NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 BY WOMAN’S DAY, NEWSDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BUSTLE, AND BOOK RIOT!

“[B]rilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.” —Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You

Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Americanah in this disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place.

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.

About the Author

Candice Carty-Williams is a senior marketing executive at Vintage. In 2016, she created and launched the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, which aims to find, champion, and celebrate underrepresented writers. She contributes regularly to i-D, Refinery29, BEAT Magazine, and more, and her pieces, especially those about blackness, sex, and identity, have been shared globally. Queenie is her first novel. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @CandiceC_W.

Praise For…

“Brilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.” –Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You

“You’ll likely feel seen while reading this (yes, it’s that relatable), an example of what happens when you go looking for love and find something else instead.” –PopSugar

“You’ll read Queenie, a novel about a young Jamaican British woman trying to find her place in London, in one day. It’s that good.” –Hello Giggles

“They say Queenie is Black Bridget Jones meets Americanah. But she stands in her own right—nothing can and will compare. I can’t articulate how completely and utterly blown away I am.” –Black Girls Book Club

“An irresistible portrait of a young Jamaican-British woman living in London that grows deeper as it goes.” —Entertainment Weekly (ew.com)

“Meet Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman who works for a London newspaper, is struggling to fit in, is dealing with a breakup, and is making all kinds of questionable decisions. In other words, she’s highly relatable. A must read for ’19.” –Woman’s Day

“A black Bridget Jones, perfectly of the moment.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“[A] smart, fearless debut… This is an essential depiction of life as a black woman in the modern world, told in a way that makes Queenie dynamic and memorable.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Carty-Williams creates an utterly knowable character in Queenie, who’s as dimensional and relatable as they come as she tries to balance her own desires with what everyone else seems to want for her… This smart, funny, and tender debut embraces a modern woman’s messiness.” –Booklist (starred review)

“Adorable, funny, heartbreaking. People are going to love it.” –Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina

“My favorite novel this year. Queenie is the sort of novel you just can’t stop talking about and want everyone you know to read. Snort your tea out funny one moment and utterly heart breaking the next, (and with the best cast of characters you’ll read all year), I absolutely loved it. I can’t wait to read whatever Candice writes next. If there is anything right in the world, Candice Carty-Williams is going to be a literary superstar.” –AJ Pearce, author of Dear Mrs. Bird 

“Queenie is the best mate we all want—funny, sharp, and more than a little vulnerable. I loved climbing inside her mind and wish I could have stayed longer. I adored this novel.” –Stacey Halls, author of The Familiars

“Candice Carty-Williams is a fantastic new writer who has written a deliciously funny, characterful, topical, and thrilling novel for our times.” –Bernardine Evaristo, author of Mr. Loverman

“Hilarious and off the wall and tender.” –Nikesh Shukla, author of The One Who Wrote Destiny

“I ate up Queenie in one greedy, joyous gulp. What a treat of a book. Lots to enjoy and think about. I loved Queenie and was cheering her on all the way. I thought all the mental health stuff was brilliant and so well done and authentic—it so often isn’t, in novels—and also all the unhappy sex rang so true. Is there a sequel planned? All I wanted to do when I finished was to open book two.” –Cathy Rentzenbrink, bestselling author of The Last Act of Love

“Queenie has all the things you want in a debut novel—a startlingly fresh voice, characters you fall in love with from the very first page, and a joyous turn of phrase that makes this book almost impossible to put down. In turns hilariously funny and quietly devastating, Queenie is an important, timely story.” –Louise O’Neill, bestselling author of Asking for It

“A really special book with much to say about black female identity, sexual politics, group chats, emotional becoming in a way that feels totally unforced. Filthy, funny, and profound.” –Sharlene Teo, award-winning author of Ponti

“This book isn’t even out yet and people are talking about it. Written by a new and exciting young woman, it’s articulate, brave and, in the new parlance, ‘woke.’ Funny, wise, and of the moment, this book and this writer are the ones to watch.” –Kit de Waal, author of My Name is Leon

“Candice gives so generously with her joy, pain and humour that we cannot help but become fully immersed in the life of Queenie—a beautiful and compelling book.” –Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

“So raw and well-written and painfully relatable. It’s also clever and funny and has the most glorious cover.” –Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 

“A beautifully written and beautifully conceived series of stories about, well, conception…Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one.”—ANTHONY DOERR, author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

A candid, ultimately buoyant debut story collection about the realities of the “baby years,” whether you’re having one or not

The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or–having recently given birth–are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about what having a baby looks like.

One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another woman nervous about her biological clock “forgets” to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother’s Day contend with their losses and what it would mean to have a child.

Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, Look How Happy I’m Making You offers the rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women’s most intimate choices.

