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Claire Fuller

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family. 
 
But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades. 
 
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without. 
 
From critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Claire Fuller, Hunger and Thirst is a compelling and chilling tale of loneliness and female friendship, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.

Hunger and Thirst

Gabriel Tallent

Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university. 
 
Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy, queer, truant-playing, snaggle-toothed daughter, who everyone but Dan believes to be a troublemaker and no-hoper. But Tamma and Dan are fuelled by dreams of becoming legendary rock climbers, of devoting their lives to summiting the most challenging climbs and defying all the expectations, both good and bad, that others have for them. 
 
Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap...

Crux

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. 
 
Inspired in part by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour. 
Light-hearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford's first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. 
 
'A delightful comedy of manners' - The Times

Highland Fling

Sam Hart

Eddie Hart

Nieves Barragán Mohacho

When Sam and Eddie Hart opened Barrafina, their no-reservations tapas bar and restaurant in London's Soho, they had no idea how successful it would be. Four years on and it is always packed, always stylish, always lively. 
 
And so is the food: together with their Basque-born head chef Nieves Barragan Mohacho, the Harts are cooking the best Spanish food in London today. In this cookbook they share their secrets and recipes: this is not difficult, fancy restaurant food, but gutsy, fresh, sometimes delicate, sometimes hearty food, that a home cook will be able to prepare easily. 
 
First, there is food to eat with your hands: fried pimientos de Padron, salt cod fritters and delicias, the Spanish equivalent of Devils on Horseback. Then cold meats; on to fish and shellfish - from simple razor clams on the grill, to more sophisticated dishes such as turbot with cavolo nero; rice dishes and paellas; big dishes of roast and braised meat - from suckling pig for a special occasion to rabbit stew or roast cumin-rubbed pork with quince sauce; and desserts in the form of chocolate and almond tarts, cakes and the classic Crema Catalana. There is everything here to help you recreate great Spanish food at home. 
 
With over 120 recipes, Nieves, Sam and Eddie will whisk you through step-by-step instructions, showing you everything, from how to make the more difficult things, such as arrocina beans with chorizo, morcilla and pork belly, to how to cook a simple but perfect tortilla.

Barrafina

A Spanish Cookbook

Joe Bond

“I don’t know about that, sir. We’re delinquents,” said Damico. “If you give us an inch, we’ll take the whole mile.” 
Watts laughed us off. 
“All I’m saying is there’s things we can do different. I’m talking about you fellas helping me get this right. What do you think?” 
 
They came from the streets, the sticks, and every place in between. They've stolen cars, dealt dope and hurt people. They've been hurt themselves. They’ve been labelled ‘delinquents’ and cast out from their families – if they ever had a family at all. Their futures promise prison - or worse - but for now, they've been brought together to live in an old house on a hill, and see about getting themselves - and each other - right. 
 
Spirited, angry, confused, and misled, these are the boys of Hope House, an institution for ‘delinquent’ young men in 1980s Kentucky. There is Smoove, named for his distinctive walk after he was shot in both feet back home in Louisville. There’s Damico, reported for shoplifting and assault, even though that was only part of the story. There’s Bobby, who tells brave tales of adventures of coyotes but goes quiet at the thought of his father. And there’s Awol, who can’t stop running away, only to return to the place he knows best. 
 
Deeply honest and soulful, Hope House is a novel about searching for belonging and lifting each other up; about coming of age into a society that’s already closed its doors; about lost boys who grapple with their pasts, dare to imagine different futures, and nurture the almost outrageous hope that they might just turn everything around.

Hope House

Marina Lewycka

After walking out on his wife to shack up with 'Brexit Brenda' next door, George Pantis thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he can't access the money because he's forgotten his password. What is he meant to tell all the forceful people who keep appearing at his doorstep desperate to know his mother's maiden name? The situation is shadier than he thinks, and George is need of rescue. But will his dysfunctional family be able to save him, and in the process, can they save each other?

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid

Naomi Alderman

They had come from nowhere, and now they were everywhere 
 
A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long trunk-like nose. Suddenly these ‘mimmoths’ are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from. 
 
As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief – a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes. 
 
Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably? 
 
From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.

The Strangers

Sophie Chen Keller

Song is a nobody—just a food delivery worker from a village in Northeastern China—but her son, River, is a little wonder. 
 
