Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Marion Coutts

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

What Did the Deep Sea Say?

Rachel Aviv

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

You Won’t Get Free of It

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

Maggie Nelson

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

The Slicks

On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift

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