Staff Picks
By Burley Fisher Books
Staff Picks
By Burley Fisher Books
Favourite titles selected & annotated by our booksellers: Ant, Dan, Enya, Jake, Sam & So.
The Eighth Life: (for Brilka) The International Bestseller
Nino Haratischvili
£12.99 £12.34Nino Haratischvili’s ‘The Eighth Life’ tells the story of a Georgian family’s history that spans the ‘red century’ with romance, grace and immense power. The reader follows the characters through ballrooms, war zones and the hills of Georgia as they orbit and collide with one another’s lives. Haratischvili sets up generation-defining moments with poetic language and deft storytelling that never loses pace. A remarkable read, order one to your door and hunker down!
A Ghost In The Throat
Doireann Ni Ghriofa
£12.99 £12.34A Ghost in the Throat melds the forms of essay, auto-fiction and scholarly research in poetic prose to create a truly unique book. Doireann Ní Ghríofa makes it her mission to shed light on the life and work of the poet Eibhlín Dubh who has been silenced at the hands of writers, translators and scholars throughout history. In forgotten ruins, drowned forests, libraries and through the challenges of motherhood the author hunts for Eibhlín Dubh’s true voice. In doing so she also finds her own.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia: A Sunday Times Paperback of 2021
Sophy Roberts
£10.99 £10.44In her travelogue ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia’ Sophy Roberts sets out on a journey to find a piano for her friend the Mongolian pianist Odgerel Sampilnorov. On her quest Roberts traces these lost pianos from 1930s jazz jams in Harbin, to prison orchestras touring gulags, identifies the piano in the final home of the Romanovs and is led to the Kuril Islands at the edge of the Siberian provinces. What is so striking about this book is the depth of physical research in one of the most remote places on earth. Roberts’ prose is fully absorbing and her determination unwavering in the face of brutal weather conditions, Russian police interrogation and the depth of family stories that revolve around an instrument that transformed Russia, giving us some of the world's greatest composers and pieces of music.
Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition
Cathy Park Hong
£9.99 £9.49Poet Cathy Park Hong weighs every word with profound precision in this essayistic intervention into racialisation in North America. Looking critically and compassionately at and from her family's story in the context of LA in the 1990s, Hong elucidates faultlines and possibilities for solidarity. The chapter on fellow poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, in particular, reverberates with particularity and passion.
No One Is Talking About This: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
Patricia Lockwood
£14.99If you're on Twitter, you'll probably know quite a lot about Patricia Lockwood is. If not, you might know nothing at all. Lockwood's debut novel starts out as a reckoning with this phenomenon of being 'very online': of how language is warped and remodelled by the infinite self-reflexivity of The Feed, and the one-day subcultures this creates. The protagonist, a writer and web culture commentator is our lens, as she travels the world talking on the web and talking about the web. Then, *something happens*. The protagonist's everyday existence of writing about her life, in miniature, is interrupted by larger events that bring her back to the town of her youth, and things she thought she had left behind there. I was surprised to find that the antedote to doomscrolling was to read a novel about doomscrolling, but this novel is funny, surprising and ultimately very moving. It even made me put down my phone.
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
Barbara Comyns
£9.99 £9.49I was totally gripped and utterly charmed by this parable of bucolic village life gone awry. Set during the 30s (and first published in the 50s) we follow the genteel, but down at heel Willoweed family, as they prance around their eccentric estate. But when the miller goes mad and drowns himself, and then – the following day – the butcher slits his throat, their parochial life slides into disorder. One of the greatest bullying matriarchs in fiction, as well as one of the most memorable opening scenes (ducks floating in the drawing room) make this beguilingly strange and wickedly funny tale of country life the perfect escape from February drabness. I read it in two sittings and am now a confirmed Comyns convert!
