ADAM HAMDY is a bestselling author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, The Other Side of Night, was an NPR best book of 2022 and a New York Times best thriller of the year, and has been described as ingenious and deeply moving. He is the author of the Scott Pearce series of modern spy thrillers, Black 13, Red Wolves and White Fire, and the Pendulum trilogy. Keep up to date with his latest books and news at www.adamhamdy.com.

Adam Hamdy

Adam Hart-Davis

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Imagine Me Gone and Union Atlantic. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. His journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Haslett

Adam Henson presents Countryfile, often from his 650-hectare farm in the Cotswolds. Having studied Agriculture at college, Adam took over Bemborough Farm from his father, Joe. The farm now grows wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, runs a flock of 400 commercial ewes and has the UK's leading collection of rare breeds, many of which are in demand for film sets and advertisements. Cotswold Farm Park (www.cotswoldfarmpark.co.uk) offers a total countryside experience for all the family, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year. 
 
Adam presented Lambing Live with Kate Humble, writes for Countryfile magazine and has appeared on Radio 4's On Your Farm and Farming Today. He is the author of three previous books, Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land, the Sunday Times bestseller, Like Farmer, Like Son and A Farmer and His Dog.

Adam Henson

Adam Henson is perhaps the best-known farmer in the UK, presenting on BBC's Countryfile to millions of viewers each Sunday evening. He's also appeared on Lambing Live, Secret Britain, Coast and Inside Out. Adam also runs the award-winning Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which welcomes family visitors all year round and is home to many rare breeds. He has a monthly column in Countryfile magazine, as well as the Cotswold Life magazine. He has written several books including the Sunday Times bestseller Like Farmer, Like Son. This is his first children's book and it is the perfect introduction to the farm.

Adam Higginbotham has written for magazines including The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and Smithsonian. He is also the author of Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, which was awarded the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York City.

Adam Higginbotham

Adam Hills is an internationally recognised comedian and host of award-winning Channel 4 show The Last Leg. His collection of stories from a life in comedy, Best Foot Forward, was a Times bestseller.

Adam Hills

Adam Howling

Adam J. Kurtz

Adam Jacot de Boinod

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Adam Johnson

Adam Kay is a former doctor who has written five million books and sold seven copies. No, hang on – he’s written seven books and sold five million copies. His debut book, This is Going to Hurt, is a literary sensation: a Sunday Times number one bestseller for over a year, winning a record-breaking four National Book Awards and selling over 3 million copies. Kay adapted This is Going to Hurt as a BAFTA-winning comedy-drama series for the BBC. Adam Kay’s children’s books have been translated into 32 languages and sold over 1 million copies, making him one of the UK’s bestselling children’s authors. Kay’s Anatomy became the fastest-selling children’s general non-fiction hardback of the decade. His first picture book, Amy Gets Eaten, was published in 2023, and his first children’s novel, Dexter Procter the Ten-Year-Old Doctor, was published in September 2024.

Adam Kay

Adam studied illustration and animation, and received a BA followed by an MA from the Edinburgh College of Art. As a student he won a competition to create a short film for MOMI and Channel 4, and once his career producing animated commercials was under way, he became an illustrator as well. He has regular columns in the UK and the US.

Adam Larkum

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Macqueen

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Adam O'Riordan

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Adam Phillips

Adam Rackley

Adam Richardson is the UK's top trending health and fitness coach with a rapidly growing audience across both TikTok and Instagram. Adam is passionate about removing barriers to exercise and movement, a philosophy that is key to his work as a Personal Trainer in which he strives to help his clients feel more confident, as well as more fit and healthy.

Adam Richardson

Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs, and coauthor of Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and currently writes The Amateur Gourmet Newsletter on Substack. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is acknowledged as the senior scholar of international relations in the UK. He was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University 1986-2007, and President of the British Academy 2009-13 - the head of humanities in Britain. He was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2002-08), a member of the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board (2003-15) and is now on the Board of Advisers of the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Adam Robinson is based in the Middle East and is a regular contributor to newspapers in the Arab world and also to the British media. He is the author of numerous books on the region, including Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Adam Robinson

Adam Ross

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans, and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television, including Inside Science and The Cell. Adam has also worked as a science advisor on many films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Adam Rutherford

Adam Smith

Adam Smyth runs the 39 Step Press, an experiment in printing, from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. He is also Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Adam Smyth

Adam Sweeting

Adam Tandy

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Ocean Vuong

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
 
‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New Yorker 
 
An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. 
 
