there in this beautiful story.
The story is about a young American woman named Ella Durran who has made it to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Through twists and turns, Ella must decide whether to turn her back on the man she’s falling in love with or follow her political dreams, which are coming true. Can we change our dreams? Read to find out.
She could never have guessed what the year would hold...
'A pure delight . . . will stay with you long after you're done' TAYLOR JENKINS REID
Gazing up at the dreaming spires of Oxford, American student Ella Duran can't believe it: she has finally arrived at Oxford University.
A new life starts, and not even Ella's handsome lecturer Jamie Davenport can distract her from her classes. But, as the term goes on, Ella can't deny the growing attraction between them - an attraction that soon turns to love.
And when Ella learns of Jamie's life-changing secret, their relationship becomes…
I was a freelance writer for The Oxford Times for 20 years when it was well respected. For ten of those years, I wrote the Oxford Castaway series in which I cast away inspirational people from 5 continents whose lives have been affected by their time in the city. Even Lord Chris Pattern of Barnes – the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong let me cast him away on Oxtopia! Oxford is still divided between Town and Gown but I stride the two and my husband was an academic at that other Oxford University: Oxford Brookes.
The artist John Buckley made this shark to go into the roof of American Bill Heine’s terraced house. I cast both of them away on my mythical island of Oxtopia. They explained that their aim was to feel shock and awe falling from the sky. When American warplanes were leaving nearby Heyford to drop bombs on Libya, they asked what it would feel like to have your domestic world penetrated out of the blue. Not everyone liked the shark and Bill had a six-year battle against bureaucracy. This book tells that story. It is now a TOWN icon but for me, it has both personal and international significance.
It's 1986 and American jets take off near Oxford to bomb Tripoli and take out Gaddafi . . . meanwhile another missile has crashed through the shattered tiles of a quiet Oxford suburban home. This is a true story. Dive into this book which celebrates the 25th anniversary of one of England s quirkiest icons. The Hunting of the Shark spills the guts for the very first time on how this bizarre 25-foot fibreglass sculpture was conceived, constructed, erected and kept up on the roof against the full blast of Oxford City bureaucracy. Told by Bill Heine who commissioned its…
I taught at Yale for 33 years and I hold advanced degrees from the Sorbonne. I am interested in literature as lessons for life, but I am mostly a passionate letter writer, especially to the great authors who have marked me. They are never really dead. I carry them around with me.
I selected the category of Offbeat Memoirs because I have written one. I also have an Italian alter-ego, Donatella de Poitiers, who authors a blog in which she muses about how a lifelong Francophile could have forsaken la Belle France for la dolce vita in the Umbrian countryside, where the food and fresh air are way better than the roads.
What do the writers you are drawn to reveal about you? Why at certain points in our lives do we become “attached” to certain authors? The process of attachment is mysterious. As we age (and change) some things remain constant. Our attachment to a particular author may have begun in our youth, but evolved as we have. To reconnect with a favorite author can put us in touch with our younger self in unexpected ways. Mead shows how much Middlemarch has “spoken” to her throughout her life. This book is perhaps more in harmony with my own than any on the list. I have come to love books that underscore how what we read can be inseparable from the person we become.
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described…
I was a freelance writer for The Oxford Times for 20 years when it was well respected. For ten of those years, I wrote the Oxford Castaway series in which I cast away inspirational people from 5 continents whose lives have been affected by their time in the city. Even Lord Chris Pattern of Barnes – the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong let me cast him away on Oxtopia! Oxford is still divided between Town and Gown but I stride the two and my husband was an academic at that other Oxford University: Oxford Brookes.
Weimin was the university's artist-in-residence recording the restoration of the C18th Observatory and Radcliffe hospital, the bulldozing of the site, and the building of the Maths Institute and Blavatnik School of Government near Jericho. This historic collection of art evokes past, present, and future, and Town and Gown. The artist comes from Manchuria so to me, it represents Oxford as an international city.
This book is only available from the author, email Weimin He for a signed copy for £20 plus postage.
We are law professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eyal Zamir is interested in the intersections of law, economics, ethics, and psychology. In addition to theoretical studies of these issues, he engages in experimental legal studies, as well. Barak Medina studies constitutional law, human rights, and economic analysis of law. He is interested in constitutional interpretation and the interaction between common-sense morality, public opinion and adjudication.
This collection of essays by some of the leading contemporary scholars in ethics and in economics provides both critical surveys of the various interactions between these two bodies of thought and original suggestions for future advancements in this important intersection.
The collection includes both general and theoretical inquiries and more specific applications. It may be of interest both to academics (scholars and students) and to policymakers and laypersons.
Economics and ethics are both valuable tools for analyzing the behavior and actions of human beings and institutions. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, considered them two sides of the same coin, but since economics was formalized and mathematicised in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the fields have largely followed separate paths.
