Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

Ajay Chowdhury

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Joe Sacco

From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today 
 
Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath. 
 
Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed. 
 
Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, the award winning cartoonist turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for us all. 
 
* 
 
PRAISE FOR JOE SACCO: 
 
'One of the masters of his craft' New Statesman 
 
'A pioneer of the genre' TLS 
 
'Formidably talented.' Independent 
 
'The hands-down boss of his particular corner of contemporary literature' Dazed & Confused 
 
'Sacco's brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage are potent territory... He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold' New York Times Book Review

The Once and Future Riot

Michael Ondaatje

The poems in Handwriting are memories of Sri Lanka: the rituals and traditions, history and geography, the smells and tastes and colours of his first home. Here are sunless forests, cattle-bells, stilt-walkers 'with the movement of prehistoric birds'; a Buddha buried 'so roots/like fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face'; 'saffron and panic seed, lotus flowers, sandalwood; a lover, who lay her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night'. 
 
Handwriting is an elegy for lost childhood, for a culture and language lost to the turmoil of history, but it is also a glimpse of the source of the writer's delicate, erotic, mysterious imagination. By focussing on writing frankly about beautiful things, Ondaatje takes the poems beyond narrative to these simple, deeply sensual images - given to us in a language that is pared, cursive and exquisite.

Handwriting

Deepti Kapoor

Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Médicis 
 
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night. 
 
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character. 
 
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own. 
 
A novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.

A Bad Character

Salman Rushdie

If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. 
 
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. 
 
These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through. 
 
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don't know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time. 
 
‘More than 40 years after Midnight's Children, there is still nobody who spins a yarn quite like Salman Rushdie’ Spectator 
 
‘Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities’ The Times 
 
‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes

The Eleventh Hour

Marjane Satrapi

In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul. 
 
As the days pass and Nasser Ali Khan grows weaker, those who love him - his wife, his children, his siblings - gather round, incredulous, to try to comfort him. Every visitor stirs up a memory, and in the course of this week Nasser Ali Khan revisits his entire life, a life defined by three relationships in particular. He remembers his late mother, who sacrificed everything for his revolutionary brother, but who also, in the last week of her life, found solace only in smoking and listening to him play his tar; his angry wife, who can't forgive him his melancholy and irresponsibility; and Irane, his first love, whose father forbade her to marry a poor musician and inflicted the wound that fuelled his music. The pieces of Nasser Ali Khan's story slowly fall into place, and as they do, we begin to understand him. By the time the eighth day dawns, having witnessed Nasser Ali Khan communing with Sufi mystics, Sophia Loren, the spirit of his late mother, his own demons and, bravely, with Azrael, the angel of death - we feel privileged to have known him. 
 
Brilliantly weaving together the past, present and future to explore the successes and joys, failures and disappointments of Nasser Ali Khan's life and through his story, the meaning of any of our lives - Marjane Satrapi has also once again presented us with a complex and deeply human portrait of the men and women of her country, and of pre-revolution Iran itself. She delivers this tremendous story about life and death, and the fear and courage both require, with her trademark humour and insight. Chicken With Plums is Marjane Satrapi's finest achievement to date.

Chicken With Plums

From independence movements in Sri Lanka to train stations in contemporary Ontario, an intimate and witty selection of Michael Ondaatje’s most widely loved poems taken across fifty years 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric family, to his life in rural southern Ontario with its beloved rivers, celebrations of treasured friends, the close ties of children. 
 
Ondaatje is one of the great poets of love, and here we follow him through the exhilarations of youth into that ‘storm of music’, the passionate, sensuous swerves of longing and desire, until we reach the calm of that moment when ‘only a cloud’s reflection holding you up / You swim into late afternoon’. 
 
The Distance of a Shout offers us a glimpse into the interwoven life and art of one of our most cherished poets and novelists – a reminder itself of the power of great poetry to shine a light on living. 
 
'Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry' TERRANCE HAYES

The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems

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

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by him' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
'A generous, moving book' GUARDIAN 
 
Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world &ndash; describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone born out of diverse cultures. 
 
Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Molière&rsquo;s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. As he writes in the opening poem: 
 
Reading the lines he loves 
he slips them into a pocket, 
wishes to die with his clothes 
full of torn-free stanzas 
and the telephone numbers 
of his children in far cities 
 
Poetry &ndash; where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

A Year of Last Things

Neil Rollinson

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

Talking Dead

Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe's fourth collection continues his engagement with history: the living continuum that connects us with our near and distant past, nourishing and illuminating our present. Here are traces left of presence: Indian scratchings on rock, the nail-marks of destroyed frescoes, spoken fragments of war memories - petroglyphs that function as both memorials and re-awakenings, traceable with the finger of the imagination. And here, too, are images of the stilled, the stopped life: a snowed-up village, the paralysed victim of motor-neurone disease, a soft drink fermented in an old village cafe. 
 
From this rueful equilibrium of mid-life, Thorpe circles his own personal history, allowing regret and anticipation their Janus-like say. These are erudite, generous poems, formally versatile yet rich in startlingly original observation and a natural lyric grace. Performing his unique archaeology on lives lived, Adam Thorpe once again displays the range of his imagination and the depth of his humanity.

Nine Lessons From The Dark

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

David Szalay

'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 
 
'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital 
 
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. 
 
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. 
 
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. 
 
Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. 
 
Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail 
 
‘Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day 
 
'It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer 
 
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer' Tessa Hadley

Flesh

Amie Barrodale

A mortally funny story of a mother's love that defies all odds, including death 
 
'Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation' OTTESSA MOSHFEGH 
 
Three days after I died, my son ran away. 
 
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth in the North American desert. 
 
But Sandra soon discovers that a mother’s work is never done, not even when you’re dead. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is. 
 
As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra’s struggle to save him from the other realm begins. 
 
From Florida’s Gulf Stream to the raging seas, through Munich-bound aeroplanes and from one body to another, Trip takes us on an absurd, profound and irresistibly entertaining odyssey - a story of childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between. 
 
'An extraordinary novel' AKHIL SHARMA 
 
'I've read nothing like it' CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN 
 
'As absurd, tender and moving as life itself' BookPage

Trip

Don McCullin

The updated retrospective published for McCullin's 80th birthday. 
 
Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction — the definitive edition. 
 
McCullin’s reputation has long been established as one of the greatest photographers of conflict in the last century. In the fourteen years since the first publication of the book, McCullin has shed the role of war photographer and become a great landscape artist. He has also travelled widely through Africa, India, the Middle East and among the tribes living in Stone Age conditions in Indonesia. His journey from the back streets of north London to his rural retreat in the depths of Somerset is unparalleled. It includes a passage through the most terrible scenes of recent history, for which his stark views of the West Country offer him some redemption.

The New Definitive Edition

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

Posy Simmonds

The brilliant graphic novel behind the major new film starring Gemma Aterton (Quantum of Solace), Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Fabrice Luchini (In the House) and Mel Raido (Spooks) 
 
Gemma is the bored, pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children and the bête-noire of his ex-wife. Gemma's sudden windfall and distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off. 
 
Is it a coincidence that Gemma Bovery has a name rather like Flaubert's notorious heroine? Is it by chance that, like Madame Bovary, Gemma is bored, adulterous, and a bad credit risk? Is she inevitably doomed? These questions consume Gemma's neighbour, the intellectual baker, Joubert. Denying voyeurism, but nevertheless noting every change in the fit of her jeans, every addition to Gemma's wardrobe, her love-bites and lovers, Joubert, with the help of the heroine's diaries, follows her path towards ruin. Adultery and its consequences. Disappointment and deception. The English in France. Fat and slim. Then and now.

Gemma Bovery

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

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

‘The blessing of an inherently interpretive medium like comics is that it hasn't allowed me to . . . make a virtue of dispassion. For good or for ill, the comics medium is adamant, and it has forced me to make choices. In my view, that is part of its message’ – from the preface by Joe Sacco 
 
Over the past decade, Joe Sacco has increasingly turned to short-form com­ics journalism to report from conflict zones around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost international correspondents working today. 
 
