Meik Wiking founded the world's first Happiness Research Institute in 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a New York Times and Sunday Times Bestselling author. Meik has been called The Indiana Jones of Smiles and probably the World's Happiest Man by The Times. He is the author of four globally bestselling books which have sold over 2 million copies worldwide: The Little Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Lykke, The Art of Making Memories and My Hygge Home.

Meik Wiking

Sue Meikle has always been obsessed with picture books, and after working as an Early Years Specialist for over 25 years, she has read stories to children from Stockport to South Africa. In schools, in early years centres, while on forest school adventures... Sue has even read stories on a travelling play bus! So, perhaps it was always in the stars for Sue to not just read books, but write them, too! When she's not reading or writing stories, Sue can be found walking her dog or chauffeuring her teenagers around the Greater Manchester area (because that’s where they live… in a home that they made from a derelict barn!)

Sue Meikle

David Meikle is a TV scriptwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written and co-written seven books, including the autobiographies of Charlie Richardson and Bobby Cummines.

David Meikle

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Guy Delisle

Famously referred to as part of the 'Axis-of-Evil', North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When the fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. 
 
Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang and its countryside while chaperoned by his translator and a guide. But among the statues, portraits and propaganda of leaders Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il - the world's only Communist dynasty - Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered. 
 
His astute and wry musings on life in the austere and grim regime form the basis of this remarkable graphic novel. Pyongyang is an informative, personal and accessible look at an enigmatic country.

Pyongyang

A Journey in North Korea

Guy Delisle's work for a French animation studio requires him to oversee production at various Asian studios on the grim frontiers of free trade. His employer puts him up for months at a time in 'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual deprivations of a man very far from home. After Pyongyang, his book about the strange society that is North Korea, Delisle turned his attention to Shenzhen, the cold, urban city in Southern China that is sealed off with electric fences and armed guards from the rest of the country. The result is another brilliant graphic novel - funny, scary, utterly original and illuminating.

Shenzhen

A Travelogue From China

John Burnside

A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction 
 
**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023** 
 
'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
In this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins. 
 
Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness. 
 
Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation. 
 
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*

Ruin, Blossom

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

Fumio Obata

'I still remember arriving in the city for the first time... It wasn't easy... But here, London, is my home.' 
 
Yumiko is a young Japanese woman who has made London her home. She has a job, a boyfriend; Japan seems far away. Then, out of the blue, her brother calls to tell her that her father has died in a mountaineering accident. 
 
Yumiko returns to Tokyo for the funeral and finds herself immersed in the rituals of Japanese life and death – and confronting a decision she hadn’t expected to have to make. 
 
Just So Happens is a graphic novel by a young artist and storyteller of rare talent. Fumio Obata’s drawing, in particular, is marvellous in its power and delicacy.

Just So Happens

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

To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to 'labour to make the way of God your own', Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo. 
 
In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church - where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinable - and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world. 
 
The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled 'Four Quartets', intended both as a spiritual response to the string quartets of Bartók and Britten (as Eliot's were to Beethoven's late quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro, chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master of his craft.

Gift Songs

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

Henry Shukman

With this assured and powerful first collection, Henry Shukman springs fully-formed into the poetry world, having already won a raft of prizes for individual poems. His sensibility is unique, engaging and immediate; we are drawn into the worlds of these poems by his accurate eye, his sensual line and the warmth of his communion with the scene he describes. 
 
Ranging across the globe, from Mexico to Japan, from the States to Southern England, these poems can be lyrical and deeply affecting, wryly funny or wildly imaginative. From a lonely mother attempting to learn the piano to a ski-jump that never ends, from a redemptive encounter with horses on a cold day to a miraculous bowl of chicken soup, these poems display a vibrancy and variety rarely seen in contemporary poetry. But Shukman's great strength is in the domestic: the complexities of love, and the rites of passage of childhood and parenthood, are re-entered with candor, grace and originality. 
 
In Doctor No's Garden is an affectionate, refreshing debut, striking in its imagery and insight, remarkable for its lightness of touch and emotional weight.

In Doctor No's Garden

Julian Hanshaw

The noodle soup called pho is the national dish of Vietnam. When Little Blue-- having been dropped by a mysterious man with a red car and being told to count to 500 -- finds himself in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's baffling, daunting capital, his salvation is his own mobile pho stand. Little Blue's relationship with the city and its food brings an understanding to what it means to never want to return home and the fact that everyone goes away in the end. 
 
Beautifully drawn and coloured, and featuring many delicious recipes for pho, this is a startlingly original and immensely appealing graphic novel by a brilliant new talent. 
 
