Life of M | By Rachel Cusk
A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea.
She's a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said. M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away. Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography.
Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths - about the very experience of living - might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work? In Life of M, Rachel Cusk has again fashioned a new kind of literature.A novel stripped of artifice, it takes our emptiness and fills it with grace.
The Sleep Thief | By Ibtisam Azem | Translated by Sinan Antoon
‘Sleep thief is what the interrogator called me. I’ll never forget that. I would steal a few seconds of sleep so I could remain steadfast before them. The name stuck; I even dreamt about it, the same dream, night after night. I woke up not knowing what to do and drenched in sweat.’
The experimental first novel from International Booker-Prize longlisted Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem, The Sleep Thief follows the life of Gharib ('the Stranger') Haifawi as he comes of age, is drawn into resistance, makes friends, meets lovers, pushes back against traditional values, longs to be free of the labels and expectations that burden him, rails against the commodification of suffering, and dreams of a Palestinian identity that will transcend sorrow.
Will There Ever Be Another You | By Patricia Lockwood
The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she’s afraid of her own floorboards, and the lyrics of ‘What Is Love’ play over and over in her ears. ‘I’m sorry not to respond to your email,’ she writes, ‘but I live completely in the present now.’
Tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.
From one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, Will There Ever Be Another You is a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times.
G. | By John Berger
In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their liaisons with him.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.
Medea Sang Me a Corrido | By Dahlia de la Cerda | Translated By Julia Sanches & Heather Cleary
In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio, hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.
From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals — her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.
Air | By Christian Kracht | Translated By Daniel Bowles
Two men venture through strange landscapes towards unknowable destinations. Paul, a feted designer, wanders the echoing corridors of a server farm in Norway - before, in a sudden blackout, he seems to vanish.
In another time and space, a wounded stranger wakes in a forest, watched over by a young girl who helps him flee to an icebound settlement where perhaps he will find safety. Inventive, enigmatic and chromatically resonant, Air is the seductively disorienting new novel from one of the most significant European writers working today.
Heir to the ingenious fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin or Jorge Luis Borges, resistant to single interpretation, it unfolds as a haunting journey through a layered universe that may be a dream, the afterlife or reality's inverted twin.
The First House | By Avni Doshi
A woman’s husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her that he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage, an almost perfect marriage. In the following days, marooned with two young daughters in a hostile suburb, the woman starts coming apart.
As she sifts through the ruins of their shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into the forest of her own mind, where marital memories intermingle with myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses, messages hidden in the constellations, glimpses of a natural world seething and alive with portents. Over the course of a single summer, as the cicadas that have been buried in the ground for seventeen years prepare to emerge and fill the air with a plague of ecstatic transformation, the woman too is splitting, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light.
This is a novel about unhappy families – about poison seeping through the domestic space, the bloody battlefield of the home, the enduring threat posed by those closest to us. Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, it is a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth.
White Rabbits/Down Below | By Leonora Carrington
In 1940, Leonora Carrington - a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist - was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined to a mental institution, where she was subjected to sadistic treatment under the guise of medical care. In her memoir, Down Below, she describes her experiences with an anthropologist's precision and an artist's sense of the fantastic.
This volume also includes a selection of Carrington's best stories from across her lifetime, functioning as companion pieces to her surrealist-inflected non-fiction. They include 'The Debutante', in which a young woman, wishing to avoid a ball in her honour, swaps places with a hyena; 'White Rabbits', which sees a friendly neighbour come by to ask for spare decomposing meat; and 'My Flannel Knickers', in which a woman has sainthood forced upon her.
Murder in the Midday Sun: Classic Crime for the Holidays | By Various | Edited by Cecily Gayford
As dusk falls on an English summer, a detective interviews a stranger with a sinister story to tell. Among the sands of an Egyptian desert, a tourist buys a souvenir which is not quite as it seems. On the sparkling waters of the Scilly Isles, a boating trip turns deadly.
It might be the height of summer, but in the midday sun - it's murder. These ten tales of murder, mystery and mayhem make for perfect beach reading - in the latest addition to a series that has sold over 250,000 copies.
What We Can Know | By Ian McEwan
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately. What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
The Book of Guilt | By Catherine Chidgey
England, 1979. Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Every day, the triplets do their chores, play their games and take their medicine, under the watchful eyes of three mothers: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night.
