Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Neil Rollinson

With the frank, subversive, and very funny poems in his first two books, Neil Rollinson established himself as a deft cartographer of the sensual world. While a rich and tactile eroticism still courses through Demolition, there is a new seriousness here, as mortality starts to throw its long shadow. 
 
These poems occupy a more rueful, reflective space - provisional, mercurial and fragile - a darker place where disintegration and loss are the only certainties, and memory is the only solid ground. Central to this is the death of the father - whether the poet's own, or the lost fathers of Borges or Vallejo - and the theme is broadened through a number of moving examinations of the erosion of time and youth. Against this gathering darkness, Rollinson sets a spirited defence, blending the lyric and vernacular voice in a muscular celebration of food, sex, sport and the natural world that is unusually refreshing, and sophisticated enough to allow both humour and profundity. 
 
The poems in Demolition never give up hope; they exhibit a tenacious optimism - or at least a steely pragmatism - that says: we have what we are given, there is no alternative, and we all must find what joy we can in life, and in its living.

Demolition

Set against elemental landscapes – the dying coalfields of Northumberland and the barren wastelands of Andalusia – The Dead Don’t Bleed is an unflinching exploration of fraternal rivalry, family trauma and the lasting effects of a violent patriarchy. 
 
Frank Bridge turned his back on his family’s gangland conflicts in Northumberland decades ago. His brother, Gordon, fled to Spain with the proceeds of a disastrously botched robbery and has not been heard from since. Frank’s life has taken a different path: he fell in love, studied Lorca and is now writing a book. 
 
But when their gangster father, the head of their savage dynasty, dies, Frank feels he must track Gordon down and tell him that their father’s reign of terror is over. Can Frank’s appearance after twenty-five years prompt a truce, a reconciliation even, or will his arrival merely be the catalyst for more turmoil and brutality? 
 
Taut, elegiac, violent and beautiful, Neil Rollinson’s debut novel is about how family can make or break us. Beneath the scorching, pitiless Andalusian sun, the two brothers are finally brought together for one last reckoning.

The Dead Don't Bleed

Continuing where he left off with A Spillage of Mercury, Neil Rollinson's eagerly awaited new collection delves again into the dark, moist, unexpected bag of human experience. Taking the themes of love, sex, and life's unpredictable mysteries and excitements, he scrapes away at the veneer of normality to reveal a world that is instantly stranger and more compelling than before. 
 
Rollinson revisits the erotic with his usual wit and bravado, in poems that are sometimes playful and sensitive, sometimes visceral and shocking. He explores scientific subjects through bedroom eyes, introducing the idea of entropy to the lovers' lexicon; he makes sport a backdrop for loneliness - his characters playing golf on the moon, taking the final penalty in the shoot-out, or wandering aimlessly and forever through the high grass of the village-cricket boundary. 
 
Diverse and provocative, vibrant and accessible, Spanish Fly is an unusually happy combination: a successful stimulant and a wholly satisfying performance.

Spanish Fly

William Goldsmith

The Bind charts the rise and fall of Egret Bindings, once the most prestigious firm of bookbinders in London. 
 
In 1910 brothers Guy and Victor Egret take on an ambitious commission: a deluxe, jewelled binding of a collection of poems, A Moonless Land. It proves to be a moment of hubris. The work triggers their ruin, watched by the disapproving spirit of their father, Garrison Egret. 
 
A darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and creative one-upmanship, The Bind shows once again that William Goldsmith is an incomparable storyteller and a marvellously inventive artist.

The Bind

Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me. You've no idea how much - right from the first time we met.' 
 
In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse - from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet's art. In Redgrove's poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.

Collected Poems

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
 
Like Neil Rollinson’s earlier books, Talking Dead is a refreshment of the senses: lifting the lid on the human condition in a heartfelt celebration of the act of being, whether in moments of love or mortality, sex or feasting. 
 
