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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

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Ariana Reines

Fury is very lustful 
A body concealing its heart’s desire 
 
Has a certain texture 
A tang or an edge if you will 
 
That the openhearted cannot match 
& when exactly does the deceitful 
 
Heart open? At climax. 
—from ‘The Hanged Man’ 
 
 
The Rose navigates the intersection of power and surrender. Drawing on the history of ‘romance’ as the troubadours knew it, and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, award-winning poet Ariana Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: ‘I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.’ In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul. 
 
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humour. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the ‘secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,’ and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

The Rose

Nick Makoha

In The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that leads to Uganda becoming a pariah state and later to the young Makoha’s escape from the country. 
 
Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat’s technique of the ‘exploded’ collage, Makoha’s triumvirate of characters – the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – embark on a heroes’ odyssey, gathering the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life. ‘Hold that note,’ writes the poet. ‘In this place you are no longer the chorus . . . In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.’

The New Carthaginians

Ralf Webb

Highway Cottage weaves the story of a strange homecoming. A young poet travels to the heart of the English countryside – back to the West Country village where he grew up. Descending into the valley where the small riverside community still resides, he finds himself within a dreamlike landscape, peopled by uncanny figures: drone operators and hunters; half-familiar friends; local historians, and braying councillors trying desperately to oust a community of Travellers. Hovering between reality and folklore, the locale is at once idyllic and in decay; the visitor is both unsettled and soothed by it. Slowly, we start to sense that both villagers and poet might be under threat – not just from the future, but from the past.This book-length sequence of poems represents a ground-breaking artistic achievement by acclaimed poet Ralf Webb. Blending the eerie musicality of children’s rhymes with echoes of traditional balladry and free verse, the collection swells to an extraordinary chorus. With great clarity and affection, but not a trace of sentimentality, Webb conjures a precise vision of a rural community, surfacing the deep and urgent tensions – personal, political, and environmental – that run through Britain today. The result is a unique portrait of contemporary country life, enchanting and unnerving in equal measure.

Highway Cottage

Miranda Cowley Heller

WHAT THE DEEP WATER KNOWS is the debut poetry collection from bestselling author Miranda Cowley Heller, a series of exquisite reflections on love in all its seasons.In poetry that is quick-witted and lyrical, gentle and devastatingly frank, Cowley Heller contemplates time, marriage, and motherhood, and paints a moving portrait of a rich life.

What the Deep Water Knows

Maria Ferguson

In the consultation room I stared 
at the purple flowers in their purple 
vase and imagined my insides: 
an ocean, a cave, a storm. 
 
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman’s experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother's embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants towards recovery, empowerment and renewal. 
 
Tender, direct and winningly witty, Swell distils the poet's complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.

Swell

Theresa Lola

In Yoruba culture, newborn babies are welcomed into the world, and ushered into the social fabric, through naming ceremonies filled with songs of praise. The names bestowed are communicative both of where the baby has come from – the circumstances of its birth, the atmosphere in the home – and of where its future will take it. Both are forms of destiny. 
 
Far-reaching and musical, Theresa Lola’s second collection explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. Lola conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began. 
 
In lyrical, joyful and moving poems, Lola breaks down the complexities of the diasporic experience and the way it is woven through family life, history and memory. Ceremony for the Nameless is an exquisite collection from a thrilling contemporary voice, described as among “the ranks of an exciting new wave of young female bards who are widening the appeal of poetry for a new generation” (Sunday Times Style Magazine).

Ceremony for the Nameless

Robin Lane Fox

Homer's Iliad is the famous epic poem set among the tales of Troy. Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles and its dreadful consequences for the warring Greeks and Trojans. It was composed more than 2,600 years ago, but still transfixes us with its tale of loss and battle, love and revenge, guided throughout by the active presence of the gods. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving but great questions remain: where, how and when it was composed and why it has such enduring power? 
 