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years. 
 
‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.’ Andrew McMillan 
 
 Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year 
PBS Summer Recommendation

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

John Burnside

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other. As we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others: cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries. 
 
The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In ‘Approaching Sixty’, the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair: ‘so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist’. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.

Still Life with Feeding Snake

James Sheard

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
PBS Autumn Recommendation 
 
The poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’ 
 
These are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing. 
 
James Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.

The Abandoned Settlements

Posy Simmonds

First published in 2003, Literary Life became an instant classic as readers (and writers) delighted in watching Posy Simmonds skewer the pains and pretensions of the writer’s (and reader’s) calling with her inimitable flair for witty satire and sharp social observation. As well as all the cartoons and comic strips from the original edition, The Complete Literary Life includes 40 extra pages of cartoons, including the two series Rick Raker and Dr Derek, in which two very different heroes attempt to right the wrongs afflicting the writing world, one by brute force and skulduggery, the other with a silky bedside manner.

Literary Life Revisited

Raymond Briggs

A marvellous, life-enhancing book for all ages, now a major animated film starring Jim Broadbent, Brenda Blethyn and Luke Treadaway 
 
Utterly original, deeply moving and very funny, Ethel &amp; Ernest tells the story of Raymond Briggs' parents' marriage, lady's maid Ethel and milkman Ernest, from their first chance encounter in 1928, through the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971. 
 
Told in Brigg`s unique strip-cartoon format, Ethel and Ernest live through the defining moments of the twentieth century: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build up to World War II, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from post war austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s. 
 
Ethel &amp; Ernest is a heartfelt and affectionate tribute to an ordinary couple and an extraordinary generation.

Ethel & Ernest

Charles Burns

‘A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].’ 
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, a Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Charles Burns’ graphic trilogy has been hailed as one of the masterpieces of the form. Now readers can find the long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means ... it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug.

Last Look

Sharon Olds

‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’ 
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year 
 
Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

Odes

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

Alice Oswald

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize 
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize 
 
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 
 
Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. 
 
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. 
 
Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours – goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time – are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.

Falling Awake

Sarah Lippett

Sometimes, the simplest stories are the best... This is a lovely, tender book... Stan and Nan are all of our grandparents, their stability and infinite kindness much mourned as our ever-changing worlds spin frantically on.' 
Rachel Cooke, Observer 
 
My nan wrote me many letters back in 2011. They were about the love of her life, my grandad, Stanley Burndred. I’ve never met him, he died long before I was born, but his drawings, paintings and ceramics have been in my life for as long as I can remember. Every wall of Nan’s house would be decorated by his artworks and every windowsill bore his ceramic creations. Whenever we visited Nan in the Black Country I would study the ornaments and pictures, wondering who had made them. It wasn’t until I wrote to Nan many years later, receiving in return beautiful handwritten letters detailing his life, that it became apparent that the work was his. 
 
The letters were so beautiful I felt my nan’s story had to be told. Stan and Nan is the story of an ordinary couple and the people who loved them. The narrative follows their lives from Stan’s working-class background, to his premature death, through to Nan’s struggle to cope, and the perils of ageing. It is a memoir about the importance of family, and about death, love, living and human connection.

Stan and Nan

Bryan Talbot

Mary Talbot

Set against the background of violence and state repression in a turbulent period of French history, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia chronicles the incredible and outrageous life of Louise Michel, the revolutionary feminist dubbed ‘The Red Virgin of Montmartre’. A utopian dreamer, notorious anarchist, teacher, orator and poet, she was decades ahead of her time. Always a radical, she fought on the barricades defending the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 against the reactionary regime that massacred thousands of French citizens after the Commune’s defeat. Deported to a penal colony on the other side of the Earth, she took up the cause of the indigenous population against French colonial oppression. 
 
Celebrating the utopian urge in nineteenth-century literature and politics and the origins of science fiction, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia is the third collaboration of best-selling academic and graphic novelist Mary M. Talbot with her husband, the graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot. Their first book together, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, won the 2012 Costa Biography Award.

