Books published by publisher Fourth Estate

An unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America’s best-loved novelists.‘When I began writing this history, I let go of my doubts. I trusted the ghosts of my imagination. They showed me the hundred secret senses. And what I wrote is what I discovered about the endurance of love.’So writes Amy Tan at the beginning of this remarkably candid insight into her life. Tan takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese-American, ashamed of her parents’ Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved novelists.She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her family: the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14.How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and ‘The Opposite of Fate’ is an insight into those ancestors, the women who ‘never let me forget why these stories need to be told’.

Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Manhood for Amateurs and Moonglow, returns with a collection of heartfelt, humorous and insightful essays on the meaning of fatherhood.You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you and if you are lucky they even, on occasion, manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enoughWhat are you allowed to talk about with your children? When to step in with advice, when to let them make their own mistakes? It’s more complicated than you think. Somehow you muddle through.In this heartfelt, humorous and wise book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon attempts to weigh in on difficult conversations with his children, on everything from texting girls to death. But it is when he hangs back that he catches them transforming into their own people. What emerges is a father’s deep respect for his children’s passions and for their bravery in the face of conformity.Whether you know the joy and struggles of being a father, or were shaped by one, you will find a home in these stunning essays.

From the star of BBC One’s ‘Nigel and Adam’s Farm Kitchen’ this beautiful and easy-to-use follow-up to ‘The Kitchen Diaries II’ contains over 600 recipe ideas and is your essential go-to for what to cook every day.Returning to the territory of Nigel’s bestselling ‘Real Fast Food’, ‘Eat’ is bursting with beautifully simple and quick-to-cook recipes, in a stylish and practical flexible format that’s easy to read and use anywhere.Enjoy sizzling chorizo with potatoes and shallots; a sharp and fresh green soup; a Vietnamese-inspired prawn baguette; a one-pan Sunday lunch.Chosen by Amazon as the Best Food & Drink Book of the Year and tipped in the Guardian to be the biggest selling cookery title of 2013, the book covers everything from quick meals to share with friends to comfort food. ‘Eat’ is a new, and highly innovative, classic from Nigel Slater.

Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what they meant to her, and how they influenced movie-making forever.For Hadley Freeman, American moves of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Trading Places; all a teenager needs to know – in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action – Top Gun, Die Hard, Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex – in 9 ½ Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, Bull Durham; and family fun – in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood and Lean On Me.Born in the late 1970s, Hadley grew up on a well-rounded diet of these movies, her entire view of the world, adult relations and expectations of what her life might hold was forged by these cult classics.In this personalised guide, she puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decades key players, genres and tropes, and how exactly the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy. She looks back to a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, despite this being the decade of Wall Street, where children are always wiser than adults, and science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with excitement. She considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about pop culture’s and society’s changing expectations of women, young people and art, and explains why Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles should be put on school syllabuses immediately.

Three journeys. Three thousand years. One destination. The Devil’s Highway is a thrilling, epic and timely tale of love, loss, fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice.‘Brilliant … a powerful meditation on the damages – and the good – we have wrought, and will wreak, on the living world’ Robert Macfarlane, Book of the YearHis fingers fastened about Her stone. He brought it to the light and held it to his nose. There was lightning locked inside. He rolled the stone in his palm to give it the heat of his body. She had come to him, catching his eye where she lay among dull flints. She alone among the stones had spoken.An ancient British boy, discovering a terrorist plot, must choose between his brother and his tribe.In the twenty-first century, two men – one damaged by war, another by divorce – clash over their differing claims on the land, and a young girl is caught between them.In the distant future, a gang of feral children struggles to reach safety in a burning world.A Roman road, an Iron Age hill fort, a hand-carved flint, and a cycle of violence that must be broken.As gripping as it is dazzling, The Devil’s Highway is a bold and intimate novel that spans centuries and challenges our dearest assumptions about what it means to be civilised.