Play the interactive motion comic at http://artofpho.submarinechannel.com/

The Art of Pho

Guy Delisle's newest travelogue revolves around a year spent in Burma (also known as Myanmar) with his wife and son. Burma is notorious for its use of concealment and isolation as social control: where scissor-wielding censors monitor the papers, the de facto leader of the opposition has been under decade-long house arrest, insurgent-controlled regions are effectively cut off from the world, and rumour is the most reliable source of current information. 
 
An impressive and moving work of comics journalism from the author of Pyongyang and Shenzen.

Burma Chronicles

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

Tom Segev

Simon Wiesenthal was the legendary 'Nazi hunter', a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the punishment of Nazi criminals. A hero in the eyes of many, he was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. 
 
For this definitive biography, Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's hundreds of thousands of private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. 
 
Tom Segev has written a brilliant character study of a 'hunter' who was driven by his own memories to ensure that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten.

Simon Wiesenthal

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

Matthew Sweeney

The poems in A Smell of Fish connect and radiate like the spokes of a wheel: haiku, sestinas, poems beginning with a line by somebody else or sparked off by foreign travel, a version of Dante, a sea sequence set on the Suffolk coast, and - long overdue - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird. 
 
In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world where all explanations are withheld. 'If Beckett and Kafka come to mind', as Sean O'Brien wrote in his essay on Sweeney in The Deregulated Muse, 'they are not simply influences but kindred imaginations'. So we encounter a valley mysteriously filling with the smell of fish, second-world-war planes reappearing over London, a secret attic mural of a naked ex-lover, a cosmonaut abandoned on the moon, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland. 
 
Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.

A Smell Of Fish

Emma-Lee Moss

A story of pop music, identity crisis and Hong Kong, from the acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (a.k.a. Emmy the Great) 
 
For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises, at the height of their stratospheric fame, are seen on every billboard and heard on every street corner. Later that year, she and her family will leave the city to live in England, pushing Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity. 
 
My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about how she suffers an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into the 2019 protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her inheritance: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie. 
 
It’s about falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music, while she seeks to find her own place within it.

My Cantopop Nights

A Memoir in Songs

Desmond Morris

The first book to bring together the many different everyday gestures that are used all over the world. Desmond Morris has travelled to over 60 countries while making field studies of human body language, and made notes of hand gestures and facial expressions. The result is a fascinating reference book of over 600 different gestures from Europe, the Middle East, North &amp; South America and the Far East. The book is arranged alphabetically under the part of the body used with Meaning, Action, Background and Locality and each gesture is illustrated with a line drawing. The World Guide to Gestures complements Desmond Morris's bestsellers Manwatching and Bodywatching.

Bodytalk

A World Guide to Gestures

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

Charlotte Higgins

A deeply personal, first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime Ukraine 
Charlotte Higgins never imagined she would report on a war. But in the autumn of 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she travelled there to cover a literary festival. The experience would change her life. 
In a war fuelled by the attempted erasure of Ukrainian culture – one that has killed countless artists and created countless more – art has become a matter of life and death. In times of war, art and literature are where difficulty and complexity survive: where the most painful, unspeakable truths can still be faced. 
Drawing on two decades of cultural journalism, three years of reporting trips to Ukraine, and her training as a classicist, Ukrainian Lessons explores the profound connections between war, art and life. It is a searing, urgent and unforgettable book about what artists are prepared to risk – and why culture remains worth fighting for.

Ukrainian Lessons

Art in a Time of War

Guy Delisle expertly lays the groundwork for a cultural road map of contemporary Jerusalem, utilizing the classic stranger-in-a-strange-land point of view that made his other books, Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Burma Chronicles, required reading for understanding what daily life is like in cities few are able to travel to. In Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Delisle explores the complexities of a city that represents so much to so many. He eloquently examines the impact of the conflict on the lives of people on both sides of the wall while drolly recounting the quotidian: checkpoints, traffic jams, and holidays. 
 
When observing the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations that call Jerusalem home, Delisle's drawn line is both sensitive and fair, assuming nothing and drawing everything. Jerusalem showcases once more Delisle's mastery of the travelogue.

