A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

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Tim Spector

**As seen on Channel 4’s What Not to Eat** 
 
‘A super healthy and tasty gift for you and your gut microbiome – discover the joy of fermenting’ Dr Clare Bailey Mosley 
 
From the world-leading gut scientist and no. 1 bestselling author of Food for Life, comes an introduction to the life-changing benefits of fermentation. 
 
Of all the ways to prepare food, fermenting is surely the most mysterious, miraculous and misunderstood. As Tim Spector shows in this groundbreaking book, the science is now clear that adding fermented foods to our diets brings an astonishing range of benefits for our health. 
 
Drawing on his own cutting-edge research, and including practical tips for buying and making fermented foods, Tim demystifies the world of ferments, and introduces us to some of his favourites – from homemade kombucha and kefir, to sourdough, miso and coffee. 
 
He explores the extraordinary science of fermentation and the transformative role of microbes, in our kitchens and in our guts – and reveals why fermenting is the key to good food and good health. 
 
Ferment is the ultimate gift for anyone who wants to eat better and feel better. 
 
Praise for Tim Spector: 
 
‘One of the visionaries leading the way. His writing is illuminating and so incredibly timely.’ Yotam Ottolenghi 
 
‘No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ DAILY MAIL 
 
‘Tim Spector has been exploding the myths around food and health for years’ THE TIMES 
 
‘The man changing how we eat’ TELEGRAPH

Ferment

The Life-Changing Power of Microbes

Kevin Young

A new poetry collection about loss, legacy and African American history, from the poetry editor of the New Yorker 
 
'One of the most important poets of his generation' Washington Post 
 
Kevin Young's new poetry collection, written over sixteen years, tells stories of community, nationhood and resistance, inspired in part by other lives. He starts in the bayous of Louisiana, and speaks from the voices of Millie and Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American 'Carolina Twins' - born into enslavement who later toured the world as free women. 
 
Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: 'It's like a language, / loss -', he writes, 'learnt only / by living - there - '. Evoking the history of poetry, Young's new collection is defiant and playful, elegant and devastating - his voice shaping sorrow with music, humour and wit. 
 
'Keeping up with him is like trying to keep up with Bob Dylan or Prince in their primes' New York Times

Night Watch

Asta Olivia Nordenhof

'Nordenhof has a sort of literary X factor' OBSERVER 
‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ OLGA RAVN 
'Fizzes and soars' MARK HADDON 
*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025* 
 
A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar 
 
A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. She has lived many lives and as she sits out a two-week quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. 
 
Years ago, desperate for money, she sold herself to a man called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death. 
 
At the last moment, she chose life and fled. Now in London, the woman watches the people around her, searching for clues on how to live in the face of betrayal and loss, and what freedom really looks like. 
 
Intimate, revelatory and ultimately revolutionary, this is a portrait of a woman driven to the brink of destruction, who learns to believe in love again. 
 
'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' Guardian 
 
'Defiantly unique' Financial Times

The Devil Book

Richard Lloyd Parry

A father is stranded with his baby daughter as violence breaks out in the jungle, in this page-turning and explosive new novel 
 
'Brilliant, harrowing and heartbreaking, yet utterly compelling' David Peace 
 
Deep in a vast tropical rain forest, Kit and Lara escape the hollowness of modern life doing charitable work in a jungle village. With them is their tiny baby, Helen, who flourishes under the anxious care of her father. 
 
Their life of idyllic isolation is shattered by the arrival of an outsider with frightening news: close at hand, across the border, violence is looming. Hidden in a tiny memory card, Kit unwittingly holds evidence of the world-shattering event that is unfolding, the desperate power-play of a flailing superpower. 
 
Separated from Lara, with war erupting around them, Helen and Kit are forced to flee through the forest with a band of local children, pursued by a ruthless and determined army. Caught between the struggle of rival powers, Kit must keep his baby daughter alive while protecting the secret that his pursuers will kill to get their hands on. 
 
'Immersive and immensely readable, never not terrifying' Richard Beard 
 
Praise for the award-winning Ghosts of the Tsunami: 
 
'A book of absolute, harrowing truth and beauty. I'd give up four of my novels to have written this book' Jim Crace, author of Harvest 
 
'Every time I think of it, I'm filled with wonderment... A future classic' Observer 
 
'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm

In the Green Heart

John Burnside

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets 
 
'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
John Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages. 
 
Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability – its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed – and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany – a sudden, spiritual manifestation. 
 
There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a ‘dwelling place’ – a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace. 
 