The Yield
Tara June Winch
£14.99August Gondiwindi comes home for the first time in a decade. Returning from bar work in London to the land in Wiradjuri country where she grew up, resonantly named Massacre Plains by English settlers, August finds that she is about to lose everything, again: her grandfather has died, and with him the secret project that gave her extended family a hope of stopping a tin mine development on their land, where the river she and her sister played in has already dried up. But the ancestors and the aunties will not be stopped, and – facing up to the memory of the assault that broke her family – August rides along with them to find the artefacts stolen from their land and the missing pieces of her grandfather Albert's dictionary that retells Wiradjuri history. Land back in brilliant motion and narrative, an irresistibly compelling story that turns the world the right way up.
A Memory Called Empire: Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel
Arkady Martine
£9.99 £9.49Mind-blowing, empire-unbuilding debut following the young Ambassador Mahit Dzmare as she (& a hidden other self that literally gets on her nerves) travels from her independent mining planet to the one place she's longed to go her whole life: the Teixcalaanli Empire's seductively complicated interstellar capital. It also happens to be where her predecessor has disappeared – in the sense of being very dead. She has something the vast, sophisticated empire and its ageing emperor desperately want – and so does her home planet. But to find out what and why, Mahit has to trace the steps of her predecessor through the politely vicious maze of Imperial politics (largely conducted in spontaneously-composed intricate poetry, of course), knowing that everyone she meets might be deadly, as both civil and intergalactic war hover ever closer. But there's treachery closer to home, and it might mean that her own mind-body gets her first… An epic, romantic spy thriller of ingenious murders, breath-taking deduction and galactic stakes – and, most enticingly, the first in a trilogy that promises to join Ann Leckie's Ancillary and NK Jemisin's Broken Earth as one of the glories of contemporary SF.
Apsara Engine
Bishakh Som
£17.99 £17.09This book has been my lockdown sanity: it's such a gorgeous, gentle evocation of imaginative, impossible travel through spaces and times connected by interpersonal connection, by dreams and by desires. The separate stories, each uncanny and gorgeous, fit together into a kind of Borgesian parallel universe whole – if you attend to the details within details. One character describes the project as a "trans cartography," bending the map of how we imagine, relate and narrate.
The Future of Another Timeline
Annalee Newitz
£9.99 £9.49Imagine if Wikipedia edit wars became literal, changing history each time… New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz takes on the patriarchy, fake news, revisionism, and the grandfather paradox in this zinging back-and-forth time travel adventure that moves between the ache of adolescent first love and riot grrrl in 90s SoCal, and the urgent activism of a group of feminist scientists who believe there has to be a better world. Extra points for the gunkiness of the travel experience, using Comstockery as its point of divergence, and being sex-work positive.
Trans: A Memoir
Juliet Jacques
£10.99 £10.44A brilliantly-written memoir of being and becoming that takes in New Labour, Norwich City FC, a changing Brighton, arthouse cinema, suburbia, the NHS, the media, sex, bureaucracy, office work, dressing up, great music, bra fittings, writing, social media and more.
Gathering Evidence
Martin (Author) MacInnes
£12.99Martin MacInnes’s ‘Gathering Evidence’ may be the most suitable and the most disturbing novel to read at the moment. Pitched between sci-fi and slow-burn horror, MacInnes‘s second novel gives us a dose of anthropology and coding, mycological communication and surveillance anxiety, postpartum depression and... viruses. A research scientist investigates the behaviours of a troop of bonobos on a high-risk field trip whilst her partner, a data programmer, recovers from a serious head injury in enforced isolation. Both characters are trying to get closer to the new truth of human existence, the central theme being whether the development of technology is inextricably bound in with evolution, but they also just want to get back to normal life...! MacInnes's prose alone makes this an enjoyable and curious reading experience, give it a whirl!
