John Sandoe Books

A month before Cook was intending to embark on his second voyage, he took his ship, the Resolution, for a test run on the Thames. He had a particular reason for concern: Joseph Banks, the naturalist on the Endeavour, had grandly assembled a staff of fifteen and built a superstructure on the ship. Finding that it rendered the ship hopelessly top-heavy and unsuitable, Cook instructed that it be remo...

It is impossible to tell from Renoir’s celebrated portrait of two delightful, pampered-looking girls that its subject — and their family at large — are destined for a horrible end; one of the girls would be murdered in Auschwitz, by then an elderly lady. The world of Catherine Ostler's The Renoir Girls is that of the super-rich Jewish bankers of late C19th France, great patrons of the arts and app...

Simard is a genius of modern forest ecology. Her first book, Finding the Mother Tree, was at the vanguard of humanity’s understanding of the interconnectedness of trees and we were honoured that she could come to Sandoe’s to talk to us on our podcast. In this second book, When the Forest Breathes, published in March this year, the Canadian scientist recounts her ongoing research, with profound les...

Our first podcast for 2026 is with Jane Rogoyska , the author of Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War. Divided into three parts, it tells the story of the influx of mostly German refugees into Paris following the rise of the Nazis, and how the Hotel Lutetia, a grand hotel on the Left Bank, became a focus for them in organizing some kind of resistance to the regime at home. After the German Occu...

We are delighted to have Juliet back on our podcast. Her books have been regular bestsellers at Sandoe’s: The Perfect Summer, A House Full of Daughters, Frostquake, which she spoke about on the podcast in 2020. Her new book looks at the dynamics of corrosive secrets that women have been obliged to keep, how those secrets fit into a broader social context and how exposing them has been a release fo...

A mentor to Le Corbusier, Ozenfant was an artist and critic who ran art schools in Paris and London in the 1920s and ’30s. Highly regarded, he knew everyone; Leonora Carrington was a student, Henry Moore worked for him, Paolozzi admired him. Despite his connections, energy and talent, his star dimmed and he passed into obscurity. This short, beautifully written book is a superb resuscitation of a...

We are delighted to bring you a new episode of our podcast: a conversation with Jonas Hassen Khemiri. He is a Swedish novelist and playwright, a teacher on the creative writing course at NYU and a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing is warm and playful, often concerned with his own Swedish-Tunisian heritage and with the joys and exasperations of being a writer, a father and a partner...

Horatio is an outstanding writer of literary non-fiction. He’s written before about life on a container ship and on an icebreaker, three memoirs, two important books on acute mental crisis, a glorious book on Bach, a book on curlews and swallows, three delightful books for young children and a couple more on Welsh myths — all in addition to regular journalism. With the small boats crisis as its fo...

Bouverie's first book, Appeasing Hitler, was a tremendous success. His second — a history of the alliance that won the war — is once again fascinating and beautifully written. He spoke to Johnny about the destruction of the French fleet by the British (they had been allies months earlier), the betrayal of Poland, and the significance of public opinion for democracies at war; offensives that would...

Dalton, who has worked for over a decade as a parliamentary and Foreign Office policy advisor and speech-writer, found herself raising a leveret in lockdown. Her approach was to intervene as little as possible and allow the animal to remain wild – yet it still comes to snooze in her house, and has now raised leverets that treat Dalton’s small converted barn as their own. She spoke to Arabella abou...

The scapegoat in question is the Duke of Buckingham: favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman… The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria would have paid the mercenary army for four months. He was hated so fiercely by the time of his stabbing in a Portsmouth inn that his murderer was cheered en...

'motherhood is frequently politicised, but rarely acknowledged in all its fullness to be political' We were delighted that Helen Charman, a Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, whose writing has been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze and The Stinging Fly, came to the shop to speak about her new book, Mother State. The impetus behind the book — a history of motherhood in the...

Five years - almost to the day - since the first episode of the Sandoe's podcast, we welcome back the very first author to have graced our airwaves: William Dalrymple. In September 2019 he came to discuss The Anarchy; he returns, on our 80th episode, for The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. He traces the rise and spread of Buddhism from its roots, showing the dominance of Indi...

Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. He's been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; and his first novel, Dreams of Leaving - one of the earliest books to be published by Bloomsbury soon after it was established in 1986 - found fans in...

Acclaimed historian Giles Milton (Checkmate in Berlin, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Paradise Lost) talks to Johnny about his new book on the US and Britain's diplomatic mission to brace Stalin against the Germans and bring him into WW2 as an ally.  Edited by Magnus Rena

Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked with Complicité, Florence...

Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian rubber industry. In 1911 he was knighted; five years later he would be executed in Pentonville Prison for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a closeted queer man and an Irish Nationalist — is the subject of Roland Philipps' fantastic new bi...

A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland , a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War , is a fascinating, grisly and often witty account of the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus,...

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing  is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. It's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper, but the story of the publisher's life through twelve books, including his mother's diary and Lolita.    Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik: II. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer

Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul . It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as the process of ‘catching souls’.    Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Nick Drake, When the Day Is D...

Marina spoke with Laura Freeman about her new book, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists . Remarkably, this is the first biography of Jim Ede ever to appear. It’s a marvellous book — already a shop favourite this summer — studded with anecdotes: Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth arguing over who first put a hole in their sculpture; studio visits to Brancusi and Picasso; a hypochondri...

Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians , his first book, was an eye-watering collection of houses and gardens from Tangier to Milan and the Dolomites… each scene a private space: tasteful, indulgent, never grandiose. Now the great aesthete has turned his eye to the Aegean with Haute Bohemians: Greece: Interi...

It’s a few months since we’ve given a new podcast but we’re delighted to break the silence with a conversation with Margaret Jull Costa, the distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese, about the Spanish writer Javier Marías. Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to th...

The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a discursive and extraordinarily erudite book on an abstruse but delightful subject: those who collect, hoard, deal or care for astonishing manuscripts and illuminated books. His cast includes a Greek forger, a Fr...

George Balanchine’s life cut the twentieth century in two. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. Mr B.: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century  is more than a biography, and more than a book about ballet. It’s about a changing century and a revolutionary approach to art. Magnus talks to Jennifer Homans – balle...