'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
‘A titan of literature' KATHLEEN JAMIE

The Empire of Forgetting

Michael Longley

A collection of Michael Longley's greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years as one of the Belfast triumverate, alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon 
 
'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS 
 
'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEY 
 
The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet. 
 
It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty. 
 
'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS 
 
'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement

Ash Keys

New Selected Poems

Irvine Welsh

It is the late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin – a time for hope, for love, for raving. 
 
Leaving heroin behind and separated after a drug deal gone wrong, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie each want to feel alive. They fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead; they follow the call of the dance floor, with its promise of joy and redemption. 
 
Sick Boy starts an intense relationship with Amanda, his ‘princess’ – rich, connected, everything that he is not. When the pair set a date for their wedding, Sick Boy sees a chance for his generation to take control at last. But as the 1990s dawn, will finding love be the answer to the group’s dreams or just another doomed quest? 
 
Irvine Welsh’s sequel to his iconic bestseller Trainspotting tells a story of riotous adventures, wild new passions, and young men determined to get the most out of life.

Men in Love

Joris Mertens

In the rain-slicked, neon glowing streets of a 1970s continental metropolis, a man called François makes a snap decision that will change his life for good 
 
François, in his fifties, living alone and low on cash, does not have the life he dreams of. 
 
With a cigarette stuck to the corner of his mouth and wearing his perpetual black suit, he has carried out the same morning routine for 17 years: entering the lottery with his lucky numbers, then knocking back a beer at Café Monico before his shift as the delivery driver for a dry cleaners. 
 
His days are brightened only by newsagent Maryvonne and her young daughter. He dreams of winning the lottery to give them a better life. 
 
When a routine delivery leads him to knock on the door of a countryside mansion, he enters the scene of a crime whose remains consist of a dozen bodies and a bag full of banknotes. What François chooses to do next could change his fate for good… 
 
Visually stunning, atmospheric and replete with the smoking irony of European noir, Dry Cleaned is a masterful tale about an anti-hero radically stepping out of his routine - beautifully illustrated by a breakout international talent.

Dry Cleaned

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. 
 
'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

Helen Lewis

**Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award** 
 
*A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and GQ Book for 2025 * 
*From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Difficult Women* 
 
'Brilliant, timely and compulsively readable. Helen Lewis shows how the idea of genius has warped our understanding of human creativity – and why people of vast accomplishment in one domain can prove so destructively clueless in others.' OLIVER BURKEMAN 
 
The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor. 
 
You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. 
 
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means. 
 
Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles’ success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius — a class of special people — is distorting our view of the world. 
 
'Lucid, funny and fascinating' ADAM BUXTON 
 
'An indispensable companion to our times' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ

The Genius Myth

The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers

Heather Clark

A debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery. 
 
'A singular portrait of intoxicating young love' AUBE REY LESCURE 
 
'You wouldn't be able to put it down' SAMANTHA ROSE HILL 
 
For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering. 
 
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she meets Christoph, a German student visiting campus. They only spend a week together – discussing art, ideas and history – but it is long enough for Anna to fall desperately in love. Anna begins to visit Christoph in Germany. As she tries to understand the young, elegant man who fascinates her, he reveals his country to her. 
 
Germany is still reckoning with the Holocaust and its pretty new squares and grand facades belie its recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains vague about the part his own grandparents played. Anna’s grandfather, meanwhile, was an American GI who took photos of the end of the war, photos that capture its horror, preserved in a scrapbook only Anna has seen. 
 
Anna wants to believe in Christoph and the future he promises her but as their relationship becomes increasingly unsettling, she must face up to everything she has been unwilling to see, and everything Christoph has chosen to ignore. 
 
'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots 
 
'Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy' Times Literary Supplement

The Scrapbook

Robert Crawford

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful poetry collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot 
 
'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' Sunday Herald 
 
'Ecological poetry of great intelligence and sensitivity' Guardian 
 
Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth. 
 
These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. 
 
Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford stands as a contemporary master of poetry. 
 
‘A poet of great importance… fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman 
 
'In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

Old World

Matthew Dooley

A story about mislaid umbrellas, questionable scientific theories and unlikely friendship - from the author of Flake, winner of the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 
 
Where do all the lost things go? 
 
In Dobbiston, they'll likely end up in the care of Mr Daniels, the long-time custodian of the local lost property office. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the town council's shabby premises he has spent a lifetime quietly cataloguing the carelessness of his fellow Dobbiston residents. 
 
But when something unexpected interrupts his routine, Mr Daniels is forced to embrace a little bit of life's chaos. 
 