The Times I Knew I Was Gay: A Graphic Memoir 'for everyone. Candid, authentic and utterly charming' Sarah Waters
Eleanor Crewes
£14.99 £14.24Sometimes, who we are is not laid out for us, sometimes our identities can be elusive or so obvious that they could not possibly be right. In Times I Knew I Was Gay, Eleanor Crewes illustrates (literally) her coming out process, because there is no one grand coming out. The process of coming out to oneself, to friends, family, etc can take years, decades, it is never finite within a heteronormative culture. Crewes’ constantly changing their minds about their sexuality is a relatable struggle and a happy spoiler is no gays die in this tale. It is a coming out story, a bit of a love story, and a celebration of growing up.
Cleanness
Garth Greenwell
£14.99 £14.24Sometimes, who we are is not laid out for us, sometimes our identities can be elusive or so obvious that they could not possibly be right. In Times I Knew I Was Gay, Eleanor Crewes illustrates (literally) her coming out process, because there is no one grand coming out. The process of coming out to oneself, to friends, family, etc can take years, decades, it is never finite within a heteronormative culture. Crewes’ constantly changing their minds about their sexuality is a relatable struggle and a happy spoiler is no gays die in this tale. It is a coming out story, a bit of a love story, and a celebration of growing up.
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2014
Mx Eileen Myles
£12.99 £12.34The energy! The immediacy! The controlled chaos of being! These are postcards from every edge to every heart by the bard of our times. Myles is a straight talking visionary, a radical conversationalist, a lucid lover who turns a line like they turn a head. There's not many books you dance with but this is (the) one.
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
£9.99 £9.49The Memory Police, located on an unnamed island, cause things to disappear. Once disappeared the memory of them fades and any sign of their existence destroyed in fires or released into the wild. The novelist, our protagonist, and everyone around her, seem to have settled into the routine of disappearances, because even if you wanted to remember you cannot. The names are difficult to pronounce, the smell or feeling, there is nothing. Yōko Ogawa (excellently translated by Stephen Snyder) handles the concept with such care and perfect eeriness.
Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart
£14.99 £14.24Couldn’t put this down. Hard-hitting and relentlessly sad but beautifully written, Shuggie Bain follows the plight of a family living among the slag heaps of 1980s Glasgow. It digs deep into the mining communities that the government left for dead and presents a portrait of addiction and poverty that will live long in the memory. A scathing reminder of the policy-inflicted cruelty waged against marginalised families, especially children, across the U.K. both in the past and present moment. Shuggie Bain attempts to make a life for himself whilst navigating a broken family, bullying, starvation, abandonment and a love for his mother who he refuses to give up on. A remarkable read.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
£10.99 £10.44This book is bliss: it's wise, funny, invigorating, like going for a walk with someone who knows every inch of the ground under her feet – as Kimmerer does. Weaving together Indigenous and Western plant knowledge creates a capacious way of being in and caring for the world, in beautifully clear and conversational prose.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again: Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020
M. John Harrison
£20.00The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison feels like an ode to gothic tales and builds an atmosphere that feels like we are in purgatory. There is a sense of inevitable end, whether the characters are conscious of it or not. Not a nihilist tale, more like how rats crawl and survive in a building that’s falling down. The story is slow-moving yet engaging, Harrison’s ability to portray a grey London without ever having to say that the sky is grey is an example of a beautifully written story surely to keep you up at night in an attempt to finish it.
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
£9.99 £9.49Do you feel the chill in the air? The crunching leaves beneath your feet? The home is dark and the creaks and small sounds makes one jump! Time to curl up under a blanket and read a ghost story. Shirley Jackson’s wonderful The Haunting of Hill House published in 1959 still feels fresh and keeps you locked into the mystery. It is a horror story with a soul (who’s soul? Dun dun DUN!), I found myself as tense as the characters, terrified of every door and hallway. Jackson does not overload the reader with metaphor or comparison, she makes you face the horror as it is. No frills or cutaways. A perfect read for the changing weather.
