A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

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Zachary Mason

In the tradition of Zachary Mason’s bestselling first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey – where he recast episodes from Homer’s masterpiece – Metamorphica now reimagines Ovid’s epic poem of endless transformation, Metamorphoses. Just as the Roman poet reinvigorated the Greek Classical legends 700 years after Homer, so Mason now gives us a radical and exciting renovation of those myths, 2,000 years after Ovid. 
 
It retells the great stories of Narcissus, Orpheus, Persephone, Icarus, Midas, Medea and Actaeon, and strings them together like the stars in constellations – with even Ovid himself entering the narrative. It’s as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino – or artificial intelligence – and brought glimmering back into our world. Metamorphica re-engages with the elemental power of the ancient shape-changing gods by keeping their essences while rewriting their stories. It is this extraordinary narrative approach that is so thrilling; we watch as the author extracts more and more out of the original legend – adding infinite perspectives to narratives we thought we knew. Mason understands that the great myths are parables – always in flux, always relevant – always throwing shards of light from the morning of the world.

Metamorphica

Catherine Poulain

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE 2019** 
**NOMINATED FOR THE MÉDICIS PRIZE 2018** 
 
'A tale of travel and adventure, the story of a body utterly surrendered to pain and joy. It is mind-blowing, a delight.' Le Monde 
 
Lili is a runaway. She’s left behind her native France to go in search of freedom, of adventure, of life. Her search takes her to Kodiak, Alaska, home to a ragtag community of fishermen, army vets and drifters who man the island’s fishing fleet. Despite her tiny frame, faltering English and lack of experience, Lili lands a job on board the Rebel, the only woman on the boat. 
 
Out on the open sea, everything is heightened: colours are more vivid, sounds are louder and the work is harder than anything she's ever known. The terrifying intensity of the ocean is addictive to the point of danger. But Lili is not alone: in her fellow crewmembers she finds kindred spirits – men living on the edge, drawn to extremes. 
 
Based on Catherine Poulain’s own experiences, and written in taut, muscular prose, Woman at Sea cuts through the noise of life and straight to the heart of our innermost longings.

Woman at Sea

Bryan Talbot

In the middle of a gang war, wanted for murder, truly alone and outside the law, Detective Inspector LeBrock is on the run from both the police and gangster assassins, the victim of a diabolical scheme to annihilate himself and everyone he holds dear, engineered by mastermind crime lord Tiberius Koenig, one of the most despicable villains in the history of detective fiction. 
 
A fiendishly ingenious story of love, tenacity, treachery and tragedy, this fifth, final and longest stand-alone volume of the Eisner and Hugo Award-nominated Grandville series by master storyteller and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot is a veritable rollercoaster of a detective thriller, featuring Grandville’s trademark high-octane excitement, humour and deduction on a Holmesian scale as we finally meet LeBrock’s mentor, Stamford Hawksmoor, and discover LeBrock’s untold backstory. Fan-favourite characters Detective Sergeant Roderick Ratzi and LeBrock’s vivacious fiancée, Parisian prostitute Billie are joined by a new badger in town! Enter Tasso, an Italian badger who’s bigger, meaner and uglier than LeBrock – but is he a force for good or evil? A battle royale ensues as LeBrock fights against truly outrageous odds. How can he possibly survive? 
 
Prepare to be royally badgered!

Grandville Force Majeure

Deepti Kapoor

Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Médicis 
 
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night. 
 
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character. 
 
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own. 
 
A novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.

A Bad Character

Hannah Berry

Excitement is building for this year’s Twammies and Clementine Darling is hotly tipped to win Best Female Singer and Political Spokesperson! 
 
The government is embarrassed about the leak of a confidential email exchange, but have you heard about Clementine’s new beau Devon Ayre? Yes, human cloning appears to have been legalised, but wasn’t Devon once together with Clementine’s arch rival Coral Jerome? And does it really matter what dubious corporate connections helped get this bill into place while Clementine and Coral are locking horns in a violent feud? 
 
Livestock is a razor-sharp satire on our relationship with the media from critically acclaimed graphic novelist Hannah Berry. In the fight for the public’s attention, why let public interest get in the way?

Livestock

Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall, and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from ageing. 
 
Kern has no such access; he's one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city’s periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely – the mathematically-inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he's fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead. 
 
A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight. 
 
