Mix & Match #3 Non-Fiction TBR Edition @AlwTrustInBooks

Good morning! Welcome to another Mix & Match post here on Always Trust In Books. Today I will share with you my recent book mail, including the recent Hideaway Fall release Broken Branches which a lot of book bloggers will be discussing in the following weeks. After my book haul I will be sharing 10 non-fiction titles that are currently sat on my TBR. I need to make more time for non-fiction titles as they are really fun and interesting to review, they just take up a lot more time and energy in the reading phase. That said, I am receiving some really intriguing titles from publishers at the moment and can’t wait to get into them. Thank you as always for stopping by and please let me know if you have read/are reading any of these titles at the moment. (p.s due to a significant influx of book post yesterday, this post is rather long, my apologies).

Book Haul

The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets by Khairy Shalaby

Published by: Hoopoe Fiction

I am always looking for different and dynamic fiction, so when Hoopoe Fiction got in touch about possibly reviewing some of their titles, I was definitely intrigued. I have never read any middle-eastern fiction, but I am constantly looking for books that challenge my mind and views.

Official Synopsis: Ibn Shalaby, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through Egypt’s rich and varied past, with occasional return visits to the 1990s.

Through his wild and whimsical adventures, he meets, befriends, and falls out with sultans, poets, and an assortment of celebrities—from Naguib Mahfouz to the founder of the city of Cairo. Khairy Shalaby’s nimble storytelling brings this witty odyssey to life.

The Longing of the Dervish by Hammour Ziada

Published by: Hoopoe Fiction

Another book from Hoopoe Fiction. I am not sure about this combination of romance, history and politics, but I am going to give it a go. I am sure I can get into this as it sounds intense and complex.

Official Synopsis: At the close of the nineteenth century, freed slave Bakhit is let out of prison with the overthrow of the Mahdist state in Sudan. On the brink of death, the memory of his beloved Theodora is all that has sustained him through seven years of grim incarceration—that and his vow to avenge her killing.

Set against a backdrop of war, religious fervor, and the monumental social and political upheavals of the time, The Longing of the Dervish is a love story in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Lyrical and evocative, Hammour Ziada’s masterfully crafted novel is about sorrow, hope, and the cruelty of fate.

The Final Bet by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

Published by: Hoopoe Fiction

This is a short volume and above all else it is a crime/thriller. I am excited to see how a middle eastern crime novel translates over to the English language. I don’t get enough short and bold novels so this is a welcome treat.

Official Synopsis: When young and handsome Othman married Sofia—sophisticated, French, rich, and forty years his senior—he found his ticket out of a life of desperate poverty in the slums of Casablanca.

But when Sofia is brutally murdered, the police quickly zero in on Othman as the prime suspect.

With his mistress, the love of his life, waiting in the wings he certainly has motive. But is he guilty? Or has he been framed by an overzealous, corrupt police force?

Broken Branches by M. Jonathan Lee

Published by: Hideaway Fall

Unless you are new to book blogging or you have been out of touch for the last couple of months, you will most likely have a copy of this yourself. If you don’t then get yourself over to Hideaway Fall’s website and get on their bloggers list. Hideaway Fall are a new independent publisher who are incredibly unique and I love their image. They have come into the book community all guns blazing with care packages and personality. Check them out as soon as possible.

Official Synopsis: Family curses don’t exist. Sure, some families seem to suffer more pain than others, but a curse? An actual curse? I don’t think so.’

A family tragedy was the catalyst for Ian Perkins to return to the isolated cottage with his wife and young son. But now they are back, it seems yet more grief might befall the family.

There is still time to act, but that means Ian must face the uncomfortable truth about his past. And in doing so, he must uncover the truth behind the supposed family curse.

Clash of Eagles by Alan Smale

Published by: Titan Books

I love fantasy and I enjoy historical fiction. The Hesperian Trilogy series is a combination of both so I was elated when Titan asked me to review them. This is a rather large series so it may be a while until I can review all of these in one go!

Official Synopsis: In the year ad 1218, the 33rd Legion crosses a great ocean to the newly discovered continent of Nova Hesperia, the land of the warlike Iroqua and mound-building Cahokiani. Praetor Gaius Marcellinus and his men expect an easy victory over the native inhabitants, but instead find a unique civilization armed with weapons and strategies no Roman has ever imagined.