Jerusalem

Chronicles from the Holy City

Warren Pleece

Gary Pleece

In Montague Terrace, nothing is quite what is seems. Within its boundaries live an array of strange and extraordinary residents, including Paul Gregory, self-exiled pop crooner holed up in his Montague hovel for close to forty years, with only fading memories of a semi-successful music career and a bottle of JD for company. Mrs Beatrice Green, codename Babushka, an aged former special ops agent fighting a new war against overzealous council officials. Marvo the Magic Bunny and Mystical Marvin, a pair of down-on-their luck entertainers, shielding a disturbing past. The Puppeteer, toiling away day and night, pulling the strings of world events and causing chaos out of order. 
 
Landlocked sailors, fake pet psychics, hounded inventors and randy postmen. Welcome to Montague Terrace...

Montague Terrace

Jean Sprackland

Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. 
 
These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.

Tilt

Alison Weir

Siobhan Clarke

Christmas in Tudor times was a period of feasting, revelry and merrymaking ‘to drive the cold winter away’. A carnival atmosphere presided at court, with a twelve-day-long festival of entertainments, pageants, theatre productions and ‘disguisings’, when even the king and queen dressed up in costume to fool their courtiers. Throughout the festive season, all ranks of subjects were freed for a short time from everyday cares to indulge in eating, drinking, dancing and game-playing. 
 
We might assume that our modern Christmas owes much to the Victorians. In fact, as Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke reveal in this fascinating book, many of our favourite Christmas traditions date back much further. Carol-singing, present-giving, mulled wine and mince pies were all just as popular in Tudor times, and even Father Christmas and roast turkey dinners have their origins in this period. The festival was so beloved by English people that Christmas traditions survived remarkably unchanged in this age of tumultuous religious upheaval. 
 
Beautifully illustrated with original line drawings throughout, this enchanting compendium will fascinate anyone with an interest in Tudor life – and anyone who loves Christmas.

A Tudor Christmas

Elizabeth McCracken

Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal guide for writers old and new 
 
‘A cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business’ Yiyun Li 
 
Write every day 
Show, don’t tell 
Write what you know 
Kill Your Darlings 
 
These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. 
 
McCracken has been writing for most of her life. For over thirty-five years, she has also taught creative writing to generations of students, including at Iowa, guiding many writers towards their own answers to the question of how to write fiction. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. 
 
A book about the life of an artist and a guide to fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource and will lead all writers, at any stage of their career, back to the page. 
 
'Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers' Garth Greenwell 
 
'An irreverent, thought-provoking and ultimately inspiring book about making art' Rumaan Alam 
 
'A world class writer and a world class writing teacher' Paul Harding 
 
'I would encourage every writer to read it' Rebecca Ivory

A Long Game

How to Write Fiction

Kapka Kassabova

This is the intimate story of a Scottish glen and its inhabitants, of whom I am one. 
 
From the powerful rivers that bring life and prosperity; to the Pictish cairns, undisturbed for centuries; to the meadows of bluebells, where deer emerge, God-like, in a flash, Kapka Kassabova reveals a world that has been abused, but remains achingly beautiful and alive. 
 
In the Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation. Borrowed Land tells the stories of those who are working against this disconnect: the last true Highlanders fighting to preserve their home. 
 
An extraordinary portrait of the Scottish Highlands, this is an epic and urgent story of destruction and renewal, told through encounters with some of the last true Highlanders.

Borrowed Land

A Highland Story

Ossian Brown

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

Haunted Air

Anne Carson

In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates 'decreation' - an activity described by Simone Weil as 'undoing the creature in us' - an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start? 
 
Anne Carson's Decreation starts with form - the undoing of form. Form is various here: opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, list, montage. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe. 
 
By turns exhilarating and bewildering, lucid and hermetic, Anne Carson is a maverick with a thrilling range of skills. As Charles Simic says, 'Carson takes risks, subverts literary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations. She is a wonder: an unconventional, often difficult poet who has a huge following among today's readers of poetry and whose work has been honoured with our most prestigious literary awards.'

Decreation

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

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

Food for the Dead

Thomas Pynchon

A private eye is catapulted on to a continent-hopping journey that proves difficult to escape. 
 
 
‘A masterpiece… A vintage tale of adventure’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 
‘Swing bands, spies and surreal danger… A wild ride’ i Paper 
 
 
‘Brilliant fun… Rollicking’ Washington Post 
 
 
 
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. 
 
 
 
By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. 
 
 
 
Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question. 
 
 
‘Late Pynchon at his finest’ Los Angeles Times 
 
 
‘So alive, so pleasurable’ Megan Nolan 
 
 
‘Grabs you by the collar’ New York Times 
 
 
*A Guardian, Financial Times and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year* 
 
*Daily Mail Notable Book of 2025 and i paper Best Crime and Thriller Book of the Year*

Shadow Ticket

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

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