In this compelling book Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a life-long love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date and a method for its composition, giving us a sense of alternative approaches and grounding his own in discoveries about long heroic poems composed elsewhere in the world, and the ever-growing evidence of archaeology. 
 
Unlike other books on the Iliad, this one combines the detailed expertise of a historian with the sensitivity of a teacher of it as poetry. Lane Fox goes on to consider hallmarks of the poem, its values, implicit and explicit, its characters, its women, its gods and even its horses. He argues repeatedly for its beautiful observation and addresses its parallel use of what is, to us, the natural world. Thousands of readers turn to the Iliad every year. In this superbly written and conceived tribute, Lane Fox expresses and amplifies what old and new readers can find in it. It is pervaded, he argues, by a poignant hardness which is not just a poetic trick. It is a deeply held view of the world.

Homer and His Iliad

Elisa Gonzalez

Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself.Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," trumpet blossoms "panicking across the garden." Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place--Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio--all constellated in "a chaos of faraway." The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How do you reconcile a hatred for the world's pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? Gonzalez's poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility and sustaining questions. "Since I do love the world," she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.

Grand Tour

Poems

Terrance Hayes

A dazzling collection of poems from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin 
 
Since the publication of his first book, Muscular Music, in 1999, Terrance Hayes has been one of America's most exciting and innovative poets, winning acclaim for his sly, twisting, jazzy poems, and his mastery of emotive, restless wordplay. 
 
In So to Speak, his seventh collection, a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds, talking cats tell jokes in the Jim Crow South and a father addresses his daughter. In lyric fables, folk sonnets, quarantine quatrains and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas, Bob Ross paints your portrait, green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne and elegies for the late David Berman and George Floyd unfold amid the pandemic. These poems lyrically capture the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Hayes shapes music into language, and language into music.

So To Speak

Peter Gizzi

In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed: composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. 
 
The book’s broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls ‘a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.’ Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find – as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book – that ‘everything is fine, better than fine.’ In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament, but also – as it has been for centuries – a work of openness, and a work of love. 
 
‘Gizzi’s best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for… He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen’ The New Yorker

Fierce Elegy

Olivia Gatwood

&lsquo;Yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me&rsquo; JAMIE LOFTUS 
 
In this powerful, candid collection, Olivia Gatwood explores the trials and triumphs of growing up as a woman. 
 
She celebrates the teenage girl and the colour pink while questioning the role that fear and male violence play in who we are and what we become. These piercing poems are at times blistering and riotous, and at times soulful and exuberant. 
 
Balancing singularity of view with a sense of universal experience, Life of the Party is about the pain, the joy, the challenge, the reward of being a girl and a woman in today&rsquo;s world. 
 
&lsquo;Olivia Gatwood is a revolution of woman, a flurry of insight harnessing the language of self-assessment and acceptance&rsquo; MAHOGANY L. BROWNE 
 
&lsquo;Asks us to remember the stories of those most vulnerable, the women whose stories are too often ignored&rsquo; THEM.US 
 
 
&lsquo;An electrifying collection of poems about the agonies and ecstasies of being a young woman&rsquo; LEIGH STEIN

Life of the Party

If A Girl Screams, and Other Poems

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . . 
 
Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains an irrepressible light. In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett highlights this often forgotten but vital foundation of the plant world with her unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to Country Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy of these overlooked spaces, renaming her favourite species of moss as she recovers from grieving her father’s death, spurred on by the resilience and tenacity of her plant - and human - friends.

Twelve Words for Moss

Paul Tran

This is a book about survival. 
This is a book about love. 
 
Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, charts the rebuilding of a self in the wake of extremity. How, it asks, can we reimagine what we have been given in order to make something new: an identity, a family, a life, a dream? 
 
