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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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Jean Sprackland

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

Night Vision

In search of the true dark

Sarah Perry

'Please read this book. It may very well change how you live' Rachel Clarke 
 
'I was spellbound' Kathryn Mannix 
 
Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. 
 
Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. 
 
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. 
 
'By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved' Christos Tsiolkas 
 
'This book will be a lifeline for so many people' Seán Hewitt 
 
'To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying' Amy Key

Death of an Ordinary Man

Mimi Pond

Outrageous, passionate and glamourous - a stunning graphic biography of the six sisters who blazed their way through the 20th century, beguiling their peers, the press and then the rest of the world 
 
As a young girl living in sun-bleached 1960s suburban California, Mimi Pond fell in love with the Mitford sisters. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Mitford brought society glitz, pageantry, scandal, and real (rainy) weather to her own prosaic life. 
 
High society debutantes known for rubbing shoulders with some of history’s most infamous fascists and communists, the sisters were also, in turn, gifted writers, inveterate nicknamers, chicken-raising homebodies, scathing wits, and passionate adventurers in the maelstrom of the 20th century. 
 
Drawn with inimitable artistic flair and a mischievous affinity for the decadent and grandly declining aristocracy, Mimi Pond brings the Mitfords to life in this glittering and lovingly researched family biography.

Do Admit

The Mitford Sisters and Me

Anna Trench

The story of female footballer Florrie and the amazing hidden history of the women’s game come to life in this debut graphic novel about football, friendship and falling in love. 
 
'A really great graphic novel... beautifully drawn and very well written' ALISON BECHDEL 
 
'If you put Alison Bechdel's Fun Home in football kit, you might come up with something like Florrie' ZING TSJENG 
 
When Florrie’s great-niece discovers Florrie was a footballer in the early twentieth century, she unearths a secret history both on and off the pitch. 
 
Boxes from the attic contain photos, objects and letters, revealing football games and love affairs in Norfolk, London and Paris. Florrie’s adventures touch on both invented and real events: huge crowds at matches in London and Preston, international fixtures, dances at lesbian club Le Monocle in Paris, and the devastating consequences of the FA's 1921 ban on women's football. 
 
This is a story of self-discovery, friendship and queer love, alongside huge (and little known) historical moments for the women’s game. In Florrie, Anna Trench brings readers a beautifully drawn, evocative and warm-hearted love-song to an unforgettable woman and sport. 
 
'Bright with the feeling of liberation, and the risks and joys of following your heart' SEÁN HEWITT 
 
Charming and incredibly moving' RACHEL RAMSAY

Florrie

A football love story

Akshi Singh

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

In Defence of Leisure

Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Fiona Benson

The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet 
 
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE 
 
In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft. 
 
Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution. 
 
In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic. 
 
‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison 
 
‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson 
 
A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ Guardian

Midden Witch

Seán Hewitt

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. As he contends with the expectations of his family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. 
 
Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, but underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. 
 
With the passing seasons, the two teenagers grow closer and the bond that emerges between them transforms their lives. James falls deeply for Luke, yet he is never sure of Luke’s true feelings. And as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make – will he risk everything for the possibility of love?

Open, Heaven

Kay Sohini

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

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

A Graphic Memoir

Adrian Tinniswood

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

The Power and the Glory

The Country House Before the Great War

Miriam Gold

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

Elena: A Hand Made Life

Amelia Loulli

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

Slip

Carol Adlam

A stunning detective story from the winner of the World Illustration Award 
 
**OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH Pick for March** 
 
'Could not be more rich or more beautiful if it tried' 
OBSERVER 
 
In this stunning reimagining of a nineteenth-century Russian crime thriller from the world of Dostoevsky, Carol Adlam presents Charlie Fox, stunt journalist, magician, liar and thief, who reluctantly returns to her hometown of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of Elena Ruslanova, daughter of a fabulously wealthy glass manufacturer. 
 
In Nowheregrad Charlie finds herself caught up in a multi-layered story that is told through the richly varied visual devices of the time. With the unwitting assistance of her lover, Netochka, Charlie unravels the mystery of the Bobrov family, only to face the truth about herself. 
 
Exquisitely drawn and compellingly told, Adlam's complex, elegant narrative brings to life the lost legacies of early crime fiction and the first women journalists and detectives. 
 