Their nightmares are recorded in The Book of Dreams. Their lessons are taken from The Book of Knowledge. And their sins are reported in The Book of Guilt.
All the boys want is to be sent to the Big House in Margate, where they imagine a life of sun, sea and fairground rides. But, as the government looks to shut down the Sycamore Homes, the triplets begin to question everything they have been told. Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others.
New & Featured
Fiction
Tender: 100 poems for the first 100 days of life | By Harry Baker | Signed copies available
Tender captures all the tiny, fragile, perfect moments of new life and, with it, new parenthood. Full of sleepless wonder and with his characteristic wit and warmth, Harry Baker offers snapshots into the intense first 100 days with his son as they get to know each other. A yawn from a tiny pink mouth, a kind word from a stranger on a difficult day, the weight of a body sleeping against your chest - parents will recognise both themselves and their children in Tender and find consolation in this collection.
My Only Boy | By Rosa Rankin-Gee | Signed copies available
It is Elle’s job to manage disasters. But lately things have started to spin out of control. At work, the latest catastrophe has been live-streamed to the nation. A shock election sees an extreme-right coalition storm to power.
Then, on a night so hot it feels like London’s pavements are melting, she meets Ed. Elle and Ed are not meant to be drawn to each other. Elle has only ever been attracted to women, and Ed, billed as ‘the great gay novelist of our times’, is about to release his first book. But something inexplicable sparks between them. Can the unexpected attraction they feel last when it presents such a profound challenge to their identity? And as the country fractures and the heat rises, how will they choose between the people they’ve known themselves to be – and the people they are willing to become.
Both an unforgettable love story and a state-of-the-nation thriller, My Only Boy asks universal questions about desire, complicity, and what happens when your sense of self collapses along with the world around you.
All Grown Up | By Daisy Buchanan | Signed copies available
After thirty long years, Louisa’s daughters can finally look after themselves… or so she thinks. Because suddenly, they’re back – apparently for good.
Meg’s second-guessing her marriage. Jo’s career hangs in the balance. Amy has inexplicably quit university.
None of them empty the dishwasher. Louisa knows it’s time for some life lessons. She adores her girls, but if she’s ever going to get her (sex) life back, they’ll have to grow up – and go.
But maybe they’re not the only ones with lessons to learn… And Louisa might just discover that her daughters have something to teach her about being an adult too.
Art School (in a book): A future artist's guide to contemporary art | By Russell Tovey and Robert Diament | Signed copies available
Do you love art and want to know more but don't know where to start? Introducing Art School (in a book), a virtual gallery where you can see the most exciting contemporary artists of today, as well as some of the greatest from the twentieth century, including Henri Matisse, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frida Kahlo. And who are the visionaries, the icons, the ones to watch now? With works by Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, and David Hockney, study the art of 20 key artists working today, find out what inspires them, how they work and the meaning behind their art.
With Russell and Robert as your guides you will also discover the artist within you, with tips on new ways of seeing and reacting to the world around you and guidance on how you can develop your own creativity.
Signed Stock
Signed Stock
The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound | By Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn't believe he was deaf at all.
The Quiet Ear tells the story of Raymond's upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Raymond explores the shame of miscommunication and the joy of finding community, and shines a light on the decline of deaf education in Britain. Throughout, Raymond sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers - the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up.
The Quiet Ear is a groundbreaking and much-needed examination of deafness. A memoir, a cultural history, a call to action.
Deadwood: Gold, Guns and Greed in the American West | By Peter Cozzens
Infamous for its stage-coach robbing, whiskey-guzzling and rampant prostitution, the gold rush settlement of Deadwood, South Dakota, was once described as 'the most diabolical town on Earth'. Built in 1876 on land brazenly stolen from the Lakota people, it was an outlaw enterprise not subject to US laws or governance.
In Deadwood, award-winning historian Peter Cozzens sifts through myth and legend to recount the town's meteoric rise - a place where the currency was gold dust - and its stunning fall. He reveals how Deadwood's foundation bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, making it an exceptionally welcoming place at a time of deep-seated discrimination.
Along the way, Cozzens pulls back the curtain on legendary figures Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, and introduces us to colourful Deadwoodites: from Jack Langrishe to Judge Kuykendall, and Seth Bullock to Sol Star. This is the first book to tell Deadwood's extraordinary story in full, revealing the true tale of how one frontier town, in only three years, imprinted itself on our imaginations as the best and worst of the West.