His legionaries massacred, Marcellinus alone is spared by his captors—kept alive for his military knowledge. Drawn into their society, he forms an uneasy friendship with the people of the city-state of Cahokia. But threats—both Roman and native—promise to assail his newfound kin, and Marcellinus will struggle to keep the peace as the continent surges towards bloody war…

Eagle In Exile by Alan Smale

Published by: Titan Books

Official Synopsis: Perfect for fans of Bernard Cornwell, Steve Berry, Naomi Novik, and Harry Turtledove, Alan Smale’s gripping alternate history series imagines a world in which the Roman Empire has survived long enough to invade North America in 1218. Now the stunning story carries hero Gaius Marcellinus deeper into the culture of an extraordinary people—whose humanity, bravery, love, and ingenuity forever change his life and destiny.

In A.D. 1218, Praetor Gaius Marcellinus is ordered to conquer North America and turning it into a Roman province. But outside the walls of the great city of Cahokia, his legion is destroyed outright; Marcellinus is the only one spared. In the months and years that follow, Marcellinus comes to see North America as his home and the Cahokians as his kin. He vows to defend these proud people from any threat, Roman or native.

After successfully repelling an invasion by the fearsome Iroqua tribes, Marcellinus realizes that a weak and fractured North America won’t stand a chance against the returning Roman army. Worse, rival factions from within threaten to tear Cahokia apart just when it needs to be most united and strong. Marcellinus is determined to save the civilization that has come to mean more to him than the empire he once served. But to survive the swords of Roma, he first must avert another Iroqua attack and bring the Cahokia together. Only with the hearts and souls of a nation at his back can Marcellinus hope to know triumph.

Eagle And Empire by Alan Smale

Published by: Titan Books

Official Synopsis: The award-winning author of Clash of Eagles and Eagle in Exile concludes his masterly alternate-history saga of the Roman invasion of North America in this stunning novel.

Roman Praetor Gaius Marcellinus came to North America as a conqueror, but after meeting with defeat at the hands of the city-state of Cahokia, he has had to forge a new destiny in this strange land. In the decade since his arrival, he has managed to broker an unstable peace between the invading Romans and a loose affiliation of Native American tribes known as the League.

But invaders from the west will shatter that peace and plunge the continent into war: The Mongol Horde has arrived and they are taking no prisoners.

As the Mongol cavalry advances across the Great Plains leaving destruction in its path, Marcellinus and his Cahokian friends must summon allies both great and small in preparation for a final showdown. Alliances will shift, foes will rise, and friends will fall as Alan Smale brings us ever closer to the dramatic final battle for the future of the North American continent.

The Only Child by Andrew Pyper

Published by: Orion Books

Those who reads this blog know I love a psychological thriller. The Only Child looks epic and I can’t wait to get involved. The plot sounds brilliantly strange and bizarre. I hope it lives up to my expectations 😀

Official Synopsis: A psychotic patient with two impossible claims. A leading forensic psychiatrist on the edge. It’s not just Dr. Dominick’s career that’s in danger…

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Lily Dominick has evaluated the mental states of some of the country’s most dangerous psychotics. But today’s client – a man with no name, accused of the most twisted crime – struck her as different from the others, despite the two impossible claims he made.

First, that he is more than two hundred years old and personally inspired Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson in creating the three novels of the nineteenth-century that define the monstrous in the modern imagination.

Second, that he’s her father.

To discover the truth behind her client, Dr. Dominick must embark on a journey that will threaten her career, her sanity, and ultimately her life.

Taut, terrifying and impossible to put down, The Only Child is perfect for fans of Lauren Beukes and Stephen King.

Non-Fiction TBR

Why?: What Makes Us Curious by Mario Livio

Published by: Simon & Schuster

Official Synopsis: Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio investigates perhaps the most human of all our characteristics—curiosity—as he explores our innate desire to know why.

Experiments demonstrate that people are more distracted when they overhear a phone conversation—where they can know only one side of the dialogue—than when they overhear two people talking and know both sides. Why does half a conversation make us more curious than a whole conversation?

