Far from London's crime and pollution, Hanmouth's wealthier residents live in picturesque, heavily mortgaged cottages in the center of a town packed with artisanal cheese shops and antiques stores. They're reminded of the town's less desirable outskirts with their grim, flimsy housing stock and chain stores only when their neighbors have the presumption to claim also to live in Hanmouth.

When an eight-year-old girl from the outer area goes missing, England's eyes suddenly turn toward the sleepy town with a curiosity as piercing and unblinking as the closed-circuit security cameras that...

The loop of an "l," the chewed-on pen, letters tiny or expansive: what we've lost in the error of typing and texting

When Philip Hensher realized that he didn't know what a close friend's handwriting looked like, he felt that something essential was missing from their friendship. It dawned on him that having abandoned pen and paper for keyboards, we have lost one of the ways by which we come to recognize and know another person: handwriting.
The Missing Ink tells the story of this endangered art. Hensher introduces us to the nineteenth-century handwriting...

-Beautifully packed with detail . . . Does for Bangladesh what Rushdie did for India.- --The Sunday Times


From the Man Booker-short-listed author of The Northern Clemency, a family and a nation--Bangladesh--are forged through storytelling, conversation, jokes, feuds, blood, songs, bravery, and sacrifice.
In late 1970 a boy named Saadi is born into a large, defiantly Bengali family in eastern Pakistan. Months later the country splits in two in what will become one of the most ferocious twentieth-century civil wars. Saadi...