Contemporary fiction titles are those which focus on the present or near past. Stories rooted in the current cultural, social, and political landscape which feature characters we can all recognise.
Contemporary Fiction Books
Granta Books Faces in the Crowd
Book SynopsisIn New Mexico, she is a young mother. Stuck in a marriage that's deteriorating, unable to shake the feeling that her house and belongings are trapping her, she is increasingly drawn to reflect on who she was before: when she worked as an editor in New York, rarely in her own apartment, always seeking new places to call home. As she folds time, seeking to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. Time and again, a solitary man appears - Gilberto Owen - a lesser known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and an obsession of her youth. He is living on the edge of Harlem's social scene at the beginning of the Great Depression, anticipating death, and tracing spectral visions of his own - among them, a young woman, travelling alone, on the subway. Valeria Luiselli's daring debut, Faces in the Crowd is a meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.Trade ReviewA brilliant, short novel... Dreamlike, phenomenally structured and a powerful of being a writer and mother at the same time -- Jessie Burton, author of The MiniaturistValeria Luiselli is a precociously masterful, entirely original writer -- Francisco GoldmanA young Mexican author with seemingly boundless intellect... There are echoes of García Márquez's Strange Pilgrims; Bolaño, Hemingway and Emily Dickinson are all freely cited... Luminous -- Catherine Taylor * Guardian *Spare, strange and beautiful... an extraordinary new literary talent -- Hermione Hoby * Daily Telegraph *A remarkably confident novel... Confident in its handling of the ambitious ideas that crackle through its voices, in its complex structure and the daring intimacy of its field of vision... [the language is] sometimes sharp-edged, sometimes playful, and consistently effective -- Daniel Hahn * Independent *A sexy, surreal debut... go with the flow and you get a multi-level satire on literary fame as well as the joy of a livewire imagination uninhibited by the demands of plot -- Anthony Cummins * Metro *I loved its quiet desperation and its exploration of translations and disappearances. Wonderful -- Peter Florence, director of Hay Literary Festival, English PEN Atlas Translated Books of the YearDefinitely not magical realist yet definitely magical, this is the story of a contemporary novelist haunted by a 1920s poet. Haunting, vibrant, and often funny -- Damian Barr, English PEN Atlas Translated Book of the YearLuiselli's novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction. She avoids worn-out narratives about drug wars and violence, and her downbeat supernaturalism feels quite different from the magic realism of Márquez. Concerned, above all, with literature's ability to transcend time and space, she signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers -- Mina Holland * Observer *[Latin] American fiction thrives on distorted realities, but Luiselli's work is a more down-beat variety, and the more magical for it. Translator Christina MacSweeney has brought out the delicacy of the author's fragile prose -- Emma Hagestadt * Independent *Valeria Luiselli is a writer of formidable talent... Her vision and language are precise, and the power of her intellect is in evidence on every page -- Daniel AlarconWe love Valeria Luiselli! * Marie Claire (Italy) *Luiselli has a passion for games. And she aims high. She makes matter implode and stratifies it, and then breaks it, leaving the reader to pull the strings at his will. * Rolling Stone (Italy) *A profoundly literary first novel that manages to do what every novel should do - disquiet us (...) By its overlapping of voices, the ominous words of the narrator's son, or Owen's delirious texts, Faces in the Crowd entangles us in such a wonderfully knitted tapestry that we can only expect a very promising future for this young author