Handpicked recommendations to other books that have a similar writing style or theme to The Adventure of English

Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the history of the alphabet in twenty-six vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts

"A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting." - Eimear McBride, New Statesman

Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means - whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state.

A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture.

An illuminating account of the birth and rise of the global political and economic system that, sustained first by Britain and now by America, created the modern world.

Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- really exists. There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.

'Who would have thought a book about punctuation could cause such a sensation? Truss serves up a delightful, unabashedly strict and sometimes snobby little book, with cheery Britishisms dotting pages that express a more international righteous indignation.'

Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z.

A scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the Oxford English Dictionary. Browse an exclusive excerpt at BookBrowse.