At the age of three, he toddled to a piano and tapped out his favourite song. At five, he mastered Liszt's three Liebesträume; at eight, he blazed through the complete set of Chopin's études. And at every step, through loss, illness and poverty, Song has been there to light his way—until finally, at the age of eleven, River is invited to study with a preeminent teacher in Beijing. 
 
But in the chaos of Beijing Railway Station on the busiest day of the year, Song faces every mother's nightmare: she loses her grip on River’s little hand and is unable to find him after a desperate, harrowing search. 
 
Over the next days, weeks, and eventually, years, Song and River fight to forge a path back to each other as they carve out new lives that carry them farther apart. An evocative exploration of a mother’s love and a son’s yearning, Little Wonder takes us on an extraordinary journey through a modern Beijing that pulses with the music of humanity and its impossible—and impossibly brave—hopes. 
 
As every musician knows: You start in one key. You wander to other keys, strange and distant places. But in the end, you always come back home.

Little Wonder

Kathryn Stockett

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. 
 
Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. 
 
Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the 'unadoptable' girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed. 
 
When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. 
 
But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. 
 
Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women. 
 
But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences … 
 
Bold, heartwarming, and riotously funny, The Calamity Club is an unforgettable story of resilience and friendship, and a sisterhood of underestimated women who risk everything to take back control of their fates.

The Calamity Club

Roxy Dunn

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. 
 
Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. 
 
From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair. Through all of this she's refined her search until she believes she's arrived at 'the ending' to her story. 
 
So how did she find herself here, single at thirty-four, and about to make the biggest decision of her life?

As Young as This

Fran Fabriczki

Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum: minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn’t belong. 
 
Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school – all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past. 
 
But there are just too many things that Mila doesn’t know: 
<ul><li>She doesn’t know that her mother grew up in Soviet Hungary (where getting your hands on a banana was one of the greatest thrills in life)</li><li>She doesn’t know that her mother has a sister called Rina (whom she hasn’t spoken to in 10 years)</li><li>The only thing she does know about her father is that he was a ‘good time’ (according to her mother)</li><li>Crucially, she doesn’t know that there is a very good reason why her mother dodges everyone, from traffic cops to vice principals.</li></ul> 
So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode. 
 
Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we’ve left behind.

Porcupines

Courtney Gustafson

Previously published as Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats 
 
People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back? 
 
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. 
 
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly. 
 
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power of hope.

The Cats of Poets Square

A Memoir in Thirty Feral Cats

Grace Murray

If I ever woke up with an ungodly dread — that I could change it all now, turn around, and confess — I ignored it. I had never been good, and there was no point in trying now. 
 
On a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year with a lie. Her father died over the summer, she says. Heart attack. Very sudden. 
 
Charlotte had never been close with her classmates but as she repeats her tale, their expressions soften into kindness. And so she learns there are things worth lying for: attention, affection, and, as she embarks on a relationship with fellow student Katarina, even love. All she needs to do is keep control of the threads that hold her lie – and her life – together. 
 
But six thousand miles away, alone in the grey two-up-two-down Staffordshire terrace she grew up in, her father is very much alive, watching television and drinking beer. Charlotte has always kept difficult truths at arm’s length, but his resolve to visit his distant daughter might just be the one thing she can’t control.

Blank Canvas

Angela Tomaski

‘We shall be forgotten.’ he said. ‘We shall be lost. They will scrub us away like a set of dirty fingerprints on a plastic kettle.’ 
 
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every so-called improvement, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? 
 
Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window … these are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children. 
 
A frustrated romantic, a stubborn traditionalist, a dreamer, a diva and an explorer: The Infamous Gilberts will be cast adrift on the irresistible tides of the twentieth century, buoyed by love, buffeted by loss, and tangled together in an unputdownable story where the lines between eccentricity and madness, cruelty and love become hilariously, heartbreakingly blurred.

The Infamous Gilberts

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. 
 
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly cruel and unyielding world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.

Unsettled Ground

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021

Martina Hefter

Juno Isabella Flock is a dancer and performance artist who spends her days caring for her ailing husband, and her nights chatting to love scammers online. She’s aware of the risks these men pose – she’s watched a documentary about them – but she’s also discovered a heady freedom in these online conversations, and the things they allow her to say. 
 