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: On Making a Living | By Hu Anyan | Translated by Jack Hargreaves
Hu AnYan has held nineteen different jobs since he graduated. He’s been a convenience store clerk, a bicycle salesman, a security guard and a delivery driver (among many other things). Every time the work gets punishing or the bosses too bossy, he moves on, from city to city, carrying with him nothing but his copies of Chekhov and Carver.
This is his story. A runaway bestseller in China, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is about what it’s like to try and make a living – and stay sane – in the gig economy. From the pecking order on a parcel-sorting factory floor to the perfect alcohol dose to get some daylight shut-eye before a punishing night shift, from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the hiring departments to the ideal layout of a delivery route, Hu illuminates the hidden lives behind the roles that keep our world going.
But he also shows how, through the liberating power of literature, he finds solace, and even freedom in his existence. Quietly radical, brimming with humanity and humour, this book asks: what does work really mean? What should it mean? And do any of us really know how to live?
The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men | By Jon Ronson
I honestly have no clue what is going on.
This is very weird.
We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.
When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts from his son Joel who’d been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, it sets Ronson Sr. off on an adventure into an underworld of unmoored and disaffected men.
As Jon deepens his investigation into the castle and the wider ‘man crisis’ – where some are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies of what it means to be a man – urgent questions come to light. What exactly is ‘Princessing’? Why did a lawn care influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers, with catastrophic results? And more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit?
From the death of utopian factory towns to the false promise of YouTube influencer culture, Jon shows us our rapidly changing world like never before, and the men caught in the middle. A world drained of purpose, of collapsing institutions, where a new era of disinhibited behaviour has taken hold of our online and real-world selves. And as the castle mystery twists and turns into a cat-and-mouse story, will Jon be able to discover its terrifying secret hidden from the world?
The Ritual Year: A New Calendar of Britain's Feasts, Festivals and Folklore | By Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender & Rebecca Warren
Wassails and plough blessings, cheese rolling and well dressings, Bradford's Mela and the Notting Hill Carnival, summer hen races and festive sword-dancing... On any given week, somewhere in Britain, you will find people gathering - to mark a moment in the agricultural year, to commemorate an event in local history, to herald the beginning of a new season or bid farewell to the old. Some of these rituals have been passed down through the centuries; some are newer or recently revived; some have a deep connection to the British landscape or folklore, and some have been carried from other cultures and taken root here.
In this revelatory and beautifully illustrated guide to a living tradition of rites and rituals, we journey through some of the gatherings that shape our year, challenge our understanding of the past, and give pattern and meaning to communities across Britain today.
Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo | By Anjan Sundaram
A Congolese legend has that God, tired after creating the world, stopped at this part of the earth and dropped all his sacks of riches.
Written with startling beauty and acuity, Stringer is an account of the year and a half that Anjan Sundaram spent in the Congo working on the bottom rung of the Associated Press. It was an intense period that would take him deep into the shadowy city of Kinshasa, to the dense rainforests that still evoke Conrad’s vision, and to the heart of Africa’s great war, culminating in the historic and violent multiparty elections of 2006. Along the way he would go on a joyride with Kinshasa’s feral children, fend off women desperate for an escape route, and travel with an Indian businessman hunting for his fortune.
A breathtaking work of reportage that is both a gripping journey through a troubled country and an astonishing story of self-discovery.
UNMASKED: The Ultimate Guide to ADHD, Autism and Neurodivergence | By Ellie Middleton
Whether you are neurodivergent, suspect you might be, or want to be a better ally, UNMASKED will help you make sense of it all, and put the power in your hands.
Ellie was 24 when she learned she wasn't broken. She wasn't a bad person, she was neurodivergent. Her late diagnosis of ADHD and autism was like a lightbulb being switched on and she could finally start to heal from the trauma of being un-diagnosed and mis-understood for so long. Since getting her diagnosis, Ellie has made it her mission to change the way we think about autism, ADHD and neurodivergence and in UNMASKED she shares what she has learned along her journey.
Written in a bite-sized style for whizzy brains like hers, Ellie shares chapters on mental health, pretty privilege, how to navigate the workplace and the importance of self-diagnosis so that we can all better understand and celebrate neurodivergence, and ultimately make the world a more inclusive place.