Vivid, tumultuous and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Mason’s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

Void Star

Joe Decie

Observer Graphic Novel of the Month 
 
Collecting Sticks is a graphic novel about a family glamping trip. (It's like camping, but much more expensive.) Loosely based on actual events, but sometimes veering unexpectedly into fantasy, the story plays with the challenges nature presents to city folk as they forage for berries, get stuck up a tree, make perilous encounters with stinging wildlife, compete to build the best fire and discover the importance of finding good sticks. Also, it rains. It's about the human desire to get back to nature. Or to return to childhood and hit things with sticks. 
 
Funny, moving, beautifully drawn, Collecting Sticks can stand beside Joff Winterhart’s classic graphic novel of family life, Days of the Bagnold Summer.

Collecting Sticks

Mark Spragg

Set in Wyoming, in cattle country, The Fruit of Stone is the story of two men and one woman. McEban, a rancher, has loved Gretchen Reilly all his life; and all his life Bennett, Gretchen's husband, has been his best friend. When Gretchen leaves Bennett, the two men follow her trail on a strange, fateful journey across Wyoming to Nebraska. 
 
Spragg's characters are unforgettable, his prose is at once tender and muscular, his portrait of the harsh but beautiful landscape breathtaking. With this remarkable novel he takes his place beside Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane and Kent Haruf as one of the great contemporary chroniclers of the American West.

The Fruit of Stone

Nick Coleman

William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy. 
 
Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn’t be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal’s. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer. 
 
William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time. 
 
The question is: what to do with it? 
 
Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime. 
 
What, after all, do we really mean by ‘thread-count’?

Pillow Man

Steve Bell

In his daily cartoon for the Guardian and his long-running strip, IF, in the same paper, Steve Bell has proved that he is without equal in Britain as political cartoonist. Savage, funny, rude, constantly transgressing the rules of good taste, and of course beautifully drawn his cartoons are hated by those they lampoon and loved by everyone who likes to see authority subverted. In his new collection he covers the years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, 2010-2015, fertile ground for Bell’s genius. From George Osborne in his bondage gear, the ‘Quiet Man’ zombie Ian Duncan Smith, Cable the elephant, Cameron the talking condom and Clegg the butler to Kipling and the IF penguins, every awful moment of the coalition years is re-run before your eyes … but Steve Bell style: ‘outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really)’ to quote John Pilger.

The Graphic Novel

Karrie Fransman

Five Artists. Five Styles. All Written by One Author 
 
On 13 August 2013 graphic novelist Karrie Fransman invited four old friends from university to an isolated cottage on the misty moors of the Peak District to join her for a week of hedonism and creativity. Like Shelley and Byron before them, they would use the retreat to tell stories. Except these would be comics, collected together in this very book. The theme? The Death of the Artist. 
 
None of the five friends realised how appropriate this theme would become. 
 
The book weaves a single narrative across watercolour, digital art, photography, collage and illustration, exploring the themes of creation, destruction, and how we kill our inner artists as we grow up. It takes the graphic novel into entirely new realms.

Death of the Artist

Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is renowned for his non-fiction books of comics journalism like Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde and Footnotes in Gaza. Now in Bumf he returns to his early days as a satirist and underground cartoonist. In the vein of the old underground comix like ZAP or Weirdo, Bumf will be puerile, disgusting, and beyond redemption. It will go where it wants to go, and do what it wants to do. It will also be very funny.

Bumf

S. J. Harris

Poor Eustace is not very well. Convalescing in bed, his world is confined to the four walls of his grand and gloomy room. His days are spent in wild imaginings, punctuated by the occasional visit from his mother and a legion of Aunties, who fuss and smother Eustace. 
 
But then his wicked uncle arrives in a cloud of pipe smoke, accompanied by a swelling cast of prostitutes, hoodlums, drunkards and assorted hangers-on. Suddenly Eustace finds himself transformed from invalid to the star of a glittering and decadent social scene, serving drinks and holding court from his enormous bed. That is, until his Uncle's past begins to catch up with him... 
 
Eustace is blackly comic, surreal and exquisitely rendered. It marks the debut of a brilliant new graphic novelist.

Eustace

David Austin

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE* 
 
From when he was twelve years old Robert Radnor had been in love with the idea of being a sailor. And a sailor he became, at home on the sea as other men were on land. Until the year of 1948, on board the steamship Golden Delta, serving as first officer under Captain Peeke, when Radnor's uncanny intuition about the sea and its ways suddenly deserts him and he finds himself alone with the sea, with his fear and with his terrifying foreknowledge.

A Clear Calling

Barbara Anderson

Oliver Gurth Perkins is seventy-five, and the darkest cloud on his horizon is that the local bookshop no longer stocks paperbacks of the Times cryptic crosswords. He has an easy companionship with his wife; his dental practice is undemanding; his son is a decent enough sort; and his granddaughter who comes for the school holidays is his delight. But when a minor heart episode convinces Oliver that it's time for him to take more interest in the lives of those close to him, further shocks are in store- Change of Heart is a glittering jewel of a book, an audacious mixture of comic invention and human insight that is Barbara Anderson at her very best.

