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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Philip Hensher

Anyone who looks at the history of the novel in Britain without prejudice will find unparalleled bounty, generosity and plenty. The novel is a cultural phenomenon of stunning value, energy, beauty and excitement. It was, for almost three centuries, the means by which ordinary readers, in larger and larger numbers, reached out and tried to understand people who might be rather like them, but, in many cases, were very unlike them indeed. 
 
Philip Hensher's wonderfully entertaining, opinionated and enthusiastic book celebrates the British novel in all its peculiar and beguiling genres, from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It will be impossible for any of its many readers not to immediately derail all their plans and instead find themselves engrossed by one of the book's recommendations. 
 
Hensher is as interesting on why Britain should have developed such a vast appetite for fiction as he is on the evolutionary scramble by writers and publishers to get attention. The result is both a bravura performance and a serious plea to widen the canon, both in terms of admitting more writers and also looking more broadly at the individual writer's oeuvre.

A History of the Novel in Britain

David Damrosch

Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard's department of Comparative Literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran, and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways the world bleeds into literature. 
 
To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience, and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we're entering. Taken together, these eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on perennial problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat and the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books' heroines have to struggle, from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today. 
 
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BOOKS is a global invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings, and to see our world and its literature in new ways.

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