The Land and its People | By David Sedaris
In The Land and Its People, David Sedaris investigates what it means to be a traveller, a brother, a lifelong friend.
Trying on the role of carer after his boyfriend Hugh's hip-replacement surgery, he both succeeds and fails. He covers ground with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. An ambivalent Duolingo bot becomes his unlikely confidante as he attempts to describe his family in a foreign language.
Ever adding to his list of 'Countries I Have Been To,' he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest's cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo. Time takes its toll: Scrolling through his address book, he counts those he couldn't bear to outline and realizes how many are already gone. He is bitten by a dog and insulted by a wee train passenger.
A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn't. It's easy to agree with the lady waving a sign that reads, 'Enough is Enough.' And yet, life holds much to delight in: the massive testicles of a ram, a trip abroad with his sisters, a really excellent reptile video, a pair of well-made cotton underpants. Throughout these essays - at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound - Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity our fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History | By Emma Warren
'Youth clubs have always existed. They always will, because there will always be young people. How we care for our youth, and what we owe them, is a question for all of us.'
In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys' and Girls' clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades. With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots' DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible, effect on music, sport, culture and society.
Arguing that we cannot advocate for what we do not understand, Warren positions youth clubs as a kind of engine room - from the famous success stories to come out of their doors, such as The Specials or Stormzy, to the untold stories of young people finding shelter, sustenance and stimulation for over a century - and why their dwindling numbers, largely due to austerity and funding cuts, is of serious concern for us all.
With this impassioned history, Warren invites us to pick up the torch and play an active part in protecting and re-igniting this vital part of UK society.
Sun Country: Writing My Way Home | By Howard Cunnell
In Sun Country, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beachlands of his boyhood after the death of his mother.
A love letter to the changing coast and sea, Sun Country is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art. At the heart of the book is Gillian, his devoted single mother, and the small yet unforgettable details of her life that are woven into a powerful meditation on impermanence, grief, class and solitude.
At once intimate and expansive, this luminous memoir traces one man's journey from loss back towards life. Through stories about the writers and painters with whom he feels a kinship – including the English Romantics, W. H. Hudson and Agnes Martin – and the history of his own Sussex working-class family, Cunnell writes his way home to a place, to a culture and to himself as an artist.
Cunnell's descriptive power, so widely praised in his first memoir, reaches a new breathtaking level, with the simplicity that only comes from the finest craft and poetry.
Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef | By Slutty Cheff
Slutty Cheff is an anonymous London chef who knows what it's really like to work in the capital's hectic restaurant scene.
From working sixty-hour weeks in windowless kitchens and being the only woman in the changing room to the pure thrill of a busy service, falling in love with other chefs and cycling home through a city bubbling over with potential, Slutty Cheff's misadventures in food and sex are about experiencing and embracing life to the fullest. The pleasure and the chaos included…
Saltwater Mansions | By David Whitehouse
Margate is in the grip of a heatwave when David Whitehouse stumbles across the mysterious story of a local woman who lived on the ground floor of Saltwater Mansions, a block of flats not far from the sea. On paper, Caroline Lane was unremarkable.
She paid her mortgage every month. She always paid her bills. But nobody had seen or heard from her for 13 years, and no one had ever come looking.
She had disappeared completely. David quickly becomes as fascinated by this missing woman as the residents of Saltwater Mansions, all of whom have their own theories to share, and their own unique stories to tell. As his obsession grows, David unearths vital clues that private detectives and amateur investigators alike have failed to spot.
But the closer he gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that this mystery was never meant to be solved, and that some stories don't want to be told. What if this one was never about Caroline Lane at all?
From acclaimed and award-winning author David Whitehouse, Saltwater Mansions is an astonishing work of creative non-fiction blending reportage and memoir to explore the extraordinary hidden lives of ordinary people, the impact of grief, and the dangerous allure of taking true crime stories into our own hands.
New & Featured
Non-Fiction
Selected Poems 1965-2005 | By Mary Oliver
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Few modern poets are as beloved or as quoted as Mary Oliver. Spanning the major decades of her long career, this collection showcases Oliver’s remarkable lyrical powers and her reverential attention to the natural world. Her poetry sees life everywhere and asks what to do with it – how can we find our place among such beauty, such pain?