In the ever-fascinating Why? Mario Livio interviewed scientists in several fields to explore the nature of curiosity. He examined the lives of two of history’s most curious geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. He also talked to people with boundless curiosity: a superstar rock guitarist who is also an astrophysicist; an astronaut with degrees in computer science, biology, literature, and medicine. What drives these people to be curious about so many subjects?

Curiosity is at the heart of mystery and suspense novels. It is essential to other forms of art, from painting to sculpture to music. It is the principal driver of basic scientific research. Even so, there is still no definitive scientific consensus about why we humans are so curious, or about the mechanisms in our brain that are responsible for curiosity.

Man of Iron: Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain by Julian Glover

Published by: Bloomsbury

Official Synopsis: The enthralling Sunday Times-bestselling biography of the shepherd boy who changed the world with his revolutionary engineering and whose genius we still benefit from today

Thomas Telford’s name is familiar; his story less so. Born in 1757 in the Scottish Borders, his father died in his infancy, plunging the family into poverty. Telford’s life soared to span almost eight decades of gloriously obsessive, prodigiously productive energy. Few people have done more to shape our nation.

Thomas Telford invented the modern road. A stonemason turned architect turned engineer, he built churches, harbours, canals, docks and the famously vertiginous Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales. He created the backbone of our national road network. His bridges are some of the most dramatic and beautiful ever built, most of all the Menai Bridge, a wonder then and now, which spans the dangerous channel between the mainland and Anglesey. His constructions were the most stupendous in Europe for a thousand years, and – astonishingly – almost everything he ever built remains in use today.

Telford was a complex man: a shepherd’s boy who loved the countryside but helped industrialise it; an ambitious man who cared little for accolades; highly sociable and charming, but peculiarly private about his personal life; and an engineer who was also a poet. He cherished a vision of a country connected to transform mobility and commerce: his radical politics lay not in ideas but the creation of useful, solid things.

In an age in which economics, engineering and national identity came together, Thomas Telford’s life was a model of what can be achieved by persistence, skill and ambition. Drawing on contemporary accounts, this, the first full modern biography of Telford, at once intimate and expansive, is an utterly original portrait. It is a book of roads and landscapes, waterways and bridges, but above all, of how one man transformed himself into the greatest engineer Britain has ever produced. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/man-of-iron-9781408837467/#sthash.pR8WMFiM.dpuf

The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic

Published by: Penguin – Allen Lane

Official Synopsis: The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city

We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers the differences between capital cities and the rest to understand why it is that we often feel more comfortable in our identities as Londoners, Muscovites, or Mumbaikars than in our national identities.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/280291/the-language-of-cities/#3g45veTtlWmRC4wq.99

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Published by: Granta Books

Official Synopsis: Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary global utility which is omnipresent, universal, and available to all: the Global Positioning System (GPS). A network of twenty-four satellites and their monitoring stations on Earth, it makes possible almost all modern technology, from the smartphone in your pocket to the Mars rover. Neither the internet nor the cloud would work without it. And it is changing us in profound ways we’ve yet to come to terms with.

Pinpoint tells the remarkable story of GPS, from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its present status as one of the most important technologies in the world. Yet while GPS has brought us breathtakingly accurate methods of timekeeping, navigation, and earthquake tracking, our overwhelming reliance on it is having unexpected consequences on our culture, and on ourselves. GPS is reshaping our thinking about privacy and surveillance, and brings with it the growing danger of GPS terrorism. And neuroscientists have even found that using GPS for navigation may be affecting our cognitive maps – possibly rearranging the grey matter in our heads – leading to the increasingly common phenomenon ‘Death by GPS’, in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains.

Deeply researched, inventive and with fascinating insights into the way we think about our place in the world, Pinpoint reveals the way that the technologies we design to help us can end up shaping our lives. It is at once a grand history of science and a far-reaching book about contemporary culture.

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick-Maker: The story of Britain through its census, since 1801 by Roger Hutchinson

Published By: Little Brown

Official Synopsis: At the beginning of each decade for 200 years the national census has presented a self-portrait of the British Isles.

