Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Marion Coutts

In the aftermath of catastrophic loss, a mother and her young son cross the Atlantic, taking refuge in a wooden house on a remote strip of land. Viewed from the shore, where land meets sea, the horizon is a line that holds their attention and draws them in. Camera in hand, she charts their progress and starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family. 
 
Writing with precision and clarity, Coutts combines the real with the fictional, thinking through art, poetry, geology, maps and Minecraft to present a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, the visible and the invisible and the fragility and strangeness of the ocean and its borders.

What Did the Deep Sea Say?

Rachel Aviv

You Won't Get Free Of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. 'I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,' Aviv writes. 'It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs.' 
 
Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other parents’ children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother – the writer Alice Munro – in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free Of It is an astonishing investigation of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

You Won’t Get Free of It

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

Emmanuel Carrère

On 3 October 2023, beneath the dome of Les Invalides, the French Republic honours Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – renowned historian of Russia, member of the Académie Française, national figure. Among the mourners stands her son, Emmanuel Carrère, wondering who this formidable woman truly was: to the country, to history, and to him. 
 
In Kolkhoz, Carrère turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most intimate and ambitious book yet. From aristocratic Russia to Soviet Central Asia, from émigré salons to the shadow of the gulag, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride. There are white Russian ancestors clinging to vanished grandeur; relatives lured back to Stalin’s USSR and swallowed by silence; a father obsessed with genealogy and lost nobility; and, at the centre, a mother whose brilliance, ambition and authority shaped both French intellectual life and her son’s inner world. 
 
As Carrère sifts through letters, archives and contested memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another. What does it mean to inherit exile and privilege at once? How do political faith and historical catastrophe reverberate across generations? And can a son write about his mother with honesty without betraying her? 
 
By turns sweeping and surgical, tender and unsparing, Kolkhoz is a family epic and a reckoning: a meditation on communism and its afterlives, on filial piety and rebellion, and on the uneasy border between truth and love.

Kolkhoz

Maggie Nelson

In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth – and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialise and demonise such prolific, intimate output. 
 
The Slicks is a heady, rallying and unexpected melding of popular culture and literary criticism – an inspired treatise and unexpected celebration of two iconic female poets by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

The Slicks

On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift

Isabella Hammad

FROM THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION-SHORTLISTED AND RSL ENCORE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF ENTER GHOST 
 
Award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history. 
 
Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today. 
 
PRAISE FOR RECOGNISING THE STRANGER 
 
'Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose.' SALLY ROONEY 
 
'A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.' MAX PORTER 
 
‘Hammad’s writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.’ OLIVIA SUDJIC 
 
'Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.' RASHID KHALIDI

Recognising the Stranger

On Palestine and Narrative

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