Populated by wading birds, early snowfalls, and swaying cornfields, her reflections are the record of a life spent walking alone in the wild. These timeless poems meet and touch their reader in any season of life, brightened by Oliver’s gift for amazement, shadowed by her constant awareness of harshness and death. Her words teach us to live with our eyes open wider.
PORTAL | By Tracy Fuad
Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language — and even intelligence — is no longer produced only by humans.
The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, revelling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.
Talking in Bed: And other Poems | By Philip Larkin
The essential pocket edition of this most beloved and quoted of poets.
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
In lines perfectly constructed and as beautiful as they are plain-spoken, Philip Larkin found a way of delineating our most difficult emotions – giving them back to us in images and formulations that help us both comprehend and contain ourselves. His is a fine-tuning that turns ‘true and kind’ more truthfully into ‘not untrue and not unkind.’ These are poems to live with and through, from the trenchant assertion of ‘They fuck you up. . .’, to the transcendent image-making of ‘High Windows’:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Sparrow on the Rooftop | By Rachel Long
Rachel Long’s vivid new collection is a study of toxic love, crisis and recovery, at once moving and whip-smart, from one of our brightest stars in poetry. 'At first you eat less because you’re happy, / so fricking happy, the way you are in high summer / when you just can’t because of the sun.' Sparrow on the Rooftop tells a story of new love: the summer-like giddiness of it, the ferocity of obsession, and the stark hollowing of absence.
Alongside this affair, and unleashed by its intensity, unfolds another story, half-buried, about our young narrator’s uneasy relationship with her body: ‘Black girls// don’t get/ eating disorders./ That’s a white girl/ thing.’ Desire, indulgence, denial, and transformation are some of the themes that animate this engrossing, at times frighteningly intimate, narrative collection. With fierce wit and uncommon insight, Sparrow interrogates the self and other, and the experience of self as other.
These remarkable, penetrating, headlong poems chart disorder and desire, break-up and breakdown, and the hard path towards recovery, confirming Rachel Long as one of the most gifted poets of her generation.
Yiewsley | By Daljit Nagra
A spirited and stirring return to the poet's boyhood and the town that made him.
This autobiographical collection candidly explores Daljit Nagra's experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties in the predominantly white working-class town of Yiewsley, close to Heathrow airport in Outer London.
As Britain transitions from a post-war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher years and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps. The poems bring to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India, who had arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: 'devout realists already, and always, knuckled into work'.
They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the 'messy English' at home fusing with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.
Folkish | By Kym Deym
Folkish is a trickster figure masquerading as a poetry collection. Full of ghosts, worms, saints, and Northern English folklore, Kym Deyn’s debut is playful, spirited and absolutely furious – moving between the alive, the legendary, and the haunted in endlessly inventive forms. Between deep time and mischief, Deyn’s poetry hungers and sharpens its spells – casting curses on bad landlords, exhaustion and poverty.
These poems know intimately the coexistence of darkness and light, the mirror’s slippery surface, and all that moves like magic in the depths of forest and root, containing multitudes – ‘a million sipping leaf-mouths, now quiet and peaty’.
Here, poetry is an act of wild transformation – boundless and entirely distinctive, unafraid of reconfiguration and re-enchantment.
Coal | By Audre Lorde
‘I am Black because I come from the earth’s insidenow take my word for jewel in the open light.’ Impassioned and profound, the poems in Coal showcase Audre Lorde in all her dazzling elegance and multiplicity. Mournful, celebratory, politically conscious, this early collection faithfully captures the complex interiority of the self. With insight and great feeling, these poems explore racial and sexual politics, liberation and love; they are strongly autobiographical (including poems about Lorde’s children, her sister and her parents, as well as an elegy for a dear childhood friend).
These timeless poems resonate down the years.
The Rose | By Ariana Reines
‘Fury is very lustful
A body concealing its heart’s desire
Has a certain texture
A tang or an edge if you will
That the openhearted cannot match
& when exactly does the deceitful
Heart open? At climax’.
—from ‘The Hanged Man
The Rose navigates the intersection of power and surrender. Drawing on the history of ‘romance’ as the troubadours knew it, and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, award-winning poet Ariana Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: ‘I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.’ In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humour. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the ‘secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,’ and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
New & Featured
Poetry
Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City | By Mark Ronson
Lady Gaga, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus, the Barbie soundtrack. Behind some of the biggest musical moments in the past two decades is one man: Mark Ronson. Now, his memoir Night People captures the music, characters, escapades and energy of his formative DJ days in '90s New York.