The Bass Rock: ‘A rising star of British fiction’ Sunday Telegraph
Evie Wyld
£16.99It may be cliche to say different stories all connected are “perfectly interwoven” but I cannot think of any other way to describe Evie Wyld’s incredible Bass Rock. Perhaps intimidating by its near 400 pages, it never once felt so. The story is so engrossing I would find myself up late into the night telling myself “Just one more chapter”. It’s the kind of book I think both my grandmother and I could read and get something different from it, the various characters representing different factions of family dynamics and history. A witch hunted in the 1700s, a housewife in post-war Britain and an unemployed late 30-something granddaughter. How much does history have a say in who we are?
In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition
Fred Moten
£22.99There’s no doubt this book is deeply challenging, but it is so in the best way possible. Moten’s ‘In The Break’ stylistically reads like a free jazz improvisation as he argues that all black performance — culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself— is improvisation. Moten hones in on the improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler among others and brings them into conversation with figures such as Billie Holiday, Shakespeare and Karl Marx. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique standpoint from which to investigate the connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. It’s a fascinating and challenging experience, one well worth undertaking.
The Hard Tomorrow
Eleanor Davis
£21.00 £19.95What does it mean to care, under neoliberalism (and neo-fascism)? Eleanor Davis’ graphic novel centres on Hannah, a careworker, and her partner Johnny, who are living out of a truck while thinking of having a baby. Around them are the people they care for, personally, professionally and politically, involving them in the question of how to balance grief, loss and rage with love, friendship and activism, and the sometimes confusing lines between them.
The Roasting Tin: Simple One Dish Dinners
Rukmini Iyer
£20.00 £19.00Honestly the only cookbook you need to own (plus the Green Roasting Tin for additional veggie and vegan dishes). These are the most satisfying, tastiest recipes that – bonus – are deeply flavourful yet quick to prep, and (double bonus!) heat your kitchen up on a miserable winter day. Added triple bonus: the cooking time charts at the start of each section that help you through substitutions of proteins, grains and greens." Quadruple bonus is that most recipes are "dinner plus packed lunch" sized and just as good the next day…
Chroma: A Book of Colour - June '93
Derek Jarman
£9.99 £9.49A rage against the dying of the light by one of postwar Britain's greatest artists, Chroma is incendiary, alchemical, wry, frank, and heartbreaking. Follow the winding thread of Jarman's meditations on colours as he loses the ability to distinguish them due to AIDS-related illness. You will never see the world (or blue) the same again.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems
Audre Lorde
£13.99 £13.29Starting from "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", this collection of Lorde's key writings compiled by Silver Press will embrace you, encourage you, enrage you and turn that rage into action. Speaking specifically as a "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde creates a space of confrontation and contemplation, meditating on what it means (as in the poem "Equinox") to live through and in history.
Kingdomland
Rachael Allen
£12.99 £12.34Reviving the ancient name for Cornwall, in her first collection Allen takes a stand for independence that refuses marginalisation. As Helen Charman writes in her review, Allen's landscape "ringed as it is by the sea and by encroaching dampness, articulates a fury that rallies against official gatekeeping and interpretation." Attending to unseen women's work, to grief, and to the painful realities of being a body, the poems are fierce of utterance, refusing sentimentality in favour of a rigorous honesty.
Milkman: WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
Anna Burns
£9.99 £9.49Tired of the same routine stuck close to home? Feel like you're running in circles while the eyes of your small community are on you? Same, says the unnamed narrator of Burns' Booker-winning Milkman. Except the Milkman (who never delivers milk) is an unwelcome and threatening disruption to her repetitive, circumscribed life in Northern Ireland under English occupation, because he's more of the violent same. And so she fights back with a sly, self-aware humour, a gift for a sentence and an eye for a sunset that make this book unexpectedly all-consuming.
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
£7.99 £7.59Gender-bending immortal Orlando pursues and avoids love, travels, finds comfort in home and leaves it, and so on. Woolfe’s writing is poetic in its prose, offering us a unique tale, that one does not need to be rigidly defined.