About the Author

POLLY ROSENWAIKE has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The fiction editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, she lives in Ann Arbor with the poet Cody Walker and their two daughters.

Praise For…

“I rejoiced in this collection. A radical, unflinching cycle of stories that radiate with truth and depth and care. I could weep for how good it is to see such rich, profound narratives about women’s reproductive lives. Happy tears.”
—ELISA ALBERT, author of AFTER BIRTH

“With incisive pluck, Rosenwaike’s stories turn an empathetic and humorous eye on the time in women’s lives when the question of motherhood—-whether gained or lost or desired at all—is central. Rosenwaike fearlessly plumbs the depths of women’s interior lives, giving due space to their complexity, gravity, and lightness.”
—DANIELLE LAZARIN, author of BACK TALK

“Whatever choices Polly Rosenwaike’s characters make, they struggle and question and find joy, and through their stories we come to understand parenthood and its influence all the more deeply. Rosenwaike’s debut is funny, honest, and written with grace and empathy.”
—EDAN LEPUCKI, author of WOMAN NO.17 and CALIFORNIA
 
“In this lovely collection, Polly Rosenwaike deftly traverses the season of life that is often collapsed into the shorthand “childbearing years,” honoring the pain, joy, and possibility that accompanies women’s reproductive lives with her nuanced and entertaining stories. I felt bereft when I came to the end.”
—LYDIA KIESLING, author of GOLDEN STATE

“Each story in Look How Happy I’m Making You is a lovely universe unto itself — funny, intimate, casually profound — but there is something transcendent about reading them together like this. Rosenwaike’s women all have different desires, different fates, different circumstances, but each of them conquers the maddening unknown of motherhood with richness and depth.”
—MEAGHAN O’CONNELL, author of AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING

“The world wants one story: pregnant glow, new mother tired but ever-grateful, ever-in-love. Without shying away from any of the transcendent and true beauty, Look How Happy I’m Making You shows us the many shadowed layers of pregnancy, miscarriage, birth and motherhood with an insistent bravery and searing honesty.”
—RAMONA AUSUBEL, author of AWAYLAND

“Look How Happy I’m Making You is a beautifully written and beautifully conceived series of stories about, well, conception—about the harrowing and mundane and profound ramifications of trying to extend the species. Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one.”
—ANTHONY DOERR, author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

“These stories, so artful and so visceral, help remind us that human reproduction is, despite its ubiquity, astonishing and fraught.  Polly Rosenwaike explores pregnancy and parenthood with wisdom, wit, and tender intensity.”
—CHRIS BACHELDER, author of the THE THROWBACK SPECIAL

“Deeply resonant… An exquisite collection that is candid, compassionate, and emotionally complex.”
—KIRKUS *starred review*

“Striking… Rosenwaike’s edgy stories are endearingly honest, excruciatingly detailed, and irresistibly intimate, expertly depicting what motherhood means to millennials.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 

“The 12 stories in Rosenwaike’s debut collection capture the vast and intimate moments of motherhood and womanhood… Rosenwaike’s remarkable prose conjures emotions so effectively that readers will feel pulled into the characters’ lives.”
—BOOKLIST

The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives—by the New York Times bestselling author Evan Thomas.

“She’s a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our time.”—Walter Isaacson

She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings—doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness.

She became the first ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the United States Supreme Court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the Court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise.

Women and men who want to be leaders and be first in their own lives—who want to learn when to walk away and when to stand their ground—will be inspired by O’Connor’s example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, who believed in serving her country, and who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for all women.

Advance praise for First

“A great storyteller has found his greatest subject in trailblazer Sandra Day O’Connor. Evan Thomas has written one of the most insightful and thoroughly captivating biographies I have ever read: A clear and compelling illumination of Sandra Day O’Connor’s unique voice and place in American history is told through her remarkable life’s journey from a rancher’s daughter to the first woman appointed to the highest court in the land.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“A vivid, humane, and inspiring portrait of an extraordinary woman and how she both reflected and shaped an era.”—Drew Faust, president emerita, Harvard University

About the Author

Evan Thomas is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, and Being Nixon. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner for Newsweek of the National Magazine Award), and 2008. He appears on many TV and radio talk shows, including Meet the Press and Morning Joe. Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Praise For…

“She rose to fame as the first female Supreme Court justice, but during her twenty-four years on the bench she became even more: the most powerful justice of our era.  With practical instincts and sharp intellect, she crafted sensible compromises on affirmative action, abortion, and other contentious issues.  She embodies the virtues we sorely lack today: decency, honesty, balance, and a nobility worn lightly. With amazing access to her journals and papers, Evan Thomas has written a brilliant and riveting book that captures her principles and personality.  She’s a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our time.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo Da Vinci

