Non-Fiction

MOSCOW, July 1987. Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump visits Soviet Russia for the first time at the invitation of the government.

LONDON, December 2016. Luke Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect’s connections with Russia. Harding follows two leads; money and sex.

WASHINGTON, January 2017. Steele’s explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been 'cultivating, supporting, and assisting' Trump for years and that they have compromising information about him. Trump responds on twitter, 'FAKE NEWS.'

In Collusion, award-winning journalist Luke Harding reveals the true nature of Trump’s decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of the dossier. It features exclusive new material and draws on sources from the intelligence community.

Harding tells an astonishing story of offshore money, sketchy real-estate deals, a Miss Universe Pageant, mobsters, money laundering, hacking and Kremlin espionage. He shines a light on powerful Russian players like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have come from Vladimir Putin himself. The special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, has already indicted several of the American protagonists, including Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. More charges are likely as the crisis engulfs Trump’s administration.

This book gets to the heart of the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Russia is reshaping the world order to its advantage: this is something that should trouble us all.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

'A beautiful book; wise and sharp-eared as its subject' – Robert Macfarlane

‘Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty. She turned her face towards me. There is a narrow area that falls between pleasing and preposterous, and this owl’s circular face and bright yellow eyes fitted into it with perfect grace...'

Owls have captivated the human imagination for millennia. We have fixated on this night hunter as predator, messenger, emblem of wisdom or portent of doom. In Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington sets out to tell a new story.

Her fieldwork begins with wild encounters in the British Isles, on the owl walks she takes with her teenage son Benji. From here, Darlington seeks to identify every European species of this charismatic and elusive bird, on a journey that will take her from southern Spain through France, Serbia and Finland, and to the frosted borders of the Arctic.

Along the way, however, Benji succumbs to a mysterious and disabling illness, and her owl quest soon becomes entangled with the search for his cure.

Owl Sense is a book about the wild in nature and in the unpredictable course of our human lives. In her watching and deep listening to owls in the natural world, Darlington cleaves myth from reality and brings the strangeness and magnificence of these creatures to life.