The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Economics provides a timely and thorough survey of the various ways ethics can, does, and should inform economic theory and practice. The first part of the book, Foundations, explores how the most prominent schools of moral philosophy relate to economics;…
My name is Ruthie Robinson, and I write romance because I love romance. I also love to research and learn new things, so if I can find a topic I know nothing about, study it enough to throw it into a love story, then life is golden. Games We Play is a love story first, but there’s also beer and bingo. I wrote it just after the start of the craft-beer craze. Games We Play is also a book about bingo halls, which I also enjoyed attending and learning about. So many of the interesting characters who find a home in my stories can be found at both beer joints and bingo halls.
I love this book for its size alone, as it clocks in at about 800 pages. I love a hefty book, and this sure is one. It’s also pretty, but mostly it’s a dictionary for just about anything you want to know about beer. It’s a great reference.
For millennia, beer has been a staple beverage in cultures across the globe. After water and tea, it is the most popular drink in the world, and it is at the centre centre of an over $450 billion industry. With the emergence of craft brewing and homebrewing, beer is experiencing a renaissance that is expanding the reach of the beer culture even further, bringing the art of brewing into homes and widening the interest in beer as an important cultural item. The Oxford Companion to Beer is the first reference work to fully investigate the history and vast scope of…
Lena Einhorn is a writer and filmmaker, with a background in medicine. She has portrayed Greta Garbo’s life before the breakthrough, in the novel Blekinge Street 32, and in Nina’s Journey, she told the story of her mother, one of the last to leave the Warsaw ghetto alive. Nina’s Journey also became a feature film, written and directed by Einhorn. The book received the National Book Award of Sweden, and the film received the National Film Award for best picture and best script, as well as a number of international awards. In 2019 the critically acclaimed autobiographical novel The Thin Ice came out.
This is one of the many books that have delved into the old question of who William Shakespeare really was. And it is one of the more clever ones, drawing clear parallels between Shakespeare's texts, on the one hand, and the travels, experiences, opinions, and facilities of the main suspect, the Earl of Oxford, on the other. Looney’s book was the first one to propose and present exhaustive evidence that the Earl of Oxford was the sole author of all of Shakespeare’s works – a hypothesis that is now dominant among those who doubt the role of the relatively uneducated and untravelled “Stratford-man”.
Excerpt from "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (Classic Reprint)
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to…
I’ve written ten books for children and adults
inspired by women throughout history, ones about American outlaws, war-time
heroes, resistance groups, and activists. I enjoy learning, researching, and
shining a spotlight on the women who shape our world today. In A Betting
Woman, the presence of three names for a single woman intrigued me. I
wondered how one name bled into the next and how life winded to a seemingly unappealing
nickname, given to Eleanor after she’d taken a man’s last dime during a card
game. Still, Eleanor kept the moniker for over a decade as she carried on. I
hope you’ll enjoy her story, along with the other strong women featured on
this list!
Becoming Mrs. Lewis is the improbable love story
of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis. And, at the novel’s onset, their coupling
truly feels improbable. While in an unhappy marriage, Joy is very much married.
She has young children. Joy has health issues. Joy and C.S. Lewis are separated
by a body of water. Yet, Joy is also a very tenacious woman, which also
included Joy inserting herself into conversations and places women at that time
didn’t frequent. I wholly respect how Joy creates a new life for herself.
Now a USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestseller! Meet the brilliant writer, fiercely independent mother, and passionate woman who captured the heart of C.S. Lewis and inspired the books that still enchant and change us today.
When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis-known as Jack-she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn't holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford professor and the beloved writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters.
This book is another that absolutely stands out in a crowded genre – a real gem. I could not put this one down.
The author manages to pack wit and humour into each page while also tackling themes of inequality and oppression. Beautifully written, fast paced, with one of my favourite lead characters of all time. The characterisation is just brilliant. I just cannot fault this wonderful book.
Ryan Wilkins grew up on a trailer park, a member of what many people would call the criminal classes. As a young Detective Inspector, he's lost none of his disgust with privileged elites - or his objectionable manners. But he notices things; they stick to his eyes. His professional partner, DI Ray Wilkins, of affluent Nigerian-London heritage, is an impeccably groomed,…
Proper English—who
needs it? Certainly not Ape, the London urchin who stole my heart in this
gentle historical mystery.
I just love the lingo in this book: "He's all mild and polite, then
turns up damned handy with his fives. That was quite a wisty caster!" Ape
grinned at the memory. "Man of parts, his lordship."
His lordship is Piers,
Lord Petteril, and both he and Ape are delightfully mysterious and unconventional
characters for a Regency-set tale. Together, the two mismatched protagonists
manage to solve a mystery (not murder, but theft) and incidentally discover a
lot about themselves in the process.
This book has wonderful characters and perfectly pitched writing. It's Agatha Christie meets Georgette Heyer.
A missing family heirloom – and one of the family stole it.
In the spring of 1812, Piers Withan is dragged from his beloved Oxford to be the new Viscount Petteril. Burdened by responsibilities he doesn’t want and the remnants of a family who don’t want him, he is saved from an irredeemable mistake by Ape, the small thief burgling his house.
When the family heirloom known as the Petteril Necklace is found to be missing, Piers seeks out his burglar to get it back. However, their search leads them to Piers’s own family – entitled, resentful and largely indebted.…