When Juno meets Owen_Wilson223 – or, to use his real name, Benu - she senses an immediate connection between them, even though they're separated by thousands of miles. Gradually, they reveal more and more about themselves to each other: about their real selves, and about who they really want to be. And just as Juno sees through Benu’s lies, he sees through hers too. 
Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? is a whirlwind of a novel. It’s about yearning to stay young while age marches on; it’s about how to stay truthful while the internet changes everything; it’s about love and desire in all their many, conflicting forms. And most of all, it’s a novel about the way we are all connected, by the same constellations and the same night sky, however different our circumstances.

Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?

Leila Mottley

When Adela Woods tells her parents she’s pregnant, they immediately send her a thousand miles away to stay with her grandmother in Padua Beach. The intention is that she will leave her baby in 'the forgotten Panhandle of Florida'. and resume her suburban life nine months later as though nothing happened. But Adela’s plans are soon washed away by the tide. 
 
First, Adela meets Emory, a new mother determined to defy the expectations of everyone around her, returning to high school with her newborn baby strapped to her chest. Then she meets Simone, ringleader of ‘the Girls,’ a group of young mothers who create a village together in the back of her red truck—dancing, breastfeeding, raising their children and themselves. 
 
The town thinks they’ve lost their way. Really, they are finding it. 
 
But as they look for love, make and break friendships, navigate the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood, Adela, Emory and Simone also find themselves on an inescapable collision course with one another.

The Girls Who Grew Big

Chloë Ashby

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families have been looking forward to this cherished annual ritual – but this year things are different. 
 
Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with grief over the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost. 
 
Into this conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children find new ways to entertain themselves, it starts to feel as if the fault lines in these relationships might widen; that it might be harder to hide secrets here, under the bright sun. 
 
Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

Family Friends

Independence seems to be drifting away from Misty. Just months ago, she was living with her fiancé and planning their life together. Now she’s single, back in her childhood bedroom, on crutches from knee surgery, and relying on her mother to help her with the smallest of tasks. This isn’t how thirty-two was meant to look. 
 
When Misty turns to dating apps, she's immediately intrigued by charismatic, handsome Christopher – so intrigued that she doesn't doesn’t even notice the acronym ‘ENM’ on his profile. By the time she discovers that it stands for ‘ethical non-monogamy' – and that he’s in a long-term open relationship – she already feels such undeniable, dizzying chemistry that she decides to give things a go. 
 
And so Misty makes a pact with herself to date Christopher for the next six weeks while his partner is away. It’s all part of her plan: she wants to learn to become less attached, and to prepare herself for her next ‘real’ relationship. But is what she wants really what she needs?

Wants and Needs

Set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose. Until the murder of her maid and the kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with heroic and absurd results. 
 
One of Mitford's earliest novels and written before Christmas 1939, Pigeon Pie is delivered with a touch lighter than that of her later masterpieces but no less entertaining. This comedy combines glamour, wit, and a fiendishly absurd plot into an irresistible literary confection. 
 
'This sparking and deliciously acid commentary of the social world.' - The Scotsman

Pigeon Pie

Rosanna Pike

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. Her mother has taught her that if you’re not too bound by the Big Man’s rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. But now her ma is gone. 
 
As she journeys through the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb discovers that there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything… 
 
So, when the opportunity presents itself to escape the shackles society has placed on them, Tibb and her new friends conjure an audacious plan: her greatest trickerie yet. But before they know it, their hoax takes on a life of its own, drawing crowds - and vengeful enemies - to their door.

A Little Trickerie

Rupert Dastur

It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, Catrin and John endure the agonizing wait for their older son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other battles at home: the working of the land that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son. 
 
Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, forcing the boys’ doting mother to confront the life she might have had. And John, desperate to keep farm and family together, turns to ever riskier methods to stay afloat. 
 
As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from one another – until, on a cold winter evening, there is a fateful knock at the door. 
 
Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection.

Cloudless

Cassandra Neyenesch

Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her ‘anarcho-Marxist’ handyman, is a crisis. 
 
Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret.Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. 
 
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve? 
 
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair that turned her life upside down?

A Little Bit Bad

People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back? 
 
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. 
 
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly. 
 
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power 
of hope.

Poets Square

A Memoir in Thirty Cats

Stanley Tucci

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. Taste is an intimate reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, NY, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last. Written with Stanley's signature wry humour and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

Taste

My Life Through Food

Susanna Crossman

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. 
 
While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets. 
 
Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments. Revisiting her past, she turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

Amanda Peters

As I stood under it, looking up into the branches, listening as the wind rustled the leaves, I could hear my Kiju’s voice: “This tree holds our stories.” 
 
Born under the shadow of a tree sacred to generations of Indigenous women, Aliet has been brought up outside a small Nova Scotia town by her fierce, loving grandmother, Kiju. Her father remains a mystery no one will name, while her mother died under that very tree, gently held by its cradle of roots as Aliet came into the world. 
 
But the world beyond their community is changing, and although Kiju has a wealth of wisdom to share, local women are increasingly reluctant to follow traditional birthing rituals. At the local hospital, white doctors are sceptical of Indigenous practices, and Aliet and Kiju are distraught to witness as prejudice turns to condemnation. 
 
Decades later, Aliet is living a quiet life in the city while she grapples with a personal tragedy that has shaped her adulthood. She works as a nurse, administering modern medicine while still holding her grandmother’s teachings and stories dear, tucked beside memories of the tree that once welcomed new life. But when Kiju passes away suddenly, grief-stricken Aliet understands that she must return to the tree: it is only these roots that can help her reconnect with her heritage, and discover long-buried secrets about herself. 
 
Sweeping and intimate, spanning decades, The Birthing Tree follows one woman’s journey to protect her land, her traditions, and the memory of the women who came before her, as she decides which parts of her inheritance she will carry into the future.

The Birthing Tree

Carol Atherton

Twenty years ago, Carol Atherton and her husband, Matthew stood together on the doorstep of a suburban house waiting to meet the small, red-headed toddler who would soon be woven into the fabric of their lives. 
 
But that moment was only one of many thresholds they crossed on their journey to becoming adoptive parents. In the years leading up to it, they had found their path strewn with countless questions and clouded by the myths that have shaped our collective ideas about adoption. 
 
What was the truth behind the sensationalist headlines and the dramatic depictions in books, film and television? What level of scrutiny would Carol and Matthew face? Who would their child be, and how had they come to be adopted? And what would they need from the family who were going to give them a home? 
 
In the months following the first nervous call to the adoption agency, all Carol and Matthew’s assumptions would be upended. They would meet social workers, judges, support networks and foster carers, learning not only about the process, but also about the wider social and political realities of adoption – its complicated history, past injustices and ever-evolving future. 
 
So Many Ways to Belong is the handhold Carol wishes she’d had two decades ago, when doubt and uncertainty shadowed every step. Honest, illuminating and essential reading for those whose life has been—or may yet be—touched by adoption, and for anyone wanting to better understand its story, this is an empathetic exploration of belonging, identity and our very human need for rootedness: to know who we are, where we’ve come from, and how we fit in.

So Many Ways to Belong

A Personal History of Adoption

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

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Peter Rabbit: the design evolution of a blue-jacketed icon

An image of three children's sticker books on a green background that features a shape in a darker green filled with a squiggle pattern

Children's reading lists

6 super fun sticker books for kids

Crafts &amp; activities

Make your own Peter Rabbit bunny ears

Paint your own Peter Rabbit-inspired Easter egg

A photo from a new book from the Beatric Potter world. It shows a page from a young child's book that has a touch and feel patch on Peter Rabbit's stomach.

Where to start with Beatrix Potter and her characters

A picture of three activity sheets inspired by the Peter Rabbit: Head Over Tail book on a periwinkle blue background

Download these Peter Rabbit: Head Over Tail activity sheets

An illustration from Peter Rabbit: Hide and Seek showing Mr Tod looking for Peter who is hiding under a big pile of leaves

How to play the best game of hide and seek ever

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The best Easter stories for kids

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Jobs you didn't know existed in publishing

8 must-read classic books for under 5s

Bookish adventures | 15 fun family day trips

12 bookish days out for children in the UK

75 Christmas books for kids

Quiz | Which Beatrix Potter character are you?

Children's quizzes

Which Beatrix Potter character are you?

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17 book-related summer activities for kids

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Blogs

What will publishing look like in 2030?

An image of four children's books set in Scotland or by Scottish authors. They sit side by side on a dark and light blue montage background 

16 of the best Scottish children’s books and authors

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32 spooky books to read this Halloween

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The best new Puffin books of 2023

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Quizzes

Brilliant book quiz questions for the whole family this Christmas

12 of the best Christmas quotes from children's books

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Showing results for: ‘peter rabbit’

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