HBJH Archives - Duckworth Books

The Untold Railway Stories

A compendium of fascinating and evocative new writing on railway travel and history. Telling of little known journeys and uncovered histories on railway routes around the world – from the UK, Europe and Africa to North America, the Middle East and Asia.

From Myanmar’s highlands to the British Pennines, from slow travel between coffee plantations in Borneo to a cross-continent odyssey on African railways, from the pioneers of the American West to European trains in war, this is a new prism through which to explore human lives, and global landscapes, politics and history.

The Untold Railway Stories is a testament to both the joy and impact of train travel – to the ambition and ingenuity, and also to destruction and sacrifice within its history – and is published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of first passenger railway line.

Fall of Civilizations

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‘You need to read this book’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

‘Cooper is a phenomenon’ Max Hastings, Sunday Times

**Based on the hit podcast with over 200 million streams**

The world is full of ruins. From the Colosseum of Rome to the crumbling suburbs of Detroit, the vine-wreathed temples of the Maya to the shell-pocked buildings of Bakhmut and Gaza. Each of these ruins has a different history, but all of them are places where, one day, the future ended.

In Fall of Civilizations, historian Paul Cooper tells the stories behind our greatest civilizations, how they rose to power and what life was like for the people who witnessed their downfall. Based on the critically acclaimed podcast, this extraordinary book turns a clear eye on to humanity’s past mistakes – and whether we are doomed to repeat them.

Black Victorians

Beyond the patrician vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary.

In this deeply researched and dynamic history, Woolf and Abraham reach into the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, Black Victorians demonstrates, with storytelling verve and a liberatory impulse, how Black people were visible and influential, firmly rooted in British life.

Black Girl from Pyongyang

The extraordinary true story of a West African girl’s upbringing in North Korea under the guardianship of President Kim Il Sung.

In 1979, aged only seven, Monica Macias was sent from West Africa to the unfamiliar surroundings of North Korea by her father, the President of Equatorial Guinea, to be educated under the guardianship of his ally, Kim Il Sung.

Within months, her father was executed in a military coup; her mother became unreachable. Effectively orphaned, she and two siblings had to make their life in Pyongyang. At military boarding school, Monica learned to mix with older children, speak fluent Korean and handle weapons on training exercises.

Reaching adulthood, she went in search of her roots. Spending time in Madrid, Malabo, New York, Seoul and finally London, at every step she had to reckon with others’ perceptions of her adoptive homeland. Optimistic yet unflinching, Monica’s astonishing and unique story challenges us to see the world through different eyes.

The Bright Continent

For years Dayo Olopade struggled to reconcile the medias image of Africa as warring, impoverished and pitiful with the Africa she’s known since childhood: resilient, joyful and innovative, a continent of impassioned community leaders. She reports first-hand on the explosion of commercial opportunities and technological innovations that are improving outcomes for families, children and the environment.

The Bright Continent joins the conversation started by authors such as Jeffrey Sachs, Nicholas Kristof and Dambisa Moyo.

Olopade rejects stale and ineffectual foreign interventions, arguing that the increasingly globalised challenges the continent faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. In many ways, Africas model of doing more with less of working around dysfunctional institutions to establish strong informal networks can be a powerful model for the rest of the world. Behind the dire headlines, Olopade discovers many convincing rays of hope.

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