Heidi Perks is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars, The Whispers and The Other Guest. The Last Resort is her sixth novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and is fascinated by the darker side of our closest relationships. Heidi lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children.

Heidi Perks

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Marjane Satrapi

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

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

Wise, often funny, sometimes heart-breaking, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, growing up during the Iranian Revolution. 
 
The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. 
 
Amidst the tragedy, Marjane's child's eye view adds immediacy and humour, and her story of a childhood at once outrageous and ordinary, beset by the unthinkable and yet buffered by an extraordinary and loving family, is immensely moving. 
 
'The magic of Marjane Satrapi's work is that it can condense a whole country's tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another' Independent on Sunday 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Persepolis

The Story of an Iranian Childhood

Susan Choi

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 
 
'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood 
 
'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times 
 
The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime 
 
One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. 
 
The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels. 
 
'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian 
 
'A writer at the height of her spectacular powers' Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House 
 
'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' Raven Leilani, author of Luster 
 
'I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

Flashlight

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

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

'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

Sarah Lippett

A moving, often very funny graphic memoir about what it is like to grow up with an illness that no one can diagnose. 
 
 When the headaches started, Sarah Lippett would stand alone on a different side of the playground from the other children. When she started to drag one of her legs, her parents took her to hospital, and so began the visits to many different doctors, each one more bewildered by her illness than the last. Initially schooled at home, when Sarah went back to school she was placed with the struggling kids, and still so often ill, she felt even more alone. 
 
But although Sarah's parents often despaired of the stream of appointments and no cure, they never showed it and she grew up in the midst of a boisterous, loving family and found good friends at last, as well as venturing into bands, art, boys, books and records. Finally, when Sarah turned sixteen, she was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital where the doctors diagnosed her with the rare disease, Moyamoya. The book ends with Sarah waking up after brain surgery.

A Puff of Smoke

Internationally-acclaimed graphic-literary talent Alison Bechdel offers acerbically funny insight into the lesbian culture of 1980s America in this comic strip collection. 
 
Bechdel's brilliantly imagined counter-cultural band of friends - academics, social workers, booksellers - fall in and out of love, negotiate relationships, raise children, switch careers and cope with aging parents. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For fuses high and low culture - from foreign domestic policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex - in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for all humanist persuasions'. 
 
Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which has been syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the USA and has been published in eleven volumes. For this first time, this collection gathers the best of those volumes. 
 
'So much more than a comic strip... No one comes close to Alison Bechdel' Times

The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For

Posy Simmonds

Winner of the Grand Prix 2009 de la Critique Bande Dessinée. 
 
Tamara Drewe has transformed herself. Plastic surgery, a different wardrobe, a smouldering look, have given her confidence and a new and thrilling power to attract, which she uses recklessly. Often just for the fun of it. 
 
People are drawn to Tamara Drewe, male and female. In the remote village where her late mother lived Tamara arrives to clear up the house. Here she becomes an object of lust, of envy, the focus of unrequited love, a seductress. To the village teenagers she is 'plastic-fantastic', a role model. Ultimately, when her hot and indiscriminate glances lead to tragedy, she is seen as a man-eater, a heartless home-wrecker, a slut. 
 
First appearing as a serial in the Guardian, in book form Tamara Drewe has been enlarged, embellished and lovingly improved by the author.

Tamara Drewe

Nick Coleman

William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy. 
 
Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn’t be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal’s. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer. 
 
William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time. 
 
The question is: what to do with it? 
 
Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime. 
 
What, after all, do we really mean by ‘thread-count’?

Pillow Man

***WINNER OF THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020*** 
 
'Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius... she is as brilliant a writer as Britain has' Jenny Colgan, Mail Online 
 
Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. 
 
She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. 
 
But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body . . . Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.

Cassandra Darke

Hannah Berry

Excitement is building for this year’s Twammies and Clementine Darling is hotly tipped to win Best Female Singer and Political Spokesperson! 
 
The government is embarrassed about the leak of a confidential email exchange, but have you heard about Clementine’s new beau Devon Ayre? Yes, human cloning appears to have been legalised, but wasn’t Devon once together with Clementine’s arch rival Coral Jerome? And does it really matter what dubious corporate connections helped get this bill into place while Clementine and Coral are locking horns in a violent feud? 
 
