Lucy is the founder of The Hope-Filled Family, a ministry encouraging Christian parents, carers and all those investing in the younger generation. She is the author of several books for adults and children, including Busy Family Devotional and the Mighty Girl, Mighty God series. She is mum to four children ages 11 to 16, who arrived by birth and adoption, and is married to Al, a church leader in York, England.

	 Lucy Rycroft

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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

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Erin Maglaque

A hidden history of the female body - birthing, caring, working and desiring - with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today 
 
Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown – even unimagined. 
 
Combining memoir with archival research, from fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, Erin Maglaque assembles a chorus of women’s voices from the pre-modern past. We encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer. 
 
This is the invisible history of the female body – wanting, bleeding, spinning, dying. Reaching deeper into the shared history of women’s lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.

Presence

A Hidden History of the Female Body

Colin Grant

What do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land? 
 
Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. 
 
Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. 
 
Candid, profoundly human, sometimes funny and always moving, What We Leave We Carry is a chance to listen to Britain – in all its richness and complexity. 
 
PRAISE FOR HOMECOMING by COLIN GRANT: 
 
'Oral history at its finest' Daily Mail 
'Prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details' Observer 
'An extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph 
'Utterly fascinating' New Statesman 
'A hopeful, angry, tear-jerking read' Grazia 
'Essential reading' Guardian

What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain

Ben Rawlence

‘Beautiful and thought-provoking’ Cal Flyn 
 
‘A delightful and important book. Every parent should read this’ Merlin Hanbury-Tenison 
 
How do we raise children in a climate emergency? 
 
What should we teach them - and what kind of future are we preparing them for? 
 
Ben Rawlence began writing to his eldest daughter before she was born, trying to understand what it means to bring a child into a world facing ecological breakdown. Over the next twelve years, these letters – written to his two daughters as they grow – chart one father’s attempt to live with the central contradiction of our age: raising children within a system that threatens all life, including our own. 
 
By turns moving and funny, and always bracingly honest, Think Like a Forest explores love, fear and responsibility in perilous times. Rawlence finds the answers might lie in learning to see the world again through the eyes of a child so that we may embrace interdependence and regain our place in nature. To think like a forest, he shows us, may be the key to how we parent, how we live, and even whether we have a future on our planet at all. 
 
 
'A gift, not just for the author’s daughters, but for all of us who want to replace ecocide anxiety with the glimmerings of a better future’ Sophy Roberts 
 
‘A thoughtful, tender way to make a map of new and frightening territory’ Jay Griffiths

Think Like a Forest

Letters to my Children from a Changing Planet

Ben Passmore

A lively graphic history of Black life in America, from the award-winning political cartoonist Ben Passmore 
 
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.” 
 
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and the aughts, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic. 
 
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.

Black Arms to Hold You Up

A History of Black Resistance

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Jean Sprackland

'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of Wintering 
 
An exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean Sprackland 
 
Darkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way. 
 
We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself? 
 
In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.

Night Vision

In search of the true dark

Rory Stewart

From the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest is Politics 
 
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. 
 
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an urgent and inspiring portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria. 
 
These are stories of beauty and ingenuity, which also show us what a better politics might look like.

Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Akshi Singh

The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner invented new ways of thinking about leisure. A hundred years on, Akshi Singh follows her methods, with life-changing consequences. 
 
'Illuminating and thought-provoking' Darian Leader'Astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating' Daisy LaFarge 
 
Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. 
 
Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. 
 
In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach - from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea - she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. 
 
'An exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived' Marianne Brooker, author of Intervals 
 
'Singh's verve and intelligence radiate from every page' Hannah Zeavin

In Defence of Leisure

Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Kay Sohini

At once heartrending and enlivening, this phenomenal graphic memoir is not another ode to New York but a meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love 
 
*AN OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH* 
 
'This is such a rich book, both visually and narratively' - Isabel Greenberg, author of Young Hag 
 
'A ravishing new take on a storied city' - Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of, Wintering and Enchantment 
 
On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she’s left behind in India. Kay realises two things: she's finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific – Kerouac, Friends, Plath – and that trauma she’s endured in her relationship has left gaping holes in her memory. 
 
In New York, at last, Kay has room to begin the work of piecing herself back together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one’s own today. 
 