In the central sequence of the book – a meditation on the space between life and death – the dead speak of their final earthly moments with a liberating sense of fascination, and a luminous awe. Elsewhere we enjoy al fresco sex, astronomy via many pints in the Cat and Fiddle, and the deliverance of an Indian monsoon after weeks of thirst and drought. In ‘Christmas in Andalucia’ two lovers Skype each other achingly across hundreds of miles – ‘I am full of loss and longing,’ the poet says, ‘the heart is hewn from elm and oak and mistletoe.’ 
 
As provocative, sensual and subversive as ever, these poems seek and find the numinous in the everyday: some element of ritual or wonder that transforms experience. Although the spectre of darkness is never far away, it is the spirit of pleasure that endures, and we discover to our delight, as D. H. Lawrence did, that the Dionysian finally prevails over the Apollonian.

Talking Dead

Michael Ondaatje

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by him' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
'A generous, moving book' GUARDIAN 
 
Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world &ndash; describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone born out of diverse cultures. 
 
Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Molière&rsquo;s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. As he writes in the opening poem: 
 
Reading the lines he loves 
he slips them into a pocket, 
wishes to die with his clothes 
full of torn-free stanzas 
and the telephone numbers 
of his children in far cities 
 
Poetry &ndash; where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

A Year of Last Things

John Hartley Williams

Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge; by a spooked version of Rimbaud's 'La Bateau Ivre'; by encounters with Malcolm Lowry, the floating dead, the 'old men behind the waterfall' and the knitted poet; by poems about donkey jackets and dancing with donkeys, and a one-sided conversation with a decidedly un-Romantic polar bear two doors down from Dove Cottage. 
 
Long celebrated for his ranging, restless imagination, his baroque, elliptical narratives, his manic humour and maverick stance, Williams returns with another invitation to join him for a jug or two of wine in his out-of-kilter universe: a world that is both strange, and strangely familiar. Welcome to the Café des Artistes!

Café des Artistes

Seán Hewitt

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE * 
 
In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland 
 
'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER 
 
'Amazing writing of breathtaking power' IRVINE WELSH 
 
As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters. 
 
Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature. 
 
A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.

Rapture's Road

From the author of All Down Darkness Wide

Edward St Aubyn

A brother and sister lost and found, in a novel that seizes your heart and enthrals your mind, from the author of the Patrick Melrose series. 
 
 * The Orwell Prize Finalist 2025 * 
 
 ‘We set off in opposite directions and walked around the world until we met, and I’m very pleased we have…’ 
It is summer. Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him. His therapist, Martin, also faces challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother. Olivia, meanwhile, is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life. 
Over a year, their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, revealing their destinies in a new light. Parallel Lines is a novel about connection, family, love, and the cascading consequences of our choices. 
PRAISE FOR EDWARD ST AUBYN: 
‘Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation’ 
ALAN HOLLINGHURST 
‘I love Edward St Aubyn’DONNA TARTT 
‘Nothing can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn’s world’ 
ZADIE SMITH

Parallel Lines

David B

The most acclaimed European graphic novel of the last ten years, Epileptic is David B.'s story of his brother's battle with epilepsy - but it turns into a penetrating and sometimes lacerating self-examination on the author's part, as he delves into his own complex emotions and his family's troubled history, as well as his own youthful fantasy life. Particularly pointed is his description of the family journey from one attempted cure to another, including acupuncture, spiritualism and macrobiotics. 
 
David B.'s drawing is utterly extraordinary, balancing literal representation and expressionist psychological distortion.

Epileptic

Robert Crawford

One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.

The Scottish Ambassador

Michael Longley

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the Year 
 
Winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize 
Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize 
 
 
A remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley’s home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. Now they overflow into Angel Hill, his exuberant new collection. In addition, Longley has been exploring Lochalsh in the Western Highlands where his daughter the painter Sarah Longley now lives with her family. She has opened up for him her own soul-landscape with its peculiar shapes and intense colours. In Angel Hill the imaginations of poet and painter intermingle and two exacting wildernesses productively overlap. Love poems and elegies and heart-rending reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles add further weight to Michael Longley’s outstanding eleventh collection. Angel Hill will undoubtedly delight this great poet’s many admirers.