Mark Ronson was born a night person. With hedonistic creatives for parents, parties became his playground. Yet, having moved to New York City from London at a young age, he always felt like a bit of an outsider, until discovering himself in the pulsing, unifying joy of the city’s parties and hip-hop scene. Each night brought a heady mix of music, ambition, danger, delight, and possibilities. Having well and truly caught the DJing bug, he worked to find his place and make his name in the city that never sleeps.
Night People conjures the undeniable magic of '90s New York, when clubs were diverse, glamorous, a little lawless. It evokes the rush of a time and place where fashionistas and rappers on the rise danced alongside club kids and 9-to-5'ers – and invites us into the tribe of creatives and partiers who came alive when the sun went down.
A heartfelt coming-of-age tale, Night People is the definitive account of a cultural moment and the making of a musical mastermind.
Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World | By Anne Enright
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction.
She offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly.
Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.
The Future of Truth | By Werner Herzog
What if a lie could be true?
At the heart of this fascinating and iconoclastic book lies Werner Herzog’s concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ – a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience.
Written in Herzog’s inimitable style, these stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole to alien abduction claims and the making of Herzog’s own films.
With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction – evidence and imagination – by one of today’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers.
Too Little, Too Hard | By Various | Edited By Lucy Mercer and Livia Franchini
In recent years, countless arguments have been made for and against the enduring value of literature: reading improves mental health and offers refuge from the news cycle; the novel is dead, poetry obsolete, writers AI-replaceable. Too Little, Too Hard adds nuance to these discussions by asking professional writers what they actually think about literary value, and their underexplored working conditions.
What does it mean to write under a neoliberal economy? What can writers afford to work on – and what are they not supposed to approach? What side work sustains them, and what does it cost? What does the publishing industry want, and what does it quietly refuse? And what has happened to literary criticism, to the university, and to the conditions that once made writing possible?
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, fifteen of our most important writers reflect on their experiences of writing under – and against – capitalism. At once critical and hopeful, Too Little, Too Hard seeks to reckon with the material crises in the present state of literature, while proposing collective action as a way to secure a future in which a writing life becomes viable. With contributions from Rachael Allen, Sanah Ahsan, Anthony Anaxagorou, Julia Bell, Emily Berry, Sarah Brouillette, Helen Charman, Claudia Durastanti, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Will Harris, Amber Husain, Dizz Tate, Lara Williams, Holly Pester, Andy Perluzzo, Omar Robert Hamilton.
Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance | By Sara Veale
The untold history of the extraordinary women who drove the modern dance movement and changed cultural narratives about sex, power and women's rights.
The story of modern dance is a story of subversion - of forms challenged and hierarchies toppled in the pursuit of blazing artistic integrity. In Wild Grace, Sara Veale profiles nine of the pioneering women at the heart of this movement, from Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller's fearless rejection of nineteenth-century paternalism to Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus's battles to recentre marginalised histories in the wake of the Second World War.
Each of these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyle, conveying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman. Veale brings to life the stories and artistry of these remarkable individuals and reveals how, in their refusal to conform, we can find urgent lessons for today.
How to Enter the Art World...: AFTER a late start / a first career / raising children / caring for parents / recovering from illness / a crisis of confidence / leaving it in disgust. | By Hettie Judah
A guide for anyone whose trajectory through the art world isn't a smooth upward curve, based on years of research with art professionals.
The commercial art world is powered by a convenient fiction: that artists' careers proceed along an established route, onwards and upwards, with always the same goal in sight. It is also notoriously hard to re-enter after time away. Based on years spent talking with artists and arts professionals, How to Enter the Art World is a compendium of guidelines, pointers and tips to help readers chart their own route as an artist. Frank, funny and occasionally forthright, this book illuminates the many different ways to be an artist, regardless of life's obstacles and interruptions.
Flyboy in the Buttermilk | By Greg Tate | Introductions by Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib
These pieces orbit social, pop cultural, political, and economic subjects — from the rise of hip-hop, the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bad Brains, and many others, to the crisis of the Black intellectual and the irony of the GOP recruiting Black Americans. With unrivalled flair, Tate writes in a voice that is at once angry, joyous, self-critiquing, and dazzlingly witty.