Livestock is a razor-sharp satire on our relationship with the media from critically acclaimed graphic novelist Hannah Berry. In the fight for the public’s attention, why let public interest get in the way?

Livestock

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

Kate Beaton

Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more. 
 
Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. They also cover whatever's on her mind that week - be it the perils of city living or the pop-cultural infiltration of Sex and the City, featuring an array of characters, from a mischievous pony, to reinvented superheroes, to a surly teen duo who could be the anti-Hardy-Boys. 
 
Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, Hark! A Vagrant is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure.

Hark! A Vagrant

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 
 
**A smart-thinking gift for curious minds**

The Genius Myth

The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers

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

Brodie Crellin

A death in the (dysfunctional) family – can they hold it together long enough to organise the funeral? 
 
Mary’s death is bad news – for her daughter Patch, ex-partner Robin, and niece Jude. 
 
It will mean a funeral. But Patch can barely keep track of her mother’s journey from the hospital to the mortuary, let alone host a wake in her childhood home. 
 
Robin wants to support her, but instead of assuming the role of responsible father, he heads to his former haunt: the lay-by where he used to meet farmers for sex. 
 
Jude’s on her way from Naples, worrying less about Patch, her estranged cousin, and more about whether there’s a medicinal bag of cocaine in the boot. She hasn’t told the family she’s en route. This way, any lingering acrimony will be forgotten, and Jude’s past behaviour will be forgiven. 
 
Thrown together in Mary’s tiny house, each of them is trying to feel something: to grieve, atone, join in, be better. But they rarely have one another’s best interests at heart, and as the connection between them twists and contorts, they lose sight of the rules and grasp towards anything that might make it all less painful. 
 
Darkly funny, deeply entertaining, and intensely moving, A Sense of Occasion subverts and perverts your expectations to reveal the fractious desires that simmer beneath the surface of our lives.

A Sense of Occasion

Catherine Poulain

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE 2019** 
**NOMINATED FOR THE MÉDICIS PRIZE 2018** 
 
'A tale of travel and adventure, the story of a body utterly surrendered to pain and joy. It is mind-blowing, a delight.' Le Monde 
 
Lili is a runaway. She’s left behind her native France to go in search of freedom, of adventure, of life. Her search takes her to Kodiak, Alaska, home to a ragtag community of fishermen, army vets and drifters who man the island’s fishing fleet. Despite her tiny frame, faltering English and lack of experience, Lili lands a job on board the Rebel, the only woman on the boat. 
 
Out on the open sea, everything is heightened: colours are more vivid, sounds are louder and the work is harder than anything she's ever known. The terrifying intensity of the ocean is addictive to the point of danger. But Lili is not alone: in her fellow crewmembers she finds kindred spirits – men living on the edge, drawn to extremes. 
 
Based on Catherine Poulain’s own experiences, and written in taut, muscular prose, Woman at Sea cuts through the noise of life and straight to the heart of our innermost longings.

Woman at Sea

Chika Unigwe

Mma has just buried her mother, and now she is alone. 
 
She has been left everything. 
 
But she's also inherited her mother's bad name. 
 
A bold, brash woman, the only thing her mother refused to discuss was her past. Why did she flee her family and bring her daughter to a new town when she was a baby? What was she escaping from? 
 
Abandoned now, Mma has no knowledge of her father or her family - but she is desperate to find out. 
 
Night Dancer is a powerful and moving novel about the relationship between mothers and daughters, about the bonds of family, about knowing when to fulfil your duty, and when you must be brave enough not to. Presenting a vista of Nigeria over the past half-century, it is a vibrant and heartfelt exploration of one woman's search for belonging.

Night Dancer

*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST* 
 
'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace' 
ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOME 
 
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. 
 
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. 
 
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Ducks

Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

Liana Finck

**LONGLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020** 
 
Melancholy and funny, personal and surreal, Passing for Human is a neurological coming-of-age story in which Liana Finck goes in search of that thing she has lost – her shadow, that part of her that has always felt as though she is living in exile from the world. On a quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance, along the way, she seeks to answer some eternal questions: What makes us whole? What parts of ourselves do we hide or ignore or chase away – because they’re embarrassing, or inconvenient – and at what cost? 
 
