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  • Michael O'Mara and Guppy Books partnership

    Meet our New Client Publisher

    Michael O’Mara Books is proud to announce our sales and distribution partnership with Guppy Books, a new independent children’s publishing house founded in 2019 by Bella Pearson, former Publishing Director at David Fickling Books.

    Find out more

O'MARA BOOKS

Specialists in creative and inspired adult non-fiction – from history and popular science to language; sport and biography to puzzles; gift and humour to craft – that reaches readers across the world.
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LOM Art

Beautiful drawing, activity, photographic and reference books, showcasing the most exciting artists and illustrators – designed with creativity in mind.
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Buster Books

Publisher of quirky children’s books – from board books and reference titles to interactive activity, picture books and beyond …
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Coming soon

The Wonders

'A promising young historian with a taste for the exotic.' Stephen Fry

A radical new history of the Victorian age: meet the forgotten and extraordinary freak performers whose talents and disabilities helped define an era.

On 23 March, 1844, General Tom Thumb, at 25 inches tall, entered the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace and bowed low to Queen Victoria. On both sides of the Atlantic, this meeting marked a tipping point in the nineteenth century – the age of the freak was born.

Bewitching all levels of society, it was a world of astonishing spectacle – of dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins and swaggering showmen – and one that has since inspired countless novels, films and musicals. But the real stories (human dramas that so often eclipsed the fantasy presented on the stage), of the performing men, women and children, have been forgotten or marginalized in the histories of the very people who exploited them.

In this richly evocative account, Dr John Woolf uses a wealth of recently discovered material to bring to life the sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, always extraordinary stories of people who used their (dis)abilities and difference to become some of the first international celebrities. And through their lives we discover afresh some of the great transformations of the age: the birth of showbusiness, of celebrity, of advertising, of ‘alternative facts’; while also exploring the tensions between the power of fame, the impact of exploitation and our fascination with ‘otherness’.

The Good Bee

Bees are our most loyal ally. These fascinating, enigmatic creatures are a key lynchpin in the working of our planet. Without them the landscape, as well as every aisle in our supermarkets would look radically different.

And we’re not just talking about honey bees. There are more than 20,000 species of bee worldwide and only a handful make honey. Some live in colonies and others are solitary. We can all help protect them – and they desperately need protecting – but you can’t save what you don’t love. And you can’t love what you don’t know.

The Good Bee is a celebration of this most vital and mysterious of nature’s wizards. Here you’ll discover the complexities of bee behaviour – as well as the bits that still baffle us – the part they play in the natural world, their relationship with us throughout history, how they are coming under threat and what we can all do about it.

Beautifully produced, with hand-made illustrations throughout, it is a story for our times and a book to treasure.
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