Change Of Heart

Chris Ware

In Chris Ware's own words, 'Building Stories follows the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a thirty-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple who wonder if they can bear each other's company for another minute; and finally an elderly woman who never married and is the building's landlady...' 
 
The scope, the ambition, the artistry and emotional heft of this project are beyond anything even Chris Ware has achieved before.

Building Stories

Joff Winterhart

Discover the quirky tale of single parenting and heavy metal behind the film from director Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners) 
 
'When someone looks back and writes a history of this summer, two people they will almost certainly leave out are Sue and Daniel Bagnold...' 
 
So begins Joff Winterhart's sublimely funny and perceptive graphic novel, Days of the Bagnold Summer. Sue, 52, works in a library. Daniel, 15, is still at school. This was the summer holidays Daniel was due to spend with his father and his father's pregnant new wife in Florida. When they cancel his trip, Sue and Daniel face six long weeks together... 
Joff Winterhart perfectly captures the ennui, the tension, the pathos and yes, the affection of this mother-son relationship. Already well-known for his animated films like Violet and Turquoise, he here shows himself to be a comics author of extraordinary talent. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Award for Best Novel

Days of the Bagnold Summer

Chika Unigwe

Mma has just buried her mother, and now she is alone. 
 
She has been left everything. 
 
But she's also inherited her mother's bad name. 
 
A bold, brash woman, the only thing her mother refused to discuss was her past. Why did she flee her family and bring her daughter to a new town when she was a baby? What was she escaping from? 
 
Abandoned now, Mma has no knowledge of her father or her family - but she is desperate to find out. 
 
Night Dancer is a powerful and moving novel about the relationship between mothers and daughters, about the bonds of family, about knowing when to fulfil your duty, and when you must be brave enough not to. Presenting a vista of Nigeria over the past half-century, it is a vibrant and heartfelt exploration of one woman's search for belonging.

Night Dancer

Julian Hanshaw

I'm Never Coming Back is a collection of surreal, comic and mournful interweaving tales travelling across three continents. In each destination we zoom in on unusual lives and remarkable situations, each tale unknowingly impacting on the next. 
 
In Rye train station a woman impulsively buys the same ticket as the man in front of her. The accidental journey leads her to Berlin. A novel way to run away from home. 
 
At Heathrow Airport, a building perpetually busy with people coming and going, a traveller is visited by a memory that refuses to leave. 
 
A tray of Singapore rice noodles cooked up in Christchurch takes on a life of its own. 
 
Winchelsea. A lone letterbox in Britain's only desert is central to a friendship between a travelling chef and a deep-sea diver. 
 
An old man realises that time is running out in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Elsewhere an out-of-towner meets a crab at a taco stand who seems to know more than any crab has a right to know. 
 
The 'sound mirrors of Denge' reflect more than noise for one day-tripper. 
 
And on Johnston Island a man struggles to hold onto his fading memories as his house slowly fills with pollen. Test Match Special seems to be the only foothold in reality. 
 
The Art of Pho is now available as a live motion comic: http://artofpho.submarinechannel.com/

I'm Never Coming Back

Julia Blackburn

In these five stories Julia Blackburn recalls the significant animals in her life and in so doing gives us a sidelong glance at the human members of her family, her painter mother and poet father. 
 
First comes Congo the bush baby, from the jungles of Madagascar via Harrods pet department. He slept in an old cap on the back of the door, and could leap about the room via the picture rails. Then there are tropical fish, tortoises, chickens, guinea pigs, foxes (the last three a combustible combination), pigs, and two very distinctive dogs, Julia's own dog, Jason, a cocker spaniel whose habits of servility and loyalty Julia's father, Thomas, was determined to undo ('He's worse than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fawning at my heels!') and Henry, a Parson Jack Russell terrier that Thomas got after his divorce, a dog of great independence, dignity and forbearance, whom his master used to take mountaineering. 
 
This is a delightful book, wry, funny and wise, and unmistakably the work of Julia Blackburn.

My Animals and Other Family

Posy Simmonds

The brilliant graphic novel behind the major new film starring Gemma Aterton (Quantum of Solace), Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Fabrice Luchini (In the House) and Mel Raido (Spooks) 
 
Gemma is the bored, pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children and the bête-noire of his ex-wife. Gemma's sudden windfall and distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off. 
 