Told through Lost Property Office vignettes - a snooker cue love story, a granny’s tea cosy and a kid’s toy on an intergalactic adventure – local histories are elevated to the momentous and profound, drawn with playful nostalgia and Dooley’s deadpan wit. 
 
PRAISE FOR FLAKE 
 
'A joy... think of Joff Winterhart with a cone and a squirt of strawberry sauce' Herald Scotland 
 
'(A) wonderful, elegiac debut... full of irresistible puns' Observer 
 
'A cheerfully nostalgic trip into a north western english town of pub quizzes, crazy golf and crosswords' Guardian

Aristotle’s Cuttlefish

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

Alison Bechdel

'The funniest, most satirical cartoon she has ever written – as well as, perhaps, the most prescient' OBSERVER 
 
"Very funny and self-hating in a good way" ZADIE SMITH 
 
From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege? 
 
But how is she supposed to sit here writing a book when the world hangs on a thread? 
 
In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war. 
 
Her first graphic memoir about growing up with her taxidermist father has been adapted into a highly successful TV series, Death and Taxidermy. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group. 
 
As the TV show racks up Emmy after Emmy, Alison’s own envy spirals. Why couldn’t she be the writer for a wildly popular reality TV series which shows people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?! 
 
In Spent, the celebrated, bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud and passionately political work of autofiction, and once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times) than the real Alison Bechdel.

Spent

A Comic Novel

Ocean Vuong

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive 
 
One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 
 
The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival. 
 
‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ OPRAH WINFREY 
 
'Perfectly tuned… May well be the first millennial Great American Novel’ ArtReview 
 
‘A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain’ Observer 
 
‘His most vivid, ambitious work yet’ Dazed 
 
'A poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality' COLM TÓIBÍN 
 
‘This stunning book moved me so much, I fell in love with its characters and grieved their absence in my life when I turned the last page’ CAITRÍONA BALFE 
 
'Tender and moving' REBECCA SOLNIT 
 
'A masterwork' BRYAN WASHINGTON

The Emperor of Gladness

Linea Maja Ernst

A luscious summer novel about friends, lovers, and friends' lovers 
 
‘Clever, wry, and incredibly sexy’ SUSANNAH DICKEY 
 
Five friends from university; seven summer days in a cabin in rural Denmark. A chance to swim, sunbathe, flirt, read and mess around like in the old days. 
 
At least that’s what Sylvia had hoped. But when her friends arrive with real jobs, kids and partners, Sylvia is left wondering what happened to the radical ways of living they embraced at university. Worse, Esben and Karen announce their plan to get married at the end of the week, striking a blow to Sylvia’s simmering, decades-long crush on Esben – a crush that her monogamous girlfriend Charlie would definitely not approve of. 
 
Whilst the group swim, sunbathe, cook and flirt their way to midsummer night, desire and anxiety swirl in equal measure. As the wedding day approaches, will they achieve their arcadian dreams or will everything come tumbling down? 
 
'Delicious, and provocative' ESTHER FREUD 
 
‘Sensuous and vivid, simmering with sexual tension and with an undercurrent of deep longing... A book to devour' LAURA KAY 
 
'Trembles and flashes with hot emotion, confusion and pangs of longing. I loved its cast of characters' AMY KEY 
 
‘Linea Maja Ernst writes about sexual desire so well that it turns her readers on’ Weekendavisen

Waist Deep

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

Edward St Aubyn

A brother and sister lost and found, in a novel that seizes your heart and enthrals your mind, from the author of the Patrick Melrose series. 
 
 * The Orwell Prize Finalist 2025 * 
 
 ‘We set off in opposite directions and walked around the world until we met, and I’m very pleased we have…’ 
It is summer. Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him. His therapist, Martin, also faces challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother. Olivia, meanwhile, is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life. 
Over a year, their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, revealing their destinies in a new light. Parallel Lines is a novel about connection, family, love, and the cascading consequences of our choices. 
PRAISE FOR EDWARD ST AUBYN: 
‘Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation’ 
ALAN HOLLINGHURST 
‘I love Edward St Aubyn’DONNA TARTT 
‘Nothing can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn’s world’ 
ZADIE SMITH

Parallel Lines

Alex Dimitrov

'Ecstasy stands out for its brutal examination of the transience of Eros ... Campy and fun' Guardian 
 
In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. 
 
He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity – even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. 
 
In ‘Today I Love Being Alive’, we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring ‘I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather’; in ‘Poppers’, he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, ‘thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life’, and issuing a warning to himself and us: ‘Poetry / is not a self-help book.’ 
 
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy. 
 