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia

Daniel Clowes

Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially ‘Clowesian’, and utterly unique in the author’s body of work. This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet. 
 
The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he’s invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?

Patience

J. O. Morgan

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference. 
 
This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions? 
 
Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.

Interference Pattern

Neil Rollinson

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
 
Like Neil Rollinson’s earlier books, Talking Dead is a refreshment of the senses: lifting the lid on the human condition in a heartfelt celebration of the act of being, whether in moments of love or mortality, sex or feasting. 
 
In the central sequence of the book – a meditation on the space between life and death – the dead speak of their final earthly moments with a liberating sense of fascination, and a luminous awe. Elsewhere we enjoy al fresco sex, astronomy via many pints in the Cat and Fiddle, and the deliverance of an Indian monsoon after weeks of thirst and drought. In ‘Christmas in Andalucia’ two lovers Skype each other achingly across hundreds of miles – ‘I am full of loss and longing,’ the poet says, ‘the heart is hewn from elm and oak and mistletoe.’ 
 
As provocative, sensual and subversive as ever, these poems seek and find the numinous in the everyday: some element of ritual or wonder that transforms experience. Although the spectre of darkness is never far away, it is the spirit of pleasure that endures, and we discover to our delight, as D. H. Lawrence did, that the Dionysian finally prevails over the Apollonian.

Talking Dead

Kate Beaton

Wonder Woman! Hunks! Great men and women of history! Step aside – Kate Beaton is coming for you. 
 
The author of the smash hit Hark! A Vagrant returns with all-new sidesplitting comics that showcase her irreverent love of history, pop culture and literature. Collected from her wildly popular website, readers will guffaw over 'Strong Female Characters', the wicked yet chivalrous Black Prince, 'Straw Feminists in the Closet' and a disgruntled Heathcliff. Delight in what the internet has long known - Beaton's humour is as sharp and dangerous as a velocipedestrienne, so watch out!

Step Aside, Pops

A Hark! A Vagrant Collection

Evie Wyld

Joe Sumner

Evie Wyld was a girl obsessed with sharks. Spending summers in the brutal heat of coastal New South Wales, she fell for the creatures. Their teeth, their skin, their eyes; their hunters and their victims. 
 
Everything is Teeth is a delicate and intimate collection of the memories she brought home to England, a book about family, love and the irresistible forces that pass through life unseen, under the surface, ready to emerge at any point.

Everything is Teeth

William Goldsmith

The Bind charts the rise and fall of Egret Bindings, once the most prestigious firm of bookbinders in London. 
 
In 1910 brothers Guy and Victor Egret take on an ambitious commission: a deluxe, jewelled binding of a collection of poems, A Moonless Land. It proves to be a moment of hubris. The work triggers their ruin, watched by the disapproving spirit of their father, Garrison Egret. 
 
A darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and creative one-upmanship, The Bind shows once again that William Goldsmith is an incomparable storyteller and a marvellously inventive artist.

The Bind

Andrew McMillan

*Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award* 
 
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. 
 
We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory. 
 
Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart. 
 
Winner of the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Physical

David Hughes

On holiday in Suffolk, a boy and his dog discover a World War II pillbox half buried on a deserted beach. When he returns the next day with his parents, the pillbox has disappeared. They learn a pillbox had been there and a boy had once been found in it, dead... 
 
1945, another boy, another dog, the same pillbox … and an American serviceman from the local base. Murder, treachery, a terrible secret… 
 
David Hughes’ second graphic novel is a haunting ghost story – dark, disturbing and – as always with Hughes – stunningly drawn.

The Pillbox

Antonio Altarriba

When published in 2009, The Art of Flying was hailed as a landmark in the history of the graphic novel in Spain for its deeply touching synthesis of individual and collective memories. A deeply personal testament, Altarriba’s account of what led his father to commit suicide at the age of ninety is a detective novel of sorts, one that traces his father’s life from an impoverished childhood in Aragon, to service with Franco’s army in the Civil war, escape to join the anarchist FAI, exile in France when the Republicans are defeated, to return to Spain in 1949 and the stultifying existence to which Republican sympathisers were consigned under Francoism. 
 
