Signed Books

From the bestselling author of Mayflies and Caledonian Road, a heart-enriching celebration of what makes us great: our friends. If we are lucky in our lives, our friendships will be rich and varied. They will be shared with those with two legs, with four legs, with whiskers or clean faces; they will come dressed in the simplicity of childhood or the professional attire of adult life; some will span decades, and some will be only fleeting.

But the thing they will all have in common is that life is not only unimaginable – but unimagined – without them. In these gorgeous personal reflections, Andrew O’Hagan explores friendship through music and poetry, memory and history, illuminating the many ways and reasons that people come together, and how our lives are all the better because we do. Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Caledonian Road was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 31/03/2024

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world. More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban.

History lives within its scarred windows and walls. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.

It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days – an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the lives of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.

The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.