Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Paul Theroux

A vastly diverse and geographically scattered nation of forty million people, Canada is now threatened with annexation as the 51st state by the US President, beyond the longest undefended border in the world. This threat has had the effect of unifying the nation, inspiring patriotism, and encouraging the normally laconic Canadians to be forthcoming, ideal for a traveller with a gift for listening. 
 
For Theroux, this journey is also personal: his ancestor Antoine Theroux left Gascony in 1693 to become a pioneer in Nouvelle France and to settle in the small village of Yamaska, where many Therouxs still live and thrive. He recounts the riveting story of Antoine, illuminating the deeper, and often darker, history of Canada, before hitting the road from Yamaska, to explore the length and breadth of the country. 
 
From the farthest east in Newfoundland to the west in Vancouver, Theroux travels the highways linking Quebec, Montreal, Toronto and the huge cities of the prairies – an archipelago of urban islands, surrounded by vast, often pristine landscapes. Along the way he meets farmers and fishermen, writers and activists, new immigrants and old timers – each a vital part of this True North, each hoping for it to remain strong and free. 
 
With his remarkable gift for description and narrative, and his zest for the open road, Paul Theroux remains the most compelling, searching and evocative of travel writers.

True North

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us. 
 
The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground. 
 
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

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