“A great storyteller has found his greatest subject in trailblazer Sandra Day O’Connor. Evan Thomas has written one of the most insightful and thoroughly captivating biographies I have ever read: A clear and compelling illumination of Sandra Day O’Connor’s unique voice and place in American history is told through her remarkable life’s journey from a rancher’s daughter to the first woman appointed to the highest court in the land.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“A vivid, humane, and inspiring portrait of an extraordinary woman and how she both reflected and shaped an era.”—Drew Faust, president emerita, Harvard University

“Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there was Sandra Day O’Connor, and O’Connor’s story has everything. In Evan Thomas’s brilliant and compelling book, we are given an intimate and gripping account of a pioneering American woman successfully seeking to thrive in an all-male world. Noble and flawed, selfless and ambitious, Justice O’Connor sought a more perfect union amid imperfect choices. Written with fluidity and grace, Thomas’s book is required reading for anyone interested in the role of women in America, the course of justice, and the nature of our politics. This is a landmark achievement about an American original that’s also, blessedly, a delight to read.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America

About the Author

Praise For…

From award-winning author G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King is an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan has a secret–he can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As Fatima and Hassan traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird Kingasks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

About the Author

G. Willow Wilson is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Alif the Unseen, the memoir The Butterfly Mosque, and the graphic novels Cairo, Air, and Vixen. She co-created the celebrated comic book series Ms. Marvel starring Kamala Khan, winner of the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, and recently debuted as writer of the Wonder Woman comics. She currently lives in Seattle.

The remarkable new account of an essential piece of American mythology—the trial of Lizzie Borden—based on twenty years of research and recently unearthed evidence.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?

The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central enigmatic character has endured for more than one hundred years. Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror, but one typically wrenched from its historical moment. In contrast, Cara Robertson explores the stories Lizzie Borden’s culture wanted and expected to hear and how those stories influenced the debate inside and outside of the courtroom. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden offers a window onto America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.

About the Author

Cara Robertson is a lawyer whose writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Raleigh News and Observer, and the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. She was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Law School. A former Supreme Court law clerk, she served as a legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center of which she is a Trustee. She first started researching the Lizzie Borden story as a senior at Harvard, and published her first paper on the trial in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities in 1997. The Trial of Lizzie Borden is her first book.

Praise For…

“With deft storytelling and convincing scholarship, Cara Robertson does the seemingly impossible by bringing new life to perhaps our oldest true-crime saga: the Gilded Age case of Lizzie Borden. By giving us Fall River, Massachusetts, in full and in context, as well as the panoply of characters who made the trial so sensational, Robertson has written that rarest of things: a page-turner with a point.” —Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

“A fascinating social history.” —Mary Higgins Clark, bestselling author of I’ve Got My Eyes on You

“The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a taut, understated masterpiece: the rare history book that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Cara Robertson scours the Trial of the (Nineteenth) Century with the perseverance of a scholar, the gimlet eye of a detective, and the elegance of a novelist. As she depicts the Borden murders and the young lady accused of committing them, Robertson reveals the seething class, ethnic, and gendered tensions that roiled the glittering surface of the Gilded Age.” —Jane Kamensky, author of A Revolution in Color and the Jonathan Trumball Professor of American History at Harvard University

“Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney…Fans of crime novels will love it.” —Kirkus Review

“A fast-paced, page-turning read.” —Booklist, starred review

“You won’t be disappointed.” —Hello Giggles

“Remarkable.” —Bustle

“A fascinating and definitive account of the notorious trial of Lizzie Borden, the woman accused of the brutal murder of her father and her stepmother. Beautifully written and rich in detail, The Trial of Lizzie Borden sheds new light not only on the trial itself, but also on the setting, the period, and, in a sense, on the American soul at the end of the nineteenth century. —Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, Stanford University

“The definitive account to date of one of America’s most notorious and enduring murder mysteries…a superior, page-turning true crime narrative.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Named a Best Book of the Year by: * Financial Times * New Statesman * History Today * The Spectator *

“Like a Renaissance wonder cabinet, full of surprises and opening up into a lost world.” —Stephen Greenblatt

The impeccably researched and vividly rendered account of the forgotten quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world—“a perfectly pitched poetic drama” (Financial Times) and an amazing tour through sixteenth-century Europe.

In this innovative work of history, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the extraordinary story of Hernando Colón, a singular visionary of the printing press-age who also happened to be Christopher Columbus’s illegitimate son.

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando traveled with Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, the eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues, the first ever search engine for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando restlessly and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed as ephemeral trash: ballads, erotica, newsletters, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522—documented in his poignant Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books—set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s account of Hernando’s life is a testimony to the beautiful madness of booklovers, a plunge into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world today.