**A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR**

The Russian Detective

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

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

Food for the Dead

Leontia Flynn

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

Taking Liberties

Darrin Bell

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

The Talk

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist

Ocean Vuong

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

Time is a Mother

From the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Patrick Tidmarsh

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

The Whole Story

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

Julian Aguon

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

No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies

With an introduction by Arundhati Roy

Michael Longley

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

The Slain Birds

Ossian Brown

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

Haunted Air

Julia Blackburn

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

Dreaming the Karoo

A People Called the /Xam

John Richardson

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

A Life of Picasso Volume IV

The Minotaur Years: 1933–1943

Cristina Morales

An explosive and daring novel about bodies, sex, politics and disability by the prize-winning Spanish writer Cristina Morales 
 
Ángela, Patricia, Marga and Nati are cousins living together in Barcelona. As women branded as disabled who share a state-subsidised flat, they must fight every day to retain their independence and find new and inventive ways - from dance to underground zines - to stop the state from managing every aspect of their lives. 
 
Funny and furious, Easy Reading is an indictment of the institutions that stigmatise individuals as disabled and of the language that marginalises them. It is also a portrait - visceral, vibrant, combative - of contemporary Barcelona. But, above all, Easy Reading is a feminist celebration of the body in all its forms, of female desire and queer sexuality, and of the transgressive and revolutionary power of language. 
 
Translated from the Spanish by Kevin Gerry Dunn

Easy Reading

The new novel from the Spanish literary sensation

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

Ephemeron

Yuval Noah Harari

David Casanave

Discover the second volume of an epic, beautifully illustrated graphic history of humankind, based on Yuval Noah Harari's multi-million copy bestselling phenomenon. 
 
When nomadic Homo sapiens settled to live in one place, they started working harder and harder. But why didn't they get a better life in return? 
 
In The Pillars of Civilization, Yuval Noah Harari and his companions including Prof. Saraswati and Dr. Fiction travel the length and breadth of human history to investigate how the Agricultural Revolution changed society forever. Discover how wheat took over the world, how war, famine, disease and inequality became a part of the human condition, and why we might only have ourselves to blame. 
 
The origins of modern farming are told through Elizabethan tragedy, the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News, and the history of inequality is revealed in a superhero detective story. 
 
A radical, witty and colourful retelling of the story of humankind, adapted from Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Volume 2 can be read as a standalone or as a follow-up to Volume 1, The Birth of Humankind. 
 
Praise for Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: 
 
'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species.' Bill Gates 
 
'Interesting and provocative... It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' Barack Obama 
 
'Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last... It may be the best book I've ever read' Chris Evans 
 
'Contains a remarkable piece of information on almost every page and reminds us that we should be grateful to be human.' Matt Haig 
 
'Sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain... Radiates power and clarity, making the world strange and new' Sunday Times 
 
'Provocative and fascinating and opinionated...it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. It altered how I view our species and our world.' Guardian

Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 2

The Pillars of Civilization

Andrew McMillan

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

pandemonium

Alison Bechdel

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

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Daniel Casanave

David Vandermeulen

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

Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 1

The Birth of Humankind

Joe Sacco

In his first full-length work of journalism in a decade, the 'heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman' (Economist) brings his comics mastery to a story of indigenous North America, resource extraction, and our debt to the natural world 
 
*A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way around-it is central to their livelihood and their very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are also home to valuable natural resources, including oil, gas and diamonds. With mining came jobs and investment-but also road-building, pipelines and toxic waste, which scarred the landscape; and alcohol, drugs, and debt, which deformed a way of life. 
 
In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. Resource extraction is only part of Canada's colonial legacy: Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to remove the Indian from the child; the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage labourers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture. 
 
Against a vast and gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers and chiefs, activists and priests, telling a sweeping story about money and dependency, loss and culture, with stunning visual detail by one of the greatest comics reporters alive.

Paying the Land

Steven Appleby

'A superhero like none you've seen before. Thrilling' IAN RANKIN 
 
*A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
A delightfully witty and exciting graphic novel by one of Britain's favourite artists 
 
Dragman tells the story of August Crimp, a man who has superpowers when he puts on women's clothes. August loves wearing a dress but is deeply ashamed of his compulsion and terrified of rejection should it ever come out. So he tells no one. Not even his wife. But then one day a little girl falls from the rooftop cafe at the Art Museum and August has no choice but to fly and save her - an event witnessed by hundreds of people. 
 
And August Crimp's life is never the same again. 
 
Dragman is Steven Appleby's first long-form graphic thriller. Inspired by the superhero comics he read as a child and informed by his own secret life as a transvestite, Steven Appleby has created a multi-layered, tightly plotted, cleverly structured novel with a compulsive forward drive in which August battles greed, evil and his own self-doubt in a fight to save himself, his marriage - and the human soul. A real page-turner, Dragman brims with humanity, subtlety and wit - plus plenty of Steven Appleby's oblique and absurdly imaginative musings on 'what is life really all about?' 
 
Fans of Steven Appleby's unmistakable drawing style, as seen in his many books and in comic strips such as Captain Star (NME, Observer), Small Birds Singing (The Times), and Loomus (Guardian), will not be disappointed.

Dragman

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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