Tate teaches us ‘it is not too late to say too much, to be so dissatisfied with the world as it is that we throw far too many words toward the sky, and see what the heavens throw back’ - Hanif Abdurraqib.
A Creative Compass: Finding Your Way to a Creative Life | By Emma Gannon
An empowering guide for artists, makers, writers and anyone seeking to live more creatively, with confidence, calm and joy. We all possess creativity, whether it's in the clothes we wear, the way we arrange flowers, or the patterns we choose for our bedroom walls.
However, in today's fast-paced, AI-driven world, many of us have lost touch with our innate creative abilities. By chasing trends, productivity hacks and protocols, we forget to trust ourselves, instead relying on algorithms to dictate what we like, what we make, and crucially, how we feel.
Award-winning author Emma Gannon understands just how essential creativity is for survival. Through necessity, she has forged her own creative compass to rekindle her spark when it’s running low.
Now, she invites us to set our own inner compass, with mindsets, rituals and actions to help us: overcome burnout and mental blocks by blocking external noise, reignite our creative inspiration and flow through making 'bad' art, and reconnect with intuition and self-trust by finding the values that guide us. Break free from the need for outside approval and create a vibrant, fulfilling life from the inside-out.
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Art, Photography & Music
There’s a Ghost in this House | By Oliver Jeffers
'Hello, come in. Maybe you can help me?'
A young girl lives in a haunted house, but has never seen a ghost.
Are they white with holes for eyes? Are they hard to see? She’d love to know! Step inside and join in an entertaining ghost hunt, from behind the sofa, right up to the attic. With lots of friendly ghost surprises and incredible mixed media illustrations, this unique and funny book will entertain young readers over and over again!
The Neverfear | By Katherine Rundell
It’s the Midsummer Feast on the Islet of Glimt and on this magical moonlit evening, the word on everyone’s lips is bandits. Reports of masked men burning villages are spreading throughout the Archipelago, but worse is still to come: Christopher and Anya are ambushed and one of the people they love most is kidnapped. The two children – alongside Ratwin the ratatoska and Jacques the Jaculus dragon – set sail on the Neverfear to recover three precious treasures.
Together they must face fearsome giants, win a daring race, and outwit deadly enemies to save those they love most.
A Treasury of Moomin Tales: Adapted from three classic stories by Tove Jansson | By Tove Jansson, Alex Haridi & Cecilia Davidsson
A Treasury of Moomin Tales is a beautifully illustrated collection of three classic Moomin stories, based on Tove Jansson’s original works.
Join Moomintroll, his charming family and his eclectic band of friends on a series of adventures in a picturesque land where anything can happen: a snow horse comes to life in the depths of a freezing winter, a stolen ruby leads to a trial set in the Moominhouse garden, and seeds planted on Midsummer's Eve sprout a crowd of electrical Hattifatteners! Moomin fans of all ages will delight at the stunning artwork that accompanies the lively, witty writing, and become fully immersed in the beautiful Moominvalley. Sensitively adapted for a younger audience by Alex Haridi and Cecilia Davidsson, A Treasury of Moomin Tales is a perfect gift and a must-have for fans of Tove Jansson’s enchanting world.
Esme Pepper | By Jacqueline Wilson | Illustrated by Rachael Dean
A funny, heartbreaking and hopeful story of one girl's resilience, from the author of the bestselling Tracy Beaker series. Esme's mum would do anything for her, including trying to steal the expensive dolls house that Esme desperately wants. When Mum gets caught, Esme has to go into foster care.
When a placement proves hard to find, Esme has to stay with an elderly couple who have retired from fostering. She knows she only has to stay until Mum gets back, but she still has to deal with a new school, and a real idiot of a class bully. Esme might like to cause trouble, but this time she is going to have to find a way to get along.
The Cave Explorer | By Kate Winter
One day in 1940, a young boy named Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog, Robot, near his home in southwestern France. When Robot found a strange hole near an upturned tree, Marcel and his friends rushed in to explore and find some hidden treasure. But the treasure they found was like nothing they had ever expected – prehistoric paintings and carvings that covered the walls of an underground cave, and that told the story of the palaeolithic people that had once called this place home.