Inlands
Elin Willows
£9.99 £9.49In Inlands, a woman moves to be with her boyfriend in his hometown but is dumped before arriving. We follow as she tries to settle into an unexpected new life and the tribulations that come along with that.
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
£7.99 £7.59A book that was banned for decades after being published in 1899, Chopin’s final novel is a story of 28-year-old Edna Pontellier who abandons her family and goes on a journey of self-discovery. Water is a motif throughout, as Edna finds love and friendship and becomes more and more aware of societal bonds. But the question of what it means to be free is asked throughout, and that for some, freedom is not possible.
Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems / Selected San Francisco Poems
August Kleinzahler
£14.99 £14.24Two collections of poetry bound into one wander around two opposite ends of the USA: San Francisco and New Jersey. Feeling like a solo road trip, there is a quiet to Kleinzahler’s words, softly spoken yet heard. “And who were they all in your sleep last night/chatting so/you’d think that when you woke/the living room would be full of friends and ghosts?”
Surge
Jay Bernard
£12.99 £12.34A harrowing comparison of past and present, Bernard’s book ‘Surge’ looks at the New Cross Massacre of 1981 and how little has changed since alongside the writer's own personal dilemmas. “How many times will she die once more?/As long as things are worth dying for” To quote Victoria Adukwei Bulley, “In Surge, the dead are here and now. They are hungry and eager to be heard.” Bernard’s multimedia performance memorial invocation for the fourteen young black Londoners who died in the 1981 New Cross Fire finds equally commanding form on the page, with criss-crossing rhythms invoking house music and playground chants disrupting the brutal “neutrality” of judicial and media languages towards an absolute lyrical urgency.
The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
£9.99 £9.49Hackney local Raymond Antrobus gives us a wonderful selection ranging from familial relationships to a rewrite of Ted Hughes’ ‘Deaf School’. “Call it a boy busking on the canal path singing/to no but the bridges/and the black water under them”
Field Work: Faber Modern Classics
Seamus Heaney
£9.99 £9.49A classic collection of poetry by the late Northern Irish poet, Heaney’s work is consistently heartfelt without neglecting the coldness of life. “The end of art is peace”
Homie
Danez Smith
£10.99 £10.44Following Smith’s fantastic ‘Don’t Call Us Dead’, the new book celebrates friendship and survival. “to a different school or moved out east or made like a tree/& now sleep in a box made from one.”
Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity
Rosanna McLaughlin
£10.99 £10.44Tom Wolfe originated the term ‘double-tracking’ to describe the duplicity of artists like Picasso who clung to the idea of the impoverished artist whilst strutting around MoMA. In this slim volume from Little Island/Carcanet, Rosanna McLaughlin relocates the apex of double-tracking at the cornerstone of middle-class identity. “To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, Maldon Sea Salt of the earth”. In eminently quotable studies, McLaughlin takes on metropolitan dog-ownership, Marie Antoinette, Frieze Art Fair and workwear - endemic of what McLaughlin calls ‘a virulent strain of historical labour fetishisation’ - and lays the responsibility for today’s gap-year industry at George Orwell’s door. Comprising essays, art criticism and fictional vignettes Double-Tracking is an essential - and mercilessly funny! - debut.
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
£12.99 £12.34Deaf Republic contends for poetry collection of the twenty-first century let alone the year. It is an epic poem made up of sixty or so lyrical gems that carve a narrative arc of incredible power. Deaf Republic is set in the fictional war zone Vasenka where the townspeople use deafness as a method of resistance to military occupation after subsequent extreme violence against them. In a world of unending information and misinformation, corrupt media and deceitful leaders it seems more critical than ever that people can resist hearing whilst acknowledging the speaker’s presence as an act of resistance. Kaminsky asks us to ‘Observe this moment —how it convulses—’, in this way the poems become increasingly essential with close and repeated readings. Kaminsky states that he ‘followed the century with his eyes’ until he arrived in the US aged 16 when he was granted hearing aids - the timelessness of this collection firmly cements it as a modern great that any reader will be returning to for years to come.
