HBTB Archives - Duckworth Books

The Quality of Love

‘Oh, what lives they both led!’ Spectator

‘Enriched by the correspondence between the twins – for, ultimately, the great love story is theirs alone’ Telegraph

A TLS Book of the Year

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir, and George Orwell.

Out of this rich archive, The Quality of Love weaves the story of these captivating and unusually beautiful identical twins who overcame a meagre education to take 1930s London society by storm and move among Europe’s foremost intellectuals during the twentieth century’s most dramatic decades. Above all, it is a sparkling portrait of the deep connection between two spirited sisters.

The Guide to Black London

Africans have been in London since the Roman occupation and have been a visible and continuous presence there since the mid-16th century. Yet British domestic history struggles to place Black people within its narrative.

In The Guide to Black London, S. I. Martin and Michael Ohajuru offer neighbourhood-level insights into the continuity and extraordinary impact of Black people on the capital’s politics, culture and self-image. Street by street they reveal the networks of statesmen, writers, entrepreneurs, sportspeople, doctors, revolutionaries and others who changed the history of the city and the world.

The Secret Christmas

December, 1653, England. The Puritan parliament has outlawed the celebration of Christmas and while shops must stay open every day, the theatres have been forced to close their doors.

The Hawthorne family have been allowed to return to their ancestral home, Measham Hall, just in time for Christmas. This is only after Sir Nicholas Hawthorne has reluctantly agreed to take an oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth. When a theatre troupe begging alms turn up on their doorstep, the family’s Catholic traditions of hospitality and charity dictate they must welcome the strangers in, despite the risks involved. These magical and exuberant guests transform Christmas at Measham Hall into a secret celebration, filled with theatrical performances, music and bountiful banquets, much to the delight of the children, William and Alethea.

This festive prequel to The Master of Measham Hall is a delightful tale of a small rebellion and sows the seed for decisions William and Alethea will make in years to come.

Played in Germany

Beyond the booze and the bratwurst: what football really tells us about Germany

Germany is one of the world’s great footballing powers. Four-time World Cup winners, Euro 2024 hosts and home to clubs like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the country’s notorious winning mentality and vibrant fan culture are as famous as its beer and its cars. But if you look closer, what does the beautiful game really tell us about German history, culture and society?

Played in Germany takes us on a journey through modern Germany’s football heartlands in search of the issues that define it. Through the songs, stadiums and simmering resentments of football, Kit Holden sheds light on a nation so diverse and divided that the only thing that really unites it is the game itself.

From the author of Sports Book Awards-shortlisted Scheisse! We’re Going Up!

Firebrands

In twenty-five witty and vibrant biographical essays, Firebrands introduces us to the brilliant and complex women writers that every discerning reader should know about

From Murasaki Shikibu, the Japanese author of one of the world’s earliest novels, and Christine de Pizan, a poet in the royal court of medieval France, to Harriet Jacobs, who drew the world’s attention to the horrors of slavery through her own experience, Firebrands explores the lives and works of twenty-five extraordinary women writers.

Joanna Scutts guides the reader through the centuries and across the world, hailing the fascinating lives and astonishing literary achievements of these women who dared to write against the odds. Brilliantly researched and fiercely uncompromising, Firebrands is a reminder to all of us to question what – and who – is considered part of the canon.

Scheisse! We’re Going Up!

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023 (FOOTBALL BOOK OF THE YEAR)

––––––––––––

A club on the rise. A city in flux. This is Union Berlin.

No football club in the world has fans like 1. FC Union Berlin. The underdogs from East Berlin have stuck it to the Stasi, built their own stadium and even given blood to save their club. But now they face a new and terrifying prospect: success.

Scheisse! tells the human stories behind the unexpected rise of this unique football club. But it’s about more than just football. It’s about the city Union call home. As the club fights to maintain their rebel spirit among the modern football elite, their trajectory mirrors that of contemporary Berlin itself: from divided Cold War battleground to European capital of cool.

Scheisse! will appeal to readers who are captivated by sports biographies such as Raphael Honigstein’s Das Reboot and social history like John Kampfner’s Why The Germans Do It Better.

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.

Hotbed

New York City, 1912: in downtown Greenwich Village, a group of women gathered, all with a plan to change the world.

This was the first meeting of ‘Heterodoxy’, a secret social club. Its members were passionate advocates of women’s suffrage, labour rights, equal marriage and free love. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers and scientists. Hotbed is the never-before-told story of the club whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed an international feminist agenda into a modern way of life.

For readers who loved Mo Moulton’s Mutual Admiration Society and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting.

The Master of Measham Hall

1665, London. The scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Black Death engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is a lady’s companion to the Calverton household, but when she suddenly finds herself cast out on the plague-ridden streets of London, a long road to her family home of Measham Hall lies ahead.

How will this determined country girl navigate a perilous new world of religious dissenters, charlatans and a pestilence that afflicts peasants and lords alike?

The Master of Measham Hall is the first book in a page-turning historical series. In lyrical prose, Anna Abney portrays the divides at the heart of Restoration England in a timeless novel about survival, love, and family loyalty.

Vagabonds

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this Wolfson History Prize-shortlisted portrait by a rising-star historian and New Generation Thinker

Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty – Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Doré. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly – and radically – shows us the city’s most compelling period (1780–1870) at street level.

From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation – a world that challenges and fascinates us still.

Sign up to hear more