These rich, resonant poems of desire, freedom, control and rebirth reach back into the past - the tale of Scheherazade, US imperial violence, a shattering history of personal abuse - to show how it both scars and transforms. Innovative poetic forms mirror the nonlinear experiences of trauma survivors, while ambitious sequences probe our systems of knowledge-making and the power of storytelling as survival. 
 
At once virtuosic and vulnerable, confessional and profoundly defiant, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacities for resilience, endurance and love.

All the Flowers Kneeling

CA Conrad

The new collection from 'one of America's most legendary living poets' (Ocean Vuong), written in the drive to fall in love with the world again not as it was, but as it is 
 
when the hammer 
approached we thought 
 is that thing coming this way 
 
Breathing, moving, living on the page, CAConrad&rsquo;s exhilarating work is centred on the (Soma)tic ritual, their celebrated practice which draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an &lsquo;extreme present&rsquo; of unfettered creativity from which poems can emerge. 
 
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return gathers the results of a single new ritual, focused on fellow animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, and spanning environments from Seattle &ndash; a city built in the midst of an abundant nontropical rainforest &ndash; to the Mojave Desert. The poet receives gifts from a crow; associates different parts of their body with nine different species encountered in the desert; and joins a woman each morning in feeding rats in the streets of Rome, taking turns looking out for the police. 
 
Written with urgency, hope, anger and joy, the poems that result are an ode to survival in a world that humanity has poisoned, and a testament to a love that knows no by-laws.

Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Tayi Tibble

I am made in the image of my mother ... 
I am made in the image of / my mountain / my river / my whenua 
 
In Rangikura, plastic tiaras melt into boiling rivers, and family memories blur with ancestral mythologies. Satanic stepbrothers play jenga while the deity Mahuika burns - and the temperature is rising. Here, anger and loss, history and pop culture are spun into verses woven with vernacular and Te Reo Maori. At the collection's centre, our protagonist whirls through a love/hate story for the internet age, facing the sting of unanswered texts and unmet expectations with wit, sensibility and devastating glamour. 
 
Rangikura is the captivating second collection from award-winning poet Tayi Tibble. From feminism to colonialism, skuxes to daddies, wild swimming to schoolboy hakas, these poems at once mark the end of the world and the dawn of a new day. Poignant, hilarious and liberatory, Rangikura reminds us that the personal is sometimes political, the political is always personal, and poetry can be revolutionary.

Rangikura

Yomi Sode

In poems exploring family, survival, generational trauma and the complexities of belonging, Manorism is an examination of the lives of Black British men and boys. At the heart of the book is the ongoing pressure of code-switching - changing one's behaviour and language to suit radically different cultural contexts and environments. The violence of artists such as Caravaggio in seventeenth-century Rome and modern-day commentary by the likes of David Starkey and Piers Morgan provide a lens for considering differences of impunity afforded to white and Black people. Snippets of Yoruba interweave with English, and a moving final sequence - adapted for the Almeida stage in June 2021 to glowing reviews from the Guardian, Time Out and others - charts the dramatic reconciliations surrounding a death in the family. The result is a thrillingly original book that charts the vulnerabilities and rich nuances of Black masculinity in Britain.

Manorism

Maureen N. McLane

In her first book of poems since What I'm Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura collection of perceptive poetic meditations. What You Want is a book of landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. 
 
Here are poems filled with gulls and harbours, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumoured sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. Sensitive, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and gives form to an ambient unease. From Sappho to Constable, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a book alive to the cosmos as well as to our moment, with its many vexations and intermittent illuminations. 
 
With strong command and delicate invitation, McLane moves from swift notations to powerfully sustained sequences, testing what (if anything) might 'outlast the coming heat'. And meanwhile, 'There's no end / to beauty and shit'.

What You Want

A visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetry 
 
Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. 
 
 Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.