About the Author

Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. His research focuses on books, libraries, and travel, which during this project has involved journeys to and through Spain, Italy, India, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Shakespeare in Swahililand and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.

Praise For…

“Like a Renaissance wonder-cabinet, full of surprises and opening up into a lost world.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve

“Now I can tell everyone in tweetlandia: READ THIS TRANSPORTING BOOK. Take it to the beach, to the countryside wherever – and thank you Edward Wilson-Lee for writing it, and with such a sense of vital grace.”  —Simon Schama

“Edward Wilson-Lee’s fascinating and beautifully written account of how Hernando conceived and assembled his library is set within a highly original biography of the compiler. It’s a work of imagination restrained by respect for evidence, of brilliance suitably alloyed by erudition, and of scholarship enlivened by sensitivity and acuity.” —Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Literary Review

“Hernando Columbus deserves to be as famous as his father, Christopher. …Wilson-Lee’s greatest strength is the subtlety with which Hernando’s public life as a courtier and his private life as a collector are interwoven. Unless you like libraries a lot then the most important thing about Hernando is not the most interesting. But in these elegantly handled parallels, Wilson-Lee leads us almost by stealth to an understanding of his subject’s greatest achievement.” —The Spectator

“A wonderful book, not least in the literal sense of an epic unfolding in a nonstop procession of marvels, ordeals and apparitions… The true measure of Wilson-Lee’s accomplishment, delivered in a simile-studded prose that is seldom less than elegant and often quite beautiful, is to make Hernando’s epic, measured in library shelves, not nautical miles, every bit as thrilling as his father’s story.” —Financial Times

“Wilson-Lee’s book – the first modern biography of Hernando written in English – is far more than just a straight account of a life, albeit a rich one… moving… Wilson-Lee does a fine job of capturing the intellectual excitement of a moment in European history.” —The New Statesman

“An elegantly written, absorbing portrait of a visionary man and his age.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Astonishing for both its geographic and intellectual breadth… A potent reminder that a great library originates as a bold adventure.” —Booklist, starred review

“[Edward Wilson-Lee] has created a cabinet of wonders with this book… Wilson-Lee’s fascinating account brings back to wholeness ‘the largest private library of the day’ while revealing the son of a renowned man as, among other things, a master librarian.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“At once an adventure tale and a history of ideas that continue to resonate…Wilson-Lee’s  insightful and entertaining work refreshes the memory of Colón’s sweeping vision.” —BookPage, starred review

Bestselling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things—and what small things tell us about our larger world.

“[Simon Garfield is] an exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite and delightful factoid.” —Sunday Times (London)

Simon Garfield writes books that shine a light on aspects of the everyday world in order to reveal the charms and eccentricities hiding in plain sight around us. After beguiling fans with books about everything from typography to time, from historic maps to the color mauve, he’s found his most delightful topic yet: miniatures.

Tiny Eiffel Towers. Platoons of brave toy soldiers. A doll’s house created for a Queen. Diminutive crime scenes crafted to catch a killer. Model villages and miniscule railways. These are just a few of the objects you will discover in the pages of In Miniature. 

Bringing together history, psychology, art, and obsession, Garfield explores what fuels the strong appeal of miniature objects among collectors, modelers, and fans. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring on us a taste of adult-sized authority. For some, the desire to play with small things becomes a desire to make small things. We live in a vast and uncertain world, and controlling just a tiny, scaled-down part of it restores our sense of order and worth.

As it explores flea circuses, microscopic food, ancient tombs, and the Vegas Strip, In Miniature changes the way we perceive our surroundings, encouraging all of us to find greatness in the smallest of things.

About the Author

Simon Garfield is the author of eighteen acclaimed books of nonfiction including Timekeepers, To the Letter, On the Map, and Just My Type. A recipient of the Somerset Maugham prize for nonfiction, he lives in London.

Praise For…

Praise for In Miniature

“If you are someone who appreciates the quirkier byways of human endeavour, there’s plenty to surprise and delight in this compendium.”

“This intriguing study of our urge to make scale models is full of bizarre stories and poignant insight…engaging and exuberant…The moral seems to be that we’re all small, relatively speaking, which is perhaps why In Miniature is not only highly entertaining; it is also moving”

“A fun read.”

“Entertaining.”

“Simon Garfield’s enthusiasm…is irresistible…Garfield offers not just intriguing snapshots of curiosities but some rather interesting history lessons.”

”In Miniature is a delicious read; quirky, unpredictable and written with a genuine savour for the subject.”

“Intriguing…full of bizarre stories and poignant insight…not only highly entertaining; it is also moving.”