Journalism takes readers from the smuggling tunnels of Gaza to war crimes trials in The Hague, from the lives of India's 'untouchables' to the ordeal of sub-Saharan refugees washed up on the shores of Malta. Sacco also confronts the misery and absurdity of the war in Iraq, including the darkest chapter in recent American history – the torture of detainees. 
 
Vividly depicting Sacco's own interactions with the people he meets, the stories in this remarkable collection argue for the essential truth in comics reportage, an inevitably subjective journalistic endeavour. Among Sacco's most mature and accomplished work, Journalism demonstrates the power of a great comics artist to chronicle lived experience with a force that often eludes other media.

Journalism

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

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Matthew Sweeney

Negotiating the borders and hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe - with occasional coracle trips or forays to Antarctica for a round of golf - the homesick flaneur surveys the surrounding devastation with the same mixture of fascination and alarm he feels when he discovers the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made catastrophe: the ruins and remnants of war peopled by kidnappers and assassins, feral dogs, death squads, the dispossessed and deracinated. 
 
These poems are parables of threat, parties for the end of the world; they speak eloquently of damage, displacement and the resulting swell of terror: 
 
'I looked back at the door 
heard the lock click, then beyond 
another lock, then another.'

Black Moon

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

From the bestselling author of Persepolis comes this humorous and enlightening look at the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane's tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbours for an afternoon of tea-drinking and talk. Naturally, the subject turns to loves, sex and vagaries of men...

Embroideries

Raymond Briggs

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

Ethel & Ernest

Woody Brown

Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. 
 
Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path. 
 
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us. With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.

Upward Bound

Here is the fascinating and equally unforgettable sequel to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's memoir-in-comic strips of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis ended on a cliffhanger in 1984, just as fourteen-year-old Marjane was leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. 
 
Here we follow our young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life: an eye-opening and sometimes lonely four years of high school in Vienna, followed by a supremely educational and heartwrenching four years back home in Iran. Just as funny and heartbreaking as its predecessor - with perhaps an even greater sense of the ridiculous inspired by life in a fundamentalist state - Persepolis 2 is also as clear-eyed and searing in its condemnation of fundamentalism and its cost to the human spirit. In its depiction of the universal trials of adolescent life and growing into adulthood - here compounded by being an outsider both abroad and at home, and by living in a state where you have no right to show your hair, wear make-up, run in public, date, or question authority - it's raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

Persepolis 2

Joff Winterhart

Discover the quirky tale of single parenting and heavy metal behind the film from director Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners) 
 
'When someone looks back and writes a history of this summer, two people they will almost certainly leave out are Sue and Daniel Bagnold...' 
 
So begins Joff Winterhart's sublimely funny and perceptive graphic novel, Days of the Bagnold Summer. Sue, 52, works in a library. Daniel, 15, is still at school. This was the summer holidays Daniel was due to spend with his father and his father's pregnant new wife in Florida. When they cancel his trip, Sue and Daniel face six long weeks together... 
Joff Winterhart perfectly captures the ennui, the tension, the pathos and yes, the affection of this mother-son relationship. Already well-known for his animated films like Violet and Turquoise, he here shows himself to be a comics author of extraordinary talent. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Award for Best Novel

Days of the Bagnold Summer

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

Sam is 27 and needs to get a job. Keith, who claims to be a second cousin of his (absent) father, offers him one. On Keith’s card it says he does ‘distribution and delivery’, which seems to consist of ‘a lot of driving around, getting out of the car for a few minutes and then getting back in’, Sam tells his mother. And so the days go by, Keith driving to a trading estate, ducking into a portakabin, all the while telling Sam stories about his first boss, Geoff Crozier, his mentor in distribution and delivery. As the weeks pass, Sam gets to know Keith’s friends, flirty Hazel-Claire from whom they buy two pasties every day at lunchtime, a variety of receptionists, and a few tantalising secrets from Keith’s past… 
 
As in Days of the Bagnold Summer, Joff Winterhart is a master at depicting ordinary life in all its utterly poignant and funny mundanity.

Showing results for: ‘Ajay Chowdhury’

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