The Book of Frank

'this mechanistic world . . . has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry' 
 
Since their inception in 2005, CAConrad's (soma)tic poems have acted as an urgent appeal for an embodied, unfettered creative practice. Rooted in the Sanskrit 'soma', meaning 'to press and be newly born', and the Greek-derived 'somatic', relating to the body, Conrad's (soma)tic poetry reaches out from electrifying, esoteric rituals. Their methods are elaborate, and the results are unexpected: one, for instance, might begin by seeing the poet flood their body with the field calls of extinct animals - and end not only in a consideration of survivor's guilt and the destruction of ecosystems, but also in an elated sense of the presence, close at hand, of the many friends and lovers they lost to AIDS. 
 
Conrad draws on these rituals to enter a political, physical and spiritual state of consciousness, meditating on ecology, queerness and grief in powerful, dreamlike poetry that invites us to engage with the essence of things. This new selection is a testimony to poetry's capacity to reconnect us with the present moment and put an end to the alienation we feel: from our bodies, our surroundings, our planet.

You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis

And Other (Soma)tics

Majella Kelly

In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies. 
 
In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur. 
 
Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.

The Speculations of Country People

Claudia Rankine

In this, the landmark achievement that crowned the first phase of her writing career, Claudia Rankine invites us into the lives of Liv and her husband Erland, as they find themselves propelled into the classic plot: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. The couple's journey is charted through dreams, conversations and reflections, in a text like no other, deftly moulding language and crossing genres to arrive at new life: baby Ersatz. 
 
Plot is an inventive and engrossing meditation on pregnancy and the changes it heralds: the potential bodily cost, the loss of self, the sense of impending stasis. Each fear compounds Liv's reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. A profoundly daring collection, it explodes the emotive capabilities of language and form to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.

Plot

Marit Kapla

Winner of the 2019 August Prize 
 
Near the river Klarälven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Värmland, lies the Swedish village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees. 
 
In the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady drip of relocations to the cities for work have seen Osebol's adult population dwindle to only 40-odd residents. The shops have closed; the bridge across the river is shut to traffic. But still, life goes on. Those who have inherited their farms for generations live alongside recent arrivals from near and far. People age; children grow up. Heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth. 
 
In this extraordinary book, Marit Kapla has gathered the voices of the villagers themselves, interviewing almost all of those remaining between the ages of 18 and 92. They alone speak. Arranged with only a handful of lines on each page, they tell of their griefs and joys, resentments and pleasures, enmities and loves, and memories that span a century of progress and upheaval. 
 
To read Osebol is to be immersed in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.

Osebol

Voices from a Swedish Village

Linton Kwesi Johnson

A selection of Linton Kwesi Johnson's best poems over three decades. Ranging from protests against police brutality to eulogies for departed friends and playful celebrations of urban life, Johnson's use of Jamaican dialect to tackle distinctly British subjects contributed to a revolution in the notion of literary English. This Selected Poems charts the unique literary talent of one of Britain's most influential poets and social critics.

Selected Poems

Under USSR rule, the subject matter and style of literary expression in Ukraine was strictly controlled and censored. But once Ukraine gained independence in 1991 its literary scene flourished, as the moving and delightful poems, essays and extracts collected here show. 
 
There are fifteen authors included in this book, both established and emerging, and in this anthology we see them grappling with history and the future, with big questions and small moments. 
 
From essays about Chernobyl to poetry about Robbie Williams, from fiction discussing Jimmy Hendrix live in Lviv to underground Ukrainian poetry of the Soviet era, WRITING FROM UKRAINE offers a unique window into a rich culture, a chance to experience a particularly Ukrainian sensibility and to celebrate Ukraine's nationhood, as told by its writers.

Writing from Ukraine

Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965

The voice of Tayi Tibble is one of most exciting in poetry today. In Poukahangatus (pronounced 'Pocahontas'), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies - Greek, Maori, feminist, kiwi - peeling them apart and respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies and Twilight to exquisite renderings of precise emotions and the natural world alike. Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics chart the overflowing beauty, irony and ruination of her surroundings. 
 
Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history without merely telling it, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation. These are warm, provocative and profoundly original poems, written from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work and gender are intimately and insidiously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and asks how she as a Maori woman fits into trends, stereotypes and popular culture. With language that is at once colourful, passionate and laugh-out-loud funny, Poukahangatus announces the presence of a surpassingly daring new poet.

Poukahangatus

Yrsa Daley-Ward

A treasure trove of inspiration and an invitation for personal renewal from the acclaimed author of bone and The Terrible 
 
We still dream though, don't we? We are gifted with a way into ourselves, night after night after night. 
 
Yrsa Daley-Ward's words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers around the world: through her books of poetry and memoir bone and The Terrible, through her powerful writing for Beyoncé on Black Is King and through her always-illuminating Instagram posts. 
 
In The How, Yrsa gently takes readers by the hand, encouraging them to join her as she explores how we can remove our filters, and see and feel more of who we really are behind the preconceived notions of propriety and manners we've accumulated with age. With a mix of short, lyrical musings, immersive poetry and intriguing meditations, The How can be used to start conversations, to prompt writing, to delve deeper - whether you're on your own or with friends, on your feet or writing from the solace of home. 
 
'Lyrical . . . visceral truth is at the heart of her work' i Newspaper

The How

Notes on the Great Work of Meeting Yourself

A celebratory 20th anniversary edition of this landmark collection from black writers across the literary spectrum 
 
This ground-breaking anthology was first published twenty years ago, into a different literary landscape. Showcasing the work of more than 100 black British authors, this 20th anniversary edition celebrates their lasting contributions to literature and to our wider culture. 
 
Including poetry from Roger Robinson, David Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Jackie Kay and Benjamin Zephaniah, short stories from Ferdinand Dennis, Diana Evans, Catherine Jonson, E.A. Markham and Ray Shell; essays from Floella Benjamin, Linda Bellos, Treva Etienne, Kevin Le Gendre and Labi Siffre; memoirs from Margaret Busby, Henry Bonsu, Buchi Emecheta, Sol B. River and Leone Ross, and many others. 
 
IC3 spans a wealth of genres - from poetry, to short fiction, memoir and essays - to demonstrate the range and astonishing literary achievements of black writers, who remain underrepresented in British culture today. Featuring a new introduction from original editors Kadija Sesay and Courttia Newland, this collection reflects on the legacy of these writers and their extraordinary work.

The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain

At the theatre, around the dinner table, in the airport and in the voting booth, what fractures lie beneath the veneer of contemporary civility and rhetorical claims to unity? What happens if we actually acknowledge them? And when we do, how can we strive to stay in the room with one other? 
 
 In a series of real-life conversations with both friends and strangers, Claudia Rankine set out to explore these questions, taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy - and a willingness to be surprised - as her guiding light. Just Us is the record of those encounters. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and along the way considers a typically enlightening and unexpected range of issues, from priority boarding queues to the political and cultural implications of women dyeing their hair blonde. 
 
 Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right - and in always feeling comfortable - than in being true and being together.

Just Us

An American Conversation

Stephen Sexton

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't 
 
It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once. 
 
Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: 'Edelweiss' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it's practically always the anniversary of something terrible, but there's always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. 
 
A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Cheryl's Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize-winning If All the World and Love Were Young, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today.

Cheryl's Destinies

Jonah Mixon-Webster

Lyrical, loud and radically urgent, Jonah Mixon-Webster's debut aims its sights at the words and images that shape us and the corrupt forces that stand in the way of our freedom. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force. It is a revision of our most sacred mythologies - and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where untainted tap water is still not guaranteed and the legacies of racist policies persist. 
 
 Challenging stereotypes through scenes scattered with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster explores the places where space and body, race and region and sexuality and class meet and intersect. He invents visual/sonic forms, recasts poems as FAQs and transcripts, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems.

Stereo(TYPE)

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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