Angel Hill

Woody Brown

Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. 
 
Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path. 
 
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us. With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.

Upward Bound

Sarah Perry

'Please read this book. It may very well change how you live' Rachel Clarke 
 
'I was spellbound' Kathryn Mannix 
 
Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. 
 
Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. 
 
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. 
 
'By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved' Christos Tsiolkas 
 
'This book will be a lifeline for so many people' Seán Hewitt 
 
'To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying' Amy Key

Death of an Ordinary Man

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful poetry collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot 
 
'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' Sunday Herald 
 
'Ecological poetry of great intelligence and sensitivity' Guardian 
 
Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth. 
 
These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. 
 
Writing out of older Scottish traditions that are intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford stands as a contemporary master of poetry. 
 
‘A poet of great importance… fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman 
 
'In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

Old World

Raymond Briggs

A marvellous, life-enhancing book for all ages, now a major animated film starring Jim Broadbent, Brenda Blethyn and Luke Treadaway 
 
Utterly original, deeply moving and very funny, Ethel &amp; Ernest tells the story of Raymond Briggs' parents' marriage, lady's maid Ethel and milkman Ernest, from their first chance encounter in 1928, through the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971. 
 
Told in Brigg`s unique strip-cartoon format, Ethel and Ernest live through the defining moments of the twentieth century: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build up to World War II, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from post war austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s. 
 
Ethel &amp; Ernest is a heartfelt and affectionate tribute to an ordinary couple and an extraordinary generation.

Ethel & Ernest

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

Alex Halberstadt

'Engrossing' Daniel Beer, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful book... incisive, radiant' Olivia Laing 
 
'Illuminating, dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator 
 
'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew Solomon 
 
Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family, in this haunting work of memoir and history. 
 
In Ukraine, Halberstadt tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. 
 
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

A Memoir and a Reckoning

Peter Redgrove, who died in June 2003, was a friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and became one of the most celebrated and prolific post-war poets - regarded by many as a true visionary. 
 
The Harper, which gathers together his last poems, is a collection still charged with characteristic energy, eroticism and transforming imagination. Redgrove's language thrills with thunder, rain and electricity, the air heavy with perfumes and balsams, wasps and spiders - and reading these poems is uncannily like re-entering a dream. Peter Redgrove made us look at our world with fresh eyes, and he changed our perception forever.

The Harper

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

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.

Testament

Daniel Clowes

Discover the adventures of David Boring in this electrifying new graphic novel from the author of Ghost World 
 
David Boring is a nineteen-year-old security guard with a tortured inner life and an obsessive nature. When he meets the girl of his dreams, things begin to go awry: what seems too good to be true apparently is, and what seems truest in Boring's life is that, given the right set of circumstances (in this case a sensational cascade of vengeance, humiliation and murder), the primal nature of mankind will come inexorably to the fore. 
 
'Imagine a tilted comic-book homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with religious cults, fetishistic scrapbooks and scenes of underwater coupling' - Guardian

David Boring

Anne Carson

Anne Carson' s first full-length publication in Britain, Glass and God introduces an assured and challenging new voice: vivid, laconic, precise. Her 'Short Talks' are about everything from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, from waterproofing to walking backwards; the brilliant long poem 'The Glass Essay' deals with the end of a contemporary love affair, but is haunted by the Brontë sisters. 
 
Blending the modern and the classical, Anne Carson writes with an intensity and an integrity that is transfiguring.

Glass And God

Mark Spragg

Set in Wyoming, in cattle country, The Fruit of Stone is the story of two men and one woman. McEban, a rancher, has loved Gretchen Reilly all his life; and all his life Bennett, Gretchen's husband, has been his best friend. When Gretchen leaves Bennett, the two men follow her trail on a strange, fateful journey across Wyoming to Nebraska. 
 
