Featured titles
Claire Lynch (Author)
**WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARDS GOLD PRIZE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025**
‘I’ll be thinking about it for ever’ Barbara Kingsolver
‘A gorgeously written story…a must-read’ Jennie Godfrey
'Both readable and intelligent...it offers hope and consolation... This novel will be read and thought about for years to come' Nick Hornby
‘I was caught up from the first page and completely taken aback by this story. I loved it’ Clare Chambers
A mother following her heart. A father with the law on his side. A child caught in the middle.
1982 Dawn is a young wife and mother hemmed in by village life. Then Hazel appears like a torch in the dark. Their attraction is instant and suddenly Dawn’s world is more joyful, and more complicated, than she ever expected.
2022 Maggie has always lived with an absence where her mother should be. Her father never speaks of her and it feels impossible to ask. Then an official letter arrives with news from the past, and Maggie must face a truth far bigger than just her family’s secret.
‘Powerful and beautifully written… Lynch is a huge new talent in fiction' Good Housekeeping, Book of the Month
'Explores love and loss, intimacy and justice, custody and care…it’s brilliant, I couldn’t put it down' Anita Rani, Woman's Hour
'A beautiful and tender exploration of parental love, prejudice and the things we carry' Rachel Joyce
‘A brilliant book… Full of heart, sympathy and sadness’ Sara Pascoe
‘A triumph! Like the great Maggie O’Farrell, Claire Lynch deals brilliantly with both big themes and small moments’ Elin Hilderbrand
‘Smart and heartbreaking’ Guardian
***READERS ARE IN LOVE WITH A FAMILY MATTER***
‘I would rate this 10 stars if I could’
‘Utterly brilliant, I was captivated from page one’
‘This book had my whole heart and more’
‘A beautiful, heartbreaking, important book’
‘I can’t get the story out of my head’
‘It totally broke my heart’
‘I’ll be thinking of these characters for a long time to come’
Anne Tyler (Author)
***The Sunday Times bestseller***
‘Just relishable. Thank God for the balm of good writing’ NIGELLA LAWSON
‘A wise, wonderful book’ OBSERVER
'Razor sharp on family, love and marriage' DAVID NICHOLLS
'I devoured it in one long lazy afternoon - I laughed and cried' VICTORIA HISLOP
Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful story of love, marriage and second chances
It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines.
First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home.
Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret which could throw the whole wedding into question…
‘She is and always will be my favourite author’ LIANE MORIARTY
'If Anne Tyler isn’t the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC R4 WOMAN'S HOUR
‘She knows all the secrets of the human heart’ MONICA ALI
‘My favourite writer’ NICK HORNBY
'Anne Tyler really is the best' GRAHAM NORTON
'Our greatest chronicler of family life' DAILY MAIL
'Nobody does it better' VOGUE
Mark Haddon (Author)
'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life
Simultaneously heart-breaking and darkly hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult.
Mark Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.
Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood.
As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment
Caroline Moorehead (Author)
Corruption, sleaze and violence were woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Sicilian life, as the Mafia rose to dominance. This is the story of one man who stood in opposition.
In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy’s history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, then aged sixty-five. One of the greatest European writers of the twentieth century, he had published the first Mafia novel, The Day of the Owl, in 1961, and was widely seen by Italians as a true moral figure in a country where corruption had seeped into every corner of public and private life.
Sciascia was born in 1921 and came of age as the Mafia grew to prominence across Sicily. Widespread poverty and hardship following the First World War meant that many Sicilians no longer recognised Rome’s leadership, which had left a void for local gangsters to fill. Witnessing the scale of corruption and violence, Sciascia predicted it would soon spread north, and he was right: by the 1980s, the Mafia had infiltrated every level of Italian politics and grown into an international, highly successful business.
In A Sicilian Man, prize-winning historian and biographer Caroline Moorehead charts Sciascia’s life against the rise of the Mafia, and lays out the thrilling and devastating struggle that ensued for Italy’s soul.
Namwali Serpell (Author)
'A landmark appraisal... deep and enriching' GUARDIAN
'An exhilarating meeting of critical minds' OBSERVER
'Serpell is a superlative essayist' DIANA EVANS
'Serpell brings her expertise and eye to Toni Morrion's singular literary genius' HARPER'S BAZAAR
The essential companion to Toni Morrison’s work, written by Namwali Serpell, ‘one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today’ (Financial Times)
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and most beloved of writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, ‘she is our only truly canonical black, female writer – and her work is highly complex.’ In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and professor to illuminate Toni Morrison’s masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her vivid fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry – with contextual guidance and original close readings. Accessible and thrillingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of our time, but how to approach any great work of literature. The conversation between the two black women artist-readers that rises from these pages is stylish, edifying and spectacular in its scope and erudition.
‘[Serpell has] hopped on a rocket and touched the Tonisphere, with her mind... Serpell’s excitement, her sense of discovery and dismay, become yours’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'Breathtaking, provocative, and refreshing' IMANI PERRY
Blake Morrison (Author)
'Lucid, tender and humane . . . One of the most formally agile and compassionate poets of our age’ Fiona Benson
Here you are, on the balcony,
the sea serenading you,
the sun with its armful of light.
In Afterburn, Blake Morrison returns to poetry, his first calling, to offers scenes from his own life and the lives of others. In psychology, 'afterburn' refers to the time before a past event is assimilated – an idea that resonates through these poems (which themselves linger after reading) about memory and our attempts to articulate, shape or contain it.
Throughout the collection, not least in two extraordinary sequences – one about his sister, the other about Elizabeth Bishop – the poet sees with new eyes the turning points in a life's accidental course. What holds his wise, touching, melancholy yet joyful poems together are the small intimacies that bind us to others, under time’s lengthening shadow: ‘you moved too fast for me to catch you / and so did the years.’
Playful and charming, sometimes rakishly so, Afterburn nevertheless reveals an open, and vulnerable, heart.
***
'Distils the insights of a seasoned memoirist into images that linger long after the final page' Julia Copus
'A master of the sonnet . . . I’m taking Afterburn to my desert island' Hugo Williams