Part magical odyssey, part feminist creation myth, Passing for Human is most of all an extraordinary, moving meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman.

Passing for Human

Daniel Clowes

This is Monica, one ordinary woman&rsquo;s extraordinary journey through the history of comics &ndash; from the creator of Ghost World 
 
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Pitch-perfect... Could not put it down' OBSERVER 
 
'In Monica, Clowes reaches a new artistic peak' VANITY FAIR 
 
A dazzling, spectacular tapestry of interconnected narratives that together tell a life story, Monica is the new graphic novel from one of the most iconic storytellers of all time. This eponymous protagonist is a rag-to-riches character who, after being abandoned by her freewheelin' parents in childhood, succeeds in clawing her way to the top - only to lose it all in a stroke of bad luck. She lives out the rest of her days in search of her parents, encountering a cast of eccentric characters who help to piece together her story. 
 
This graphic novel extravaganza is an unforgettable ode to the many genres that have defined the comics form - from war, romance and horror to crime and the supernatural. Mysterious, uncategorisable and quintessentially Clowesian, here is a multi-layered masterpiece born of a lifetime of inspiration. Monica marks the creative apex of Daniel Clowes' distinguished career, one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century.

Monica

Shirley Hughes

Shirley Hughes is one of the best-loved and most innovative creators of books for young children. She has written and illustrated over fifty books, which have sold more than eleven million copies. Her characters Alfie and Dogger are loved by children and parents all over the world. 
 
Bye Bye Birdie is Shirley Hughes' first graphic book for adults. A young man, in his best bow-tie and boater, meets a fashionably dressed - and rather bird-like - young lady. But when he takes her home she undergoes a transformation and our hero's dreams of connubial bliss suddenly turn into the stuff of nightmares. 
 
Totally wordless, Bye Bye Birdie showcases Shirley Hughes' brilliant drawing and her extraordinarily vivid imagination.

Bye Bye Birdie

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

Helen Longstreth

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. 
 
Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end. 
 
In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

Things in Every Room

Arthur Lubow

Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. 
 
She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus’s work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.

Diane Arbus

Joff Winterhart

“One of the most talented graphic novelists in the UK” ZADIE SMITH 
 
At this point in her life, septuagenarian Margaret is particular about the things she likes. These include looking out of train windows, graveyards in the rain, an afternoon sherry. But most of all, it is her lifelong subject, the obscure 17th century polymath J.W Preece, who she has devoted her life to studying. 
 
Margaret doesn’t like: drawing attention to herself, extravagant behaviour and television. 
 
When she meets a young history TV producer, Lucy, they form a tentative bond, despite Margaret’s reluctance to be drawn into the media world. Several decades Margaret’s junior, heartbroken and unsure of herself, Lucy finds curious new inspiration as she falls under the spell of Margaret’s passions. 
 
With inimitable sensitivity and humour, cult-favourite graphic novelist Joff Winterhart returns with an irresistible portrait of two women navigating their age gap, loss, self-made-celebrity-historians, and bad knees… 
 
“Just when I thought I couldn’t love Joff Winterhart more, along came Dear Historian. It has all the wry humanity and keen eye for detail that won Driving Short Distances and Days of the Bagnold Summer such passionate fans” PATICK GALE 
 
“Even in the prose aisles, you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece of literary fiction as nuanced and beautiful as this.” VULTURE, on Other People

Dear Historian

Lucie Arnoux

A funny, heartfelt graphic memoir about living in foreign countries, and finding one's place both at home and abroad. 
 
In this delightful graphic novel, Lucie Arnoux chronicles her adventures around the world. Growing up in Marseille as a misfit with a passion for drawing, she decides to settle in London to pursue her dream career as a comics writer. Je Ne Sais Quoi shows us London through the eyes of a mischievous and clear-sighted young French woman, the joys and pains of being an outsider and, ultimately, how to live life to its fullest.

Je Ne Sais Quoi

The Adventures of a French Woman in London

Tim Spector

** THE ONLY GUT-HEALTH COOKBOOK YOU NEED FROM THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOOD FOR LIFE AND ITV LORRAINE’S GUT-HEALTH EXPERT ** 
 
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, 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 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 and the perfect gift for anyone who wants to embrace a new way of eating. 
 
Go with your gut. Join the food revolution.

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