Item category 1: Classics

Guide to current thinking on 'how everything works'. Explores the mysteries of space and time; asks questions about the nature of reality, dark matter, space warps and wiggles.

Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated won the Guardian First Book Award in 2002. It tells the story of a young man who goes to the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his quest by a blind old man, a randy guide dog and a very, very ba...

Roman thought he'd found the perfect opportunity to rebel. He may have been wrong. He awakens strapped to a set of parallel bars in a richly appointed sitting room, and begins a conversation with a masked man which will change his life. His world has been a facade - one which the mysterious Brahm...

Tells the story of Britain's imperial past, and shows how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers from a rainy island in the North Atlantic came to build the most powerful empire in all history, how it ended, and how - for better or worse - it made our world what it is today.