Crossing
Pajtim Statovci
£8.99 £8.54Crossing by Pajtim Statovci is a tale of one person’s journey through various countries, genders and history. Exploring the difficulties of how one is perceived by others and oneself. Our narrator never comes from a highly moralistic view, but rather a very lived one. Despite countless reinventions, cities, styles, names, our narrator is always hiding something, always afraid of getting a little too close. The story remains nonlinear throughout, beginning in Rome, going back to Albania, suddenly in the future in New York City, having the reader put together the pieces just as the narrator does: “Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw”. But guilt is a heavy thing and it follows the narrator like an old friend.
Fatherhood
Caleb Klaces
£12.00 £11.40Blending poetry and prose, in his luminous debut novel Caleb Klaces tries to find a language to explore the time-bending experience of becoming a new father. A couple move out of the city after the birth of their first child. The father (who is also the narrator), is trying to write a novel while looking after the needs of the baby. He achieves a kind of borderless communion with his daughter, until she begins to speak. He discovers that their house is built on a floodplain and his quiet contentment turns to an inexplicable rage as he struggles to understand who or what it is he feels that he needs to protect her from. It’s a beautiful and moving novel, full of wry insight. It’ll warm your heart this Christmas!
Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry
£9.99 £9.49NIGHT BOAT is an exceedingly dark exploration of friendship, marriage and fatherhood that Barry carries off with aplomb. The novel is led by language. It is a visual experience with a cinematic quality that takes the reader into darkening landscapes of Ireland’s west coast, leaves them strung out in empty Spanish towns and seats them in the seedy port building with Charlie and Maurice, two Irish gangsters, who wait for 23-year-old Dilly. The language is buoyed by humour and sharp use of Irish colloquialism. Barry draws the poetry out of everyday conversation to breathtaking effect. There are sentences that will leave the reader staring into the bottom of their glass, wide-eyed and thirsting for more. The most sinister moments are carried off in a single sentence, ruthless and harrowing in their consequence. However, at its core this novel has real heart. It stretches the expectations of friendship and family love, testing the limits of forgiveness. Most importantly is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Think Samuel Beckett meets Francis Ford Coppola on a stormy night on the Irish coast. With a pint of Guinness. Delish.
The Topeka School
Ben (Y) Lerner
£16.99 £16.14This feels like the book for our present moment; a novel of ideas that examines why public life has grown tired of them. Closing out Lerner’s loose trilogy, we follow Adam, a debate champion rendered inarticulate among his friends by his excess articulacy. His mother, Jane, is a celebrated psychotherapist harangued by men who have been left by women empowered by her books. His father, a film-maker and psychotherapist who as a student discovered ‘speech shadowing’, an effect that occurs when people repeat words that are played back to them, causing them to descend into total nonsense. Together, and in a roundabout way, they reflect on the difficulties of raising a good man in a toxic culture. There is a line that recurs: ‘Knowing is a weak state.’ And that’s what I was left with: a feeling that knowing that things are bad isn’t enough, and a hope that it might be possible, some time soon, to turn this knowledge into action.
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
£7.99 £7.59This is a great start to Baldwin’s many titles. Exploring sexulity and relationships, Baldwin creates an authentic romance that never shies away from the harsh realities faced by our characters. Observing how people seem to just fall together and apart, it is a difficult book to put down once begun.
Conversations with Friends: 'Brilliant, funny and startling.' GUARDIAN
Sally Rooney
£9.99 £9.49If you’ve been putting off reading one of the most talked about books, perhaps it is time to finally read Conversations with Friends. Following an Irish 20-something, it’s not only enjoyable because of its terribly flawed characters, but if you know Dublin it is fun to follow these people through Grafton St and whatnot. 10/10 would recommend over Normal People.
