Barefoot Bookseller Recommendations

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There–after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes–Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, eventually leading to her circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates–and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times–collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

The renowned fashion stylist celebrates the individuality of style in this empowering volume which references the sartorial codes of well-known cultural figures, alongside providing bold and exciting wardrobe options. Maya Angelou’s perfectly fitting dress made her feel like a sunbeam. Zadie Smith’s wardrobe differs depending on whether she’s in London or New York, while Joan Didion always followed the same packing list.
Mixing thoughtful, original and contemporary pieces with trailblazers from the past, this is a gloriously eclectic celebration of self-expression.

This book provides a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance.

Marine Life of the Maldives is an identification guide for divers, snorkellers and beachcombers in the Maldives and wider Indian Ocean region. It includes all the main marine invertebrates, marine plants, mammals, reptiles and birds. By using this book as a guide, divers can recognize and understand more about the many creatures seen on the reefs and participate in their discovery. It provides the reader with an opportunity to explore previously unknown life forms and opens a whole new adventure into the world of marine invertebrates.

Set in the final days before a shocking tragedy forces an elite boarding school to shut its doors for good, Ellie Eaton’s The Divines is a razor-sharp debut that asks the question: were you really as good as you remember? With the emotional power of My Dark Vanessa and the reflective haze of The Girls, The Divines is a compulsive debut exploring the intoxicating, destructive relationships between teenage girls.

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.
Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can’t work out why she stopped.
Now he is. . . without a home, waiting for his stand-up career to take off, wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn’t looking. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story…

In this much-anticipated second book of his Stoic Virtue series, Holiday celebrates the power of self discipline and those who have seized it. To master anything, one must first master themselves – one’s emotion, one’s thoughts, one’s action. Eisenhower famously said that freedom is really the opportunity to practice self-discipline. Cicero called the virtue of temperance the polish of life, Without boundaries and restraint, we risk not only failing to meet our full potential and jeopardising what we have achieved, but we ensure misery and shame. In a world of temptation and excess, this ancient idea is more urgent than ever. Discipline is Destiny will guide readers down the path to self-mastery, upon which all the other virtues depen