Spragg's characters are unforgettable, his prose is at once tender and muscular, his portrait of the harsh but beautiful landscape breathtaking. With this remarkable novel he takes his place beside Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane and Kent Haruf as one of the great contemporary chroniclers of the American West.

The Fruit of Stone

Alexander MacLeod

The highly anticipated follow-up to Alexander MacLeod's critically acclaimed debut, Animal Person is a wry and perfectly-observed collection of short stories about intimacy, family and the struggle to connect 
 
Animal Person is a collection of startling juxtapositions. Criminals and bystanders, siblings and strangers, infants, adolescents, young parents, and the elderly, mammals, reptiles and fish: unexpected encounters occur and every meeting is an opportunity for recognition or rejection. 
 
An empty-nest couple, separated after years of coexisting, find themselves pulled into the dreams of their silent, gazing rabbit; a mysterious passenger in search of his missing suitcase roams through the caverns of a 1970s LA airport; a piano recital goes wildly astray; and a great-aunt refuses to apologise as she struggles to find a place for everything in the tight space of her senior's apartment. In the adjoining motel room, a serial killer plans his next move; and a petty argument between two sisters is interrupted by an unexpected visitor. 
 
The eight stories in Animal Person are filled with wonder and yearning as MacLeod captures the fleeting intensities that shape all of our lives. MacLeod is a master of the short story form, and this is a collection that beats with raw emotion and shimmers with the complexity of our shared human experience. 
 
'Exquisite...expertly paced and finely observed' New York Times 
 
'Excellent... The eight stories, composed in crystalline prose, glimmer and gleam with yearning and loss' Eithne Farry, Daily Mail 
 
'Tender, funny and ever-surprising' Lynn Coady

Animal Person

Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance. 
 
Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to brosnachadh, the poems' resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where 'Nothing is ever single'.

Full Volume

Charles Burns

And you thought your adolescence was scary. 
 
Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. 
 
As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. 
 
And then the murders start. 
 
As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. 
 
To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin . . .

Black Hole

Kae Tempest

‘They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer.’ 
 
The heart-breaking, soul-building new novel about the transformative power of love, from the Sunday Times-bestselling KAE TEMPESTRothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind.The past is accelerating towards them: the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne’s block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there.Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different.A decade in the making, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. 
Praise for Kae Tempest 
 
‘An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker’ Matt Haig 
 
‘A truth-speaker’ Max Porter 
 
'Powerful and merciful' Ali Smith

Having Spent Life Seeking

Andrew Barrow

'Your brother looked healthy, happy, natural. But everything else about him is extremely odd. Not faintly odd. Extremely odd. Except in appearance. He's the opposite of you.' Quentin Crisp 
 
At the age of twenty-two, the youngest of five brothers, Jonathan Barrow, was killed with his fiancée in a car crash. He left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Queue, in which, among other things, he prophesied his own death. The story of a boy and a dachshund, populated by a kaleidoscopic menagerie of people and animals and an array of anthropomorphic in-betweens, The Queue is a vivid and irreverent portrayal of the world in which Jonathan and his awe-struck older brother Andrew were raised. 
 
Jonathan and his book form the framework of a remarkable study of a young man's inner and outer effervescence, his family, England and high and low society in the Swinging Sixties. Filled with fascinating and fantastical anecdotes, Animal Magic documents a heady and peripatetic childhood in Lancashire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, misadventures at home and school, and the early working life of the two brothers, on the lower rungs of show business, backstage at Claridge's, and finally in advertising. This spellbinding elegy negotiates love affairs, family tensions, exhibitions, publishers' rejections and precarious living in a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. 
 
Punctuated with excerpts from The Queue and Jonathan's other bizarre and brilliant writings, Animal Magic is a book bursting with humour, wit and pathos and featuring an outlandish cast of characters, from an eccentric father, a mischievous family dog and a down-and-out ex-schoolmaster to curious stars of Swinging London like Mick Jagger and Tommy Cooper. It is a memoir unlike any other.

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