At once heartrending and enlivening, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is not another ode to New York but a phenomenal meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love with places – and indeed people – that do not always love us back but somehow still save us in weird, unexpected ways. 
 
'A stunning graphic memoir… a praise-song to her adopted home… with its glorious, candy-coloured drawings' - FINANCIAL TIMES

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

A Graphic Memoir

Adrian Tinniswood

'Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.' 
LUCY WORSLEY 
 
Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house 
 
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. 
 
This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. 
 
The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all. 
 
'A wonderful book.' 
JUDITH FLANDERS 
 
'Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.' 
GARETH RUSSELL 
 
**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

The Power and the Glory

The Country House Before the Great War

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

Miriam Gold

This is the story of the ordinary extraordinary life of Dr Elena Zadik. 
 
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Elena Zadik was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena ran through the twentieth century without looking back. 
 
A refugee twice before she was 17, she broke glass ceilings to become a doctor during World War 2. She was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Finding community, falling in love and starting a family in Sheffield while her parents were imprisoned and killed in Auschwitz, she swam against the odds with courage and tenacity. 
 
Miriam gathers the threads of her Granny’s story, reflecting on their unconventional relationship and how trauma travels down through the generations in this gorgeous brocade of illustration and collage. 
 
Granny was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands were always busy and form the heart of this timely, irresistible graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women. 
 
A heartfelt and charming graphic memoir of love, family and fearless women.

Elena: A Hand Made Life

Amelia Loulli

One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now. 
 
*Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025* 
 
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest' ANDREW MCMILLAN 
 
'Original, essential... An unforgettable collection' FIONA BENSON 
 
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world. 
 
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.

Slip

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD** 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* 
 
This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism 
 
'A beautiful, necessary book' 
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic 
 
'Every poem is a masterpiece' 
OLIA HERCULES, author of Mamushka 
 
With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context. 
 
Central to this book is ‘a timeline of hunger’, a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian) – Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 – ‘brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past’ – and closes in Donetsk in 1929: ‘we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated.’ Through the poet’s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their ‘bones Holodomor / lives on’. 
 
Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression – about staying alive while always hungry.

Food for the Dead

Leontia Flynn

A collection about motherhood at a time of continuous crisis - from one of Ireland's most important poets 
 
'Everyone should be reading her' 
OBSERVER 
 
'One of the most accomplished poets of her generation' 
GUARDIAN 
 
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world. 
 
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all that: to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song. 
 
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.

Taking Liberties

Darrin Bell

***LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL*** 
***A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said that police think little Black boys older and less innocent than they are. So began 'The Talk'... 
 
'The Ta-Nehisi Coates of comics' 
GARRY TRUDEAU, creator of Doonesbury 
 
'Darrin Bell has produced another American classic' 
GUARDIAN 
 
Through evocative illustrations and sharp humour, Darrin Bell examines how The Talk all Black parents must have with their children shaped his intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles - and finding a voice through cartooning - Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbours and police officers, and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans, and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 
 
And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

The Talk

Ocean Vuong

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 
 
'One of the most important poets of his generation' 
ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical 
 
'Powerful' 
DUA LIPA 
 
'Redefines our idea of what an elegy can do it, what it is for' 
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic 
 
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems contend with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit. 
 
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time is a Mother is a return and a forging-forth all at once.

Time is a Mother

Patrick Tidmarsh

A leading criminologist draws on more than thirty years' experience to propose a new way of understanding sexual crimes 
 
The prevalence of sexual offending is one of the most urgent, and most widely misunderstood, subjects of our times. Drawing on his experience working with sex offenders and survivors, Patrick Tidmarsh explains how and why at every stage of the criminal and justice process we continue to get things so badly wrong. He powerfully argues that we need to find a new way to understand, investigate and talk about these crimes. He invites us all to question our own prejudices and assumptions - about both victims and perpetrators - and to question the social, criminal, and judicial systems that mean most victims still stay silent, and so few sexual offenders are held to account. 
 
Written with calm authority, insight and sensitivity, The Whole Story reveals the shocking reality of sexual crimes today and offers an urgent roadmap for change.

The Whole Story

Investigating Sexual Crime – Truth, Lies and the Path to Justice

Julian Aguon

'A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love - of the land, the ocean, the elders and the ancestors - warms the heart and moves the spirit.' - Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple 
 
Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice-for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. 
 