Pet
Akwaeke Emezi
£8.99 £8.54In Pet, the angels from Emezi’s Bailey’s Prize-nominated first book Freshwater recur, but in more immediate form: Pet steps out of Jam’s mother’s painting with no eyes and gold feathers. It’s here to help set wrong a right in Jam’s best friend Redemption’s house, in a city, named for Lucille Clifton, where such wrongs are supposed to have been righted. Jam, who signs and can hear the moods of her house, is a winning narrator destined to inspire generations of young readers to open their hearts and act for justice.
Tentacle: Winner of the 2017 Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers
Rita Indiana
£8.99 £8.54Rita Indiana is one of the Dominican Republic’s coolest musicians, and her star power is on full show in this time-travelling trip of a novel. Equal parts wickedly knowing satire about the contemporary art scene, hot queer buccaneer historiographic metafiction, and postmodern Santería eco-conscious slipstream, Tentacle and its protagonist Acilde will wind their way into your brain with hallucinatory images and a compellingly new voice from the Caribbean.
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
£9.99 £9.49A series of short stories revolving around addiction and a group of friends and outliers. Witty, depressing, chaotic and defining.
Near to the Wild Heart
Clarice Lispector
£9.99 £9.49Has any novel ever come closer to the inner workings of the human body, muscle by muscle? Written by the twenty-two year old Lispector in a tiny rented room, it bursts with the intimate discovery of her own genius, in the character of the ever-changing Joana who defies her father and her husband to transcend the limitations placed on women in 1940s Brazilian society and burn (as Lispector would title another novel) "the hour of the star."
The Fifth Season: The Broken Earth, Book 1, WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD
N. K. Jemisin
£9.99 £9.49Wishing there was an Octavia Butler novel you hadn't read yet? Well, this. The eponymous Fifth Season is an irregular global destabilisation, massive earthquakes, dust storms and mutations that cause all sensible communities to close their gates and switch to a crisis footing. Who would go outside? Essun, an ordinary woman, a wife and mother, who leaves her community and finds she has a devastating power. Jemisin's imagination truly encompasses a global narrative, a geological timescale, and a cosmic Afrofuturist philosophy.
Kindred: The ground-breaking masterpiece
Octavia E. Butler
£9.99 £9.49Dana, a contemporary academic in LA, finds herself transported to and stuck in the antebellum South, on the plantation owned by the man who raped her her several-times-great-grandmother. Butler's brilliantly challenging address to the famous time-travel "grandfather" paradox was one of the first science fiction novels to tackle the legacy of slavery head-on. An utterly gripping read, Kindred is a classic that has remained incisively contemporary.
Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Rebecca Solnit
£10.99 £10.44Written in the shadow of the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hope in the Dark has been providing exactly that for nearly two decades. It's a deeply personal, extraordinarily wide ranging essay on why working together for change matters, often in ways we can't foresee or imagine. If you need a pick me up, a confidante, a reminder that what you do counts: read this now.
Car Park Life: A Portrait of Britain's Unexplored Urban Wilderness
Gareth E. Rees
£9.99 £9.49Supermarket carkparks are not places you stop and look. Head down, bags to the car. Unless you’re Gareth Rees. In Leyton, he explores a car park hemmed in by developer’s hoardings which depict a fictitious town centre; in Hastings, beneath the castle and on the site of an old waterworks, Morrison’s car park is at the heart of the city’s history. Up and down the country he finds these ‘non-places’ textured with the ‘multiplicity of places reaching back through time’. But they are living spaces where kids meet to play, dealer meet to deal, and doggers meet to… well, dog. As public space diminishes, these private but unpoliced edgelands are becoming more and more important. They are places to be alone in company. And on his travels through these carparks, sifting through the detritus we toss out of our car windows, Rees creates a sideways state-of-the-nation portrait, sad and funny in equal measure.