Is it a coincidence that Gemma Bovery has a name rather like Flaubert's notorious heroine? Is it by chance that, like Madame Bovary, Gemma is bored, adulterous, and a bad credit risk? Is she inevitably doomed? These questions consume Gemma's neighbour, the intellectual baker, Joubert. Denying voyeurism, but nevertheless noting every change in the fit of her jeans, every addition to Gemma's wardrobe, her love-bites and lovers, Joubert, with the help of the heroine's diaries, follows her path towards ruin. Adultery and its consequences. Disappointment and deception. The English in France. Fat and slim. Then and now.

Gemma Bovery

Irvine Welsh

Can Nothing Save Us?

Jacqueline Crooks

A spellbinding portrait of 90s London and three lives brought together by chance, from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush 
 
*Guardian book to read 2026* 
 
London in the 90s. After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own high up in Sky City, a housing estate in north London carved out of the glow-in-the-dark sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now? 
 
Her best friend from the hostel is Ella-G, who has left London for the glamorous world of the New York music scene. Both Jaycee and Ella-G are daughters in search of fathers. When Jaycee finds a rare record that seems to lead to Ella-G’s father, the two women go searching for answers in Atlantic City. What Jaycee encounters there brings her to the edges of her identity. Back in London, she finally begins to confront the traumas of her own past. But can she find justice and healing, even as her, Sol, Ella-G's worlds threaten to crash together and splinter apart?

Sky City

Daisy Johnson

A hypnotic and haunting work of fiction about losing yourself and finding your family, Long Wave is the finest novel yet from Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson 
 
Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become. 
 
Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free. 
 
Told with mythic power and lyrical precision, Long Wave is an extraordinary novel of longing and loss, rebirth and survival.

Long Wave

Brodie Crellin

A death in the (dysfunctional) family – can they hold it together long enough to organise the funeral? 
 
'Crellin is an astonishing writer' DAISY JOHNSON 
 
'At once shrewd and ethereal' CHRIS KRAUS 
 
Mary’s death is bad news – for her daughter Patch, ex-partner Robin, and niece Jude. 
 
It will mean a funeral. But Patch can barely keep track of her mother’s journey from the hospital to the mortuary, let alone host a wake in her childhood home. 
 
Robin wants to support her, but instead of assuming the role of responsible father, he heads to his former haunt: the lay-by where he used to meet farmers for sex. 
 
Jude’s on her way from Naples, worrying less about Patch, her estranged cousin, and more about whether there’s a medicinal bag of cocaine in the boot. She hasn’t told the family she’s en route. This way, any lingering acrimony will be forgotten, and Jude’s past behaviour will be forgiven. 
 
Thrown together in Mary’s tiny house, each of them is trying to feel something: to grieve, atone, join in, be better. But they rarely have one another’s best interests at heart, and as the connections between them twist and contort, they lose sight of the rules and grasp towards anything that might make it all less painful. 
 
Darkly funny, deeply entertaining, and intensely moving, A Sense of Occasion subverts and perverts your expectations to reveal the fractious desires that simmer beneath the surface of our lives. 
 
'Sexy and intelligent' MERVE EMRE 
 
'Explores love, desire, family, and dynamics of power, care and dependence with total honesty' HARRIET ARMSTRONG 
 
'Immensely fun' LIZZY STEWART

A Sense of Occasion

Jess Gibson

Men and women confront the limits of their perception as reality shifts around them, in this startlingly original debut short-story collection 
 
A stone appears in a woman’s pocket like a charm only to end up lodged in someone’s throat. A psychic harnesses her talent for animal communication to extract a perfect revenge. A woman goes pheasant shooting with her father-in-law and husband, switching her aim between the birds and the men. A condescending artist throws a dinner party, where he discovers a painful and consequential truth. 
 
In these twelve exquisite and uncanny stories, the world can change in an instant. The beautiful can suddenly become grotesque, the exalted disgraced, the genius an imposter. Ranging across the globe through the worlds of art, crime and fantasy, each character turns their gaze on themselves and on each other, to confront what they see with their good eye – and their bad.

The Good Eye

Kae Tempest

They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer. 
 
The heart-breaking, soul-building new novel about the transformative power of love, from the Sunday Times-bestselling Kae Tempest 
 
Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. 
 
The past is accelerating towards them: the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne's block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. 
 
Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different. 
 
Tempest's first novel in a decade, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. 
Praise for Kae Tempest 
 
‘An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker’ Matt Haig 
 
‘A truth-speaker’ Max Porter 
 
'Powerful and merciful' Ali Smith

Having Spent Life Seeking

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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