“Engaged, intelligent, personal, fast moving and funny.” - Financial Times Life in a Time of Plague is the story of Britain under the first 75 days of its unprecedented Covid-19 lockdown, seen from the author’s rural East Sussex valley home in England. From the refuge of a seemingly idyllic rural idyll, the book monitors in bleak and forensic detail the failure of the Government to protect Britain, and its woeful response at every stage of the pandemic. The author’s age and medical issues colour this diary with a dark humour, as his age group is most at risk. He is determined to make his 70th birthday at least, despite the thousands of deaths in Britain to date. It is a quiet slow appreciation of the bright green spring and summer of 2020 in the English countryside, set against the horrors faced by frontline workers. However, what is most surprising is that amid the death, heartache and economic carnage, there is also a silver lining, a chance to simply stop and stare, and rethink our lives. Julian Roup has produced a podcast series based on 'Life In a Time of Plague'. You can listen to it here - https://iono.fm/c/5264 - first broadcast by BizNews.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal). At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution. As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest is a love letter after a forty-year affair. Wry, funny, moving and vivid, this memoir chronicles the life of the author and the ten square miles of country he calls his Kingdom. This book is as good as a brisk walk in the woods on an autumn day. Written with love and passion, it is a hymn to landscape and freedom. It is a close and deep observation of the writer’s adopted country, the fabled Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, (the home of Winnie the Pooh), where he has lived and ridden for the past forty years. His gift is the ability to take you deep into the landscapes that make this place resonate in his heart: its streams, woods, heathlands. You meet its literary residents, A.A, Milne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. You get beneath its skin among the networks of fungi that allow the trees to speak. You taste its foods, meet its locals, both the living and the ghosts, and see its huge importance during the plague year 2020-21 through the pandemic lockdowns. His passion for horses shines through these pages and his writing is, as he himself says, a form of ‘moving meditation’. He takes you under the soil of this place and he leaves a soft glow on the landscape when he is gone.

Narrated by over twenty distinct voices and full of dangerous humour, English Passengers combines wit, adventure and historical detail in a mesmerizing display of storytelling. When Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of smugglers have their contraband confiscated they are forced to put their ship, Sincerity, up for charter. The only takers are two Englishmen, the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, who believes that the Garden of Eden was on the island of Tasmania, and Dr. Thomas Potter who is developing his sinister thesis concerning the races of man. Meanwhile an aboriginal in Tasmania, Peevay, recounts his people's struggles against the invading British. As the English passengers haplessly approach his land, their bizarre notions ever more painfully at odds with reality, we know a mighty collision is looming.