Nobody
Alice Oswald
£12.00 £11.40A new tale for ancient mythology, the poems are like being the ocean watching ancient gods fight. “and breathed in and out the very winds that wrecked us”
Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity
Nathalie Olah
£10.99 £10.44Steal as Much as You Can (How to Win the Culture Wars in the Age of Austerity) by Natalie Olah, is a book that rather than saying “everything is the internet’s fault” is a refreshing look at how a generation was educated, promised a bright future and ultimately given nothing. A captivating telling of the post-Thatcher years and how culture influences politics and vice versa. Olah is a fantastic writer, making a subject that could easily feel like a history lesson become an enticing page turner. It’s an especially good read for those who are still familiarizing themselves with modern British politics (even being from Ireland, I am still confused). Olah articulates what many feel and exposes the reasons why. A recommended read for those of us who feel a bit lost in our current climate (so everyone).
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong
£12.00 £11.40Vuong’s debut poetry collection is heartbreakingly autobiographical and tender. Relating to issues of identity, immigration, the American dream and family, his words are woven together in a voice that is so clear and his own. “Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.”
The Black Flamingo
Dean Atta and Anshika Khullar
£9.99 £9.49From its gorgeously seductive pink-and-black cover to the closing standalone poem “How to Come Out as Gay” that will have you in tears, The Black Flamingo is a gift that keeps giving. Written in free verse that is direct, emotional and accessible to all readers, Michael’s story of finding his wings as a drag artist, while coming to love and own his full self as a mixed-race gay teen, resonates with right now. One to brighten up any family holiday season…
Wheels within Wheels: The Makings of a Traveller
Dervla Murphy
£14.99 £14.24Every great traveller starts somewhere: for Dervla Murphy it was rural Lismore in County Waterford, where she learned her love of books from her librarian father, and learned how to be still and listen from caring for her invalid mother. Together with her cycling marathons, these experiences would form the basis of her future life as a contemplative travel writer who traversed the world by bike with baby in tow. An evocation of the byways of postwar Ireland, and an account of one headstrong young woman who learned to travel the world from being stuck in one place.
States of the Body Produced by Love
Nisha Ramayya
£12.99 £12.34Because we need more rapt, wry, tender, attentive, intimate invocations to enter and alter the political sensorium. This is poetry as cosmic jazz, a deeply alternative prayer book, the thread of a singular journey into questions of gender, embodiment, rage, and history. Ramayya takes language apart in order to put it, lovingly, back together. As Emily Dickinson requires, this will blow the top of your head off.
Dark Constellations
Roy Kesey and Pola Oloixarac
£14.99 £14.24Pola Oloixarac's novel feels ripped from the headlines, dealing in digital surveillance paranoia, incel subculture, bioweapons, and contagion. A hallucinatory history that moves backwards and forwards between a baroque botanial expedition to the Canaries in the colonial era and the equally overblown fantasies of today's tech conquistadors, Oloixarac's third novel offers something more than satire in its brilliant shifts of register from coldly scientific to wildly poetic. In its Herzogian weirdness, it's totally perfect for right now.
Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide: A graphic guide to lesbian and queer history 1950-2020
Kate Charlesworth
£17.99 £17.09The best history of postwar Britain that you will ever read and/or swoon over. The “sensible footwear” of the title gives you a flavour of the lesbian humour and tenderness that permeates this very personal, defiantly queer and working-class graphic biography that draws the reader into the highs and lows, from “Glad to Be Gay” through Section 28 to Last Tango in Halifax. Sobfest guaranteed at how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe
£21.99This is the book of where we are: in the wake of chattel slavery. Sharpe traces the timely and time-shaping figures of the wake of the ship, the wake of Nine Night, the wakefulness of coming to political consciousness through and across the "wake work" of contemporary Black cultural practice by major artists such as Dionne Brand. Every precise and profound word holds, with great care, Black lives and afterlives. Indelible.
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