One Million Tiny Plays About Britain

A Wonder Woman and bride-to-be finds herself worse for wear at the end of a hen night; a funeral director's love of Manchester United proves unhelpful when talking to the bereaved; two overly-vigilant mothers wrestle with their paranoia in the queue for Santa's Grotto; a widow recounts her disastrous return to the world of dating and a father realises that his son is growing away from him as he helps him tie his football boots.In these snippets of overheard conversations from across the length and breadth of the country, Craig Taylor captures the state we're in with humour and pathos and perfect timing. Laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes heartbreakingly moving, these tiny plays in which every one of us could have a starring role are little windows into other people's lives that reveal the triumphs, disasters, prejudices, horrors and joys of twenty-first-century life.Hugely entertaining and utterly addictive, this is book that can be dipped into or feasted upon in one sitting. It will change the way you listen to the world around you, and train journeys will never be the same again.

Colin Elford's A Year in the Woods is an enthralling journey into the heart of the English countryside - with a preamble by Craig Taylor. Colin Elford spends his days alone - alone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbits, the birds, and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods. From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into damp autumn and the chill winds of winter, we accompany the forest-ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being a part of the outdoors. Colin Elford immerses himself in the richly diverse and unique landscapes of Britain, existing in rhythm with natural environments. For fans of Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk orJames Rebanks' A Shepherd's Life, Colin's rare and uplifiting journey will unveil the true nature and beauty of Britain's countryside. 'This is nature for real . . . Elford describes woodland wonders in short paragraphs of luminous intensity' Daily Mail 'A poetic insight in the world of hidden Nature' Countryman 'Stalking sharpens the senses and there is an almost hallucinatory clarity to Elford's writing' Observer 'Refreshingly unsentimental. Contains some wonderful descriptions and sentences which are so profound they demand a second reading' Sunday Express Colin Elford is a forest ranger on the Dorset/Wiltshire border. Craig Taylor is the author of Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain and the editor of the magazine Five Dials.

A symphony of contemporary New York through the magnificent words of its people—from the best-selling author of Londoners. In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city's best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time--and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Best-selling author Craig Taylor has been hailed as "a peerless journalist and a beautiful craftsman" (David Rakoff), and acclaimed for the way he "fuses the mundane truth of conversation with the higher truth of art" (Michel Faber). In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners, Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New Yorkers features 75 of the most remarkable of them, their fascinating true tales arranged in thematic sections that follow Taylor's growing engagement with the city. Here are the uncelebrated people who propel New York each day--bodega cashier, hospital nurse, elevator repairman, emergency dispatcher. Here are those who wire the lights at the top of the Empire State Building, clean the windows of Rockefeller Center, and keep the subway running. Here are people whose experiences reflect the city's fractured realities: a Latina mother of a teenager jailed at Rikers, a BLM activist in the wake of police shootings. And here are those who capture the ineffable feeling of New York, such as a balloon handler in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or a security guard at the Statue of Liberty. Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of color, and the poor; the constant battle between loving the city and wanting to leave it; and the question of who gets to be considered a "New Yorker." It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that--no matter what it goes through--dares call itself the greatest in the world.

When memory takes hold, when chaos takes over and when the electricity between us becomes overwhelming. An impossible love story is given a second chance and three scorched characters are about to learn that lightning does strike twice.

“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book Review Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum. Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London—and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast—rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)—shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

Ronald Blythe's 1969 book Akenfield - a moving portrait of English country life told in the voices of the farmers and villagers themselves - is a modern classic. In 2004, writer and reporter Craig Taylor returned to the village in Suffolk on which Akenfield was based. Over the course of several months, he sought out locals who had appeared in the original book to see how their lives had changed, he met newcomers to discuss their own views, and he interviewed Ronald Blythe himself, now in his eighties. Young farmers, retired orchardmen and Eastern European migrant workers talk about the nature of farming in an age of computerization and encroaching supermarkets; commuters, weekenders and retirees discuss the realities behind the rural idyll; and the local priest, teacher and more describe the daily pleasures and tribulations of village life. Together, they offer a panoramic and revealing portrait of rural English society at a time of great change.

A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, among others. Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, 'Backroom Boys' tells the bittersweet story of how one country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else. Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars. 'Backroom Boys' is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.

Adventure abounds when a toy comes to life in this classic novel! It's Omri's birthday, but all he gets from his best friend, Patrick, is a little plastic warrior figure. Trying to hide his disappointment, Omri puts his present in a metal cupboard and locks the door with a mysterious skeleton key that once belonged to his great-grandmother. Little does Omri know that by turning the key, he will transform his ordinary plastic toy into a real live man from an altogether different time and place! Omri and the tiny warrior called Little Bear could hardly be more different, yet soon the two forge a very special friendship. Will Omri be able to keep Little Bear without anyone finding out and taking his new friend away?