This rediscovered cave was an important historical find, and the artefacts and paintings inside helped archaeologists and anthropologists piece together what life must have been like for humans living hundreds of thousands of years ago. Little did Marcel know that the mystery of why these paintings were created and what stories the artists were depicting would continue to capture our imaginations as we still debate their meaning today.
Beautifully illustrated by emerging talent Kate Winter, with incredible panoramic fold-out pages, this is a book to treasure and to read again and again, perfect for all fans of natural history and curious young explorers.
A House Made of Books | By Frankie Gritton
What happens if you build a house made of books?
Simon loves books. He loves them so much, he decides to build a house made of books. Simon works hard, stacking book after book, until he has the perfect cosy home – a house made of poems and pictures, stories and songs.
Simon is very happy in his new home – until one day, a neighbour stops by to borrow a book. Before long, everyone wants to borrow a book from Simon – and the little house starts to look a bit wobbly. But when Simon’s house made of books comes tumbling down, his friends and neighbours come together to rebuild his home – bigger and stronger than ever before.
A beautiful, joyful picture book about community, kindness and connection that's made to be shared again and again.
Hanna Asks for Help | By Tom Percival
This reassuring and funny book is the perfect springboard for talking to children about asking for help - because we're all good at different things, and giving and receiving help can be one of life's greatest joys. Hanna LOVES playing sports.
But she finds maths a real puzzle! Nothing she tries works... until she finds the courage to ask for a little bit of help. Soon, Help arrives - and nothing will ever be the same again!
Dad | By Christian Robinson
A loving, funny and big-hearted tribute to all kinds of dads everywhere! A gorgeous picture book, and the perfect gift for new fathers. There are as many ways to be a dad as there are dads in the world. Dad is a love letter to all of them.
To the ups and downs, to the quiet and the loud – a loving celebration of the tender moments shared between a father and child.
'Dad is strong. Dad is sweet. Dad dreams of watching you grow'...
Written and illustrated by the multi-award-winning Christian Robinson, Dad draws inspiration from the animal world to break stereotypes of fatherhood and pay tribute to the huge range of relationships dads have with their little ones.
Lottie Brooks vs The Ultra Mean Girls | By Katie Kirby
Today we brainstormed strategies to #GETAMBERBACK. Our top ideas are:
Send her flowers
Hypnotise her
Kidnap her
Tell everyone she smells like lasagne
Emotionally blackmail her by making a BFF photo montage
Just when Lottie thought life might be going back to normal, everything goes wrong again! Amber’s hanging out with the Ultra Mean Girl Gang at school and is completely ignoring the Queens of Eight Green. Mum’s gone back to work and expects Lottie to ‘help around the house more’, Bella keeps biting everyone and Pot Noodle will not stop sniffing every dog’s bum.
DISASTER!
Now Lottie has to come up with a foolproof plan to get Amber back before her friendship group is destroyed forever. What could go wrong???
Join Lottie as she battles the mean girls, takes on school injections (apparently they can go through your arm!) and even more extremely embarrassing moments.
The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three | By Philip Pullman
‘Lyra: what will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses? ’‘Defend it,’ Lyra said. ‘Die defending it.’
When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra.
In The Rose Field, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer.
All around them, the world is aflame – made terrifying by fear, power and greed. As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers – on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination – so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear.
Wild Horse Summer | By Lauren St John
When American teenager, Morgan Taylor, arrives to spend the summer with her British cousins, all anyone knows is that an accident has left her scarred inside and out. But Morgan is hiding a secret she'll do anything to keep. Then the town's hottest surfer, Cal Heyward, saves her life and suddenly the truth about her past feels harder than ever to hide.
To escape, Morgan takes a job at a stableyard, hoping that horses will heal her as they've done so often before. But everything changes when she's asked to help Night Dancer, a horse with his own dark history...
The perfect clean teen novel! Bursting with romance, adventure, mystery - and horses - it's an explosive, unputdownable read.
Ray | By Marianna Coppo
Meet Ray - the light bulb who lives in the closet at the end of the hall. Ray’s days are pretty boring. He spends most of his time in the dark, and nothing ever changes.
But one day, Ray’s life is turned upside down. Will Ray ever see things in the same light again? With gentle humour and charming illustrations, Ray is a story that beams with positivity.
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Vilhelm’s Room | By Tove Ditlevsen | Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
‘I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...’
The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.