The census has surveyed Britain from the Napoleonic wars to the age of the internet, through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, possession of the biggest empire on earth and the devastation of the 20th century’s two world wars.

In The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, Roger Hutchinson looks at every census between the first in 1801 and the latest in 2011. He uses this much-loved resource of family historians to paint a vivid picture of a society experiencing unprecedented changes.

Hutchinson explores the controversial creation of the British census. He follows its development from a head-count of the population conducted by clerks with quill pens, to a computerised survey which is designed to discover ‘the address, place of birth, religion, marital status, ability to speak English and self-perceived national identity of every twenty-seven-year-old Welsh-speaking Sikh metalworker living in Swansea’.

All human life is here, from prime ministers to peasants and paupers, from Irish rebels to English patriots, from the last native speakers of Cornish to the first professional footballers, from communities of prostitutes to individuals called ‘abecedarians’ who made a living from teaching the alphabet.

Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve: The literary quirks and oddities of our most-loved authors by Ben Blatt

Published by: Simon & Schuster

Official Synopsis: Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve is a playful look at what the numbers have to say about our favourite authors and their classic books. Journalist and statistician Ben Blatt asks the questions that have intrigued curious book lovers for generations: Does each writer have their own stylistic footprint? Do men and women write differently? What are the crutch words our best-loved authors fall back on? Which writer is the most clichéd? Spanning from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to fan fiction, JK Rowling and Stephen King, Blatt reveals the quirks and oddities of the world’s greatest writers. This is a lighthearted, humorous book that uses numbers to inform our understanding of words to enlighten, to clarify, and, above all, to entertain.

The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants to Change Your Mind By James Garvey

Published by: Icon Books

Official Synopsis: Philosopher James Garvey explores the hidden story of persuasion and the men and women in the business of changing our minds. From the covert PR used to start the first Gulf War to the neuromarketing of products to appeal to our unconscious minds, he reveals the dark arts practised by professional persuaders.

How did we end up with a world where beliefs are mass-produced by lobbyists and PR firms? Could Google or Facebook swing elections? Are new kinds of persuasion making us less likely to live happy, decent lives in an open, peaceful world?
Is it too late, or can we learn to listen to reason again? The Persuaders is a call to think again about how we think now.

How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages by Christopher Tyerman

Published by: Penguin

Official Synopsis: Thousands left their homelands in the Middle Ages to fight wars abroad. But how did the Crusades actually happen? From recruitment propaganda to raising money, ships to siege engines, medicine to the power of prayer, this vivid, surprising history shows holy war – and medieval society – in a new light.
Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/181887/how-to-plan-a-crusade/#KoZvQQsKkAa4mgie.99

Radicals by Jamie Bartlett

Published by: William Heinemann

Release Date: 17.05.17

Official Synopsis: In the last few years the world has changed in unexpected ways. The power of radical ideas and groups is growing. What was once considered extreme is now the mainstream. But what is life like on the political fringes? What is the real power of radicals?

Radicals is an exploration of the individuals, groups and movements who are rejecting the way we live now, and attempting to find alternatives. In it, Jamie Bartlett, one of the world’s leading thinkers on radical politics and technology, takes us inside the strange and exciting worlds of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and believe they know how to fix it. From dawn raids into open mines to the darkest recesses of the internet, Radicals introduces us to some of the most secretive and influential movements today: techno-futurists questing for immortality, far-right groups seeking to close borders, militant environmentalists striving to save the planet’s natural reserves by any means possible, libertarian movements founding new countries, autonomous cooperatives in self-sustaining micro-societies, and psychedelic pioneers attempting to heal society with the help of powerful hallucinogens.

As well as providing a fascinating glimpse at the people and ideas driving these groups, Radicals also presents a startling argument: radicals are not only the symptoms of a deep unrest within the world today, but might also offer the most plausible models for our future.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109934/radicals/#pj7oGtRxIbxJoFSg.99

Thank you as always for tuning into to another (rather large) Mix & Match post. I like doing these posts as it gives me the opportunity to acknowledge all the epic books I get sent as well as seeing if any of my fellow bloggers are reading the same sort of books. I continue to appreciate all of your support and I will do my best to keep it fresh and entertaining so you feel happy about coming back for more bookish joy.

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