The Art of Flying is immensely moving and vivid, beautifully drawn by Kim. It was highly praised in Spain on first publication, where it was compared to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. It went on to win six major prizes, including the 2010 National Comic Prize.

The Art of Flying

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

Mark Doty

Mark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that – as Philip Levine says – ‘looks away from nothing’. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. ‘Pure appetite,’ he writes ironically early in the collection, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ And the following poem answers: 
 
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire 
at work all night, secretive: in the morning 
 
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, 
 
like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess 
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice? 
 
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Deep Lane

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

Sean Borodale

Human Work was written while cooking. It is the narrative of a voice in domesticity, at the alchemical heart of home – the hearth, or Hestia – where the kitchen is a stage for acts of eating and uttering; for the ebb and flow to the human mouth. The poems were written ‘live’ among pots and pans, beside chopping boards, between plates, bowls, knives, forks, spoons, and servings. Their time is the hybrid time of writing and cooking – where the dimensions of two activities hinge together. The poems occupy a shared space; the work is one work. They live together and cross-talk, like figures in a room, invoking an old story, perhaps one of our very first: how we make food to eat and share, how we draw and transform others’ bodies into being our own flesh and life. Implicit in ingredients are the stories of matter itself: without food there can be no other stories. 
 
Like the poems of Bee Journal these poems started life in notebooks, in situ. Their pages seem marked with the very process of their making: jam, grease, wine stains, crumbs of flour and spice, flecks of meat, fish, fruit, vegetable. Like Bee Journal, this is a book about communal purpose, a record of risk and response – a poetry of the moment, both immemorial and thrillingly modern.

Human Work

A Poet's Cookbook

Andy Hixon

Lucia is a hard town, full of hard people. It stands looking out across the unforgiving sea that is slowly swallowing it. Its people are all unemployed, with nothing to live for but a pint and fight. 
 
Among them are Brick and Morty, one a disabled, heartbroken divorcee and aspiring writer, the other his best friend and protector, a fantasist and aspiring Ultimate Fighting Welterweight Champion of the world.

Lucia

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

Emma Chichester Clark

A gift that will bring cries of delighted recognition from anyone who has ever owned a dog and, dare one say it, charm the pants off even those who strongly prefer cats. 
 
Hello. My name is Plum and I’m a whoosell – that’s whippet mixed with Jack Russell and poodle. I especially like swimming, leaping, catching, and croissants, and my favourite fragrance is fox poo. I live with Emma, an illustrator, and Rupert. My sister, Liffey, lives nearby. 
 
Over the last year I’ve been keeping a diary. Emma has helped with the pictures, but the words are all mine. 
 
Since 2012 Emma Chichester Clark, one of Britain’s best-loved authors and illustrators, has been delighting thousands of followers with her blog Plumdog, which records the day to day life of Plum, her dog, in Plum’s own words and Emma’s drawings.

Plumdog

Nick Hayes

Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People – men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control. 
 
Guthrie’s influence lives on, a touchstone for Bob Dylan, The Clash and the protest singers of the Occupy movement today. With a delighted eye, and an ear for a tune, Nick Hayes’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a legend to life with a generous spirit and crackling moral force its subject would have been proud of.

Woody Guthrie

And the Dust Bowl Ballads

Michael Longley

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize 
 
 
In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

The Stairwell

Robert Crawford

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.

Testament

Black Heart Blue

Black Lace Book Of Women Sexual Fantasies

Black Star Series

Blacklist

Set inside Blandings Castle, this comedy series follows Lord Emsworth and his pig Empress as they meet with his dysfunctional family and friends, and the havoc that follows.

Blandings

Blandings Castle

Blood City Rollers

Bloodlines

Blossom Street

Blue Ant

Bluey

Bodyguard

Bodyguard Series

Bollocks to Alton Towers

Book of Dust Series

Borderlands

Born Wicked

Boudica: the last defender of the Celtic culture; the only woman openly to have led her warriors into battle; the only British warrior to have stood against the might of Imperial Rome - and triumphed. 
 
This is her story.

Boudica

Boy Soldier

Brain Chemicals

Brave Bunnies

Bridge

Bridget Jones's Diary

Brief Encounters

Bright Young Things

Brotherband

Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives living in the modern world. Together they head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, ready to solve any of the weird and wonderful crimes that fall across their desks.

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