'A rollicking paean to pleasure, an ode to realness and resilience ... Raw and honest and deeply personal' New York Times 
 
'Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god he's here' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 
 
*A most anticipated queer book for Spring 2025 in Electric Literature*

Ecstasy

Anders Nilsen

From the revered graphic artist and writer Anders Nilsen, Tongues collects together in one volume for the first time Nilsen's cult comics and their retelling of the myth of Prometheus 
 
'Mindbendingly good. It’s up there with Maus, Fun Home, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan' 
MARK HADDON, author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME 
 
In the remotest reaches of Central Asia where rival groups war over oil, a minor god is chained to a mountainside. Unfolding in a series of conversations with his unlikely friend the eagle, who visits every day to carry out a gruesome sentence of torture, Tongues I follows the titan’s pursuit of revenge on the god that imprisoned him. 
 
Entwined with their story are those of Astrid, a teenage East African orphan on an errand of murder, and a man with a teddy bear strapped to his back wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. 
 
Tongues I is a postmodern, apocalyptic reimagining of Prometheus' story, here a fallible god failing in his duty as the creator and protector of humanity. 
 
A visual meditation on our deep evolutionary past and our complicated prospects for the future, Tongues I is both a propulsive story of adventure and an examination of human nature in our present moment. 
 
'A genuinely mind-blowing achievement. [...] A dazzlingly innovative feat which surprises and delights on every page, across the epic whole and in every strange detail.' 
MAX PORTER, author of LANNY 
 
'One utterly gorgeous comic' 
VULTURE

Tongues I

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

** THE ONLY GUT-HEALTH COOKBOOK YOU NEED FROM THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOOD FOR LIFE** 
 
**As seen on Channel 4’s What Not to Eat** 
 
'A book full of fantastic recipes and ideas.' Yotam Ottolenghi 
‘Packed with food you will love – and that your microbes will, too’ Dr Clare Bailey Mosley 
'Flavours and recipes you’ll want to eat every day' Melissa Hemsley 
‘Delicious and astonishingly, life-changingly, simple’ Davina McCall 
'Tim’s principles for eating well are totally transformative' Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall 
 
In: 30 plants a week. Out: Calorie counting. 
In: Fermenting. Out: Ultra-processed foods. 
But, how? 
 
The Food For Life Cookbook takes the ground-breaking guidance in Tim Spector's #1 bestselling guide to the new science of eating well and, in over 100 delicious and achievable recipes created in collaboration with ZOE, the nutrition science company that he co-founded, shows just how simple and enjoyable it can be to adapt to a gut-friendly way of eating. 
 
Shaped by Tim's own experience of transforming the way he eats, as well as common requests from readers and ZOE members, chapters include 15-minute meals, ideas for eating well when the fridge looks bare, and generous feasts and sweet treats for special moments with friends. 
 
Packed with plant-led inspiration for delicious meals to feed you, your family and your microbiome, as well as tips for increasing plant diversity and science-based explanations for the nutritional benefits of the ingredients and recipes included, The Food For Life Cookbook is a must-have for every gut-loving home and kitchen. 
 
Cook for life. Join the food revolution. 
 
PRAISE FOR FOOD FOR LIFE: 
'A fresh look at food' JAMIE OLIVER 
 
‘Fascinating’ NIGELLA LAWSON 
 
‘No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year 
 
Tim Spector, Number 1 Sunday Times bestseller, February 2024

The Food For Life Cookbook

100+ Recipes Created with ZOE

Ottessa Moshfegh

Read the novel that catapulted Ottessa Moshfegh to literary stardom: a gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas 
 
'One of America's most exciting - and most provocative - young novelists' Financial Times 
 
'You’re in safe, if sticky hands... A wild ride' The Times 
 
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, 1851: McGlue is down in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name, situation or orientation – but he has blood on his hands. He may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. As the ship makes its voyage home to Salem, Massachusetts, intolerable memory accompanies reluctant sobriety. 
 
A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

McGlue

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

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

Charles Burns

‘An instant classic from a master of the form’ 
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 
 
'Unsettling and beautifully executed' 
GUARDIAN 
 
An arresting story of an artist's obsessions, from the beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole. 
 
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie – his reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods. 
 
Armed with an old camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, in homage to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – both his damsel in distress and his saviour. 
 
Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. 
 
**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE NEW YORKER AND THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
Charles Burns, Eisner Award-Winner, 2006

Final Cut

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

Howard Jacobson

A provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist. 
 
Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? 
 
'Deliciously laugh-aloud nasty about not just the making of this rough beast but what in the American character enabled it to go slouching into the White House' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Undigested rage, whip-smart wit devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow… This is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got in the state we’re in' Oldie

Pussy

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

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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