Aguon beautifully weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Bearing witness and reckoning with the challenges of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness. 
 
A powerful and bold new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific who are fighting to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites and obtain justice for generations of harm. 
 
In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy and triumph, and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.

No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies

With an introduction by Arundhati Roy

Michael Longley

**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE ** 
 
 
'One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.' Sebastian Barry 
 
Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

The Slain Birds

Ossian Brown

A collection of anonymous Hallowe'en Photographs from America, c.1875 - 1955 
 
The roots of Hallowe'en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging 'soul cakes' in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay. 
 
The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.

Haunted Air

Julia Blackburn

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. 
 
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. 
 
Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. 
 
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers. 
 
'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing 
 
'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

Dreaming the Karoo

A People Called the /Xam

John Richardson

'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
'Magisterial... thrilling' Guardian 
 
'Terrifically enjoyable' Daily Telegraph 
 
The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson's magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives. 
 
 The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso's château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris and the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur. 
 
 Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso's vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot who would replace Maar and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings. 
 
 As always, Richardson tells Picasso's story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world's most celebrated artists.

A Life of Picasso Volume IV

The Minotaur Years: 1933–1943

Fiona Benson

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 
 
The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter Mother'. 
 
The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.' 
 
Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.

Ephemeron

Yuval Noah Harari

Daniel Casanave

An epic, illustrated graphic history of how the Agricultural Revolution reshaped humanity. 
 
When nomadic Homo sapiens settled to live in one place, they started working harder and harder. But why didn't they get a better life in return? 
 
In The Pillars of Civilization, Yuval Noah Harari and his companions including Prof. Saraswati and Dr. Fiction travel the length and breadth of human history to investigate how the Agricultural Revolution changed society forever. Discover how wheat took over the world, how war, famine, disease and inequality became a part of the human condition, and why we might only have ourselves to blame. 
 
Adapted from Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling phenomenon Sapiens, this graphic history is a radical, witty and colourful retelling of the story of humankind. 
 
Praise for Sapiens: 
 
‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates 
 
‘Interesting and provocative . . . It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama

Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 2

The Pillars of Civilization

John Burnside

Lucid, lyrical, and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness. 
 
Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. 
 
Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 
 
‘I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 
 
** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**

Learning to Sleep

Andrew McMillan

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE* 
 
After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world. 
 
Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'. 
 
McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.

pandemonium

Alison Bechdel

**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER AND FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK** 
**A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021** 
 
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home comes this Christmas's must-gift graphic novel. 
 
All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret... 
 
The secret to superhuman strength. 
 
She has looked for it in her favourite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, therapy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong passion for exercise. Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weightlifting - you name it, she's tried it. "Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!" 
 
But as she gets older, her body isn't getting any stronger. And in a changing, sometimes overwhelming world, are "cantaloupe-sized guns" all a person needs? Maybe the all-important secret is not where she expected to find it . . . 
 
'The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour' Daily Telegraph 
 
In this, her third graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel has written a deeply layered, personal story about selfhood, self-sabotage, mortality, addiction, bliss, wonder, and the concerns of a generation. This is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud chronicle of the conundrums we all grapple with as we seek our true place in the world. Truly, a must-gift book this Christmas.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

David Vandermeulen

The first volume of the graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's global phenomenon and smash Sunday Times #1 bestseller, with gorgeous full-colour illustrations and a beautiful package - the perfect gift for the curious beings in your life. 
 
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one-homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? 
 
In this first volume of the full-colour illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human". From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens challenges us to reconsider accepted beliefs, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and view specific events within the context of larger ideas. 
 
Featuring 256 pages of full-colour illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, this adaptation of the mind-expanding book furthers the ongoing conversation as it introduces Harari's ideas to a wider new readership.

Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 1

The Birth of Humankind

Alex Halberstadt

'Engrossing' Daniel Beer, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful book... incisive, radiant' Olivia Laing 
 
'Illuminating, dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator 
 
'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew Solomon 
 
Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family, in this haunting work of memoir and history. 
 
In Ukraine, Halberstadt tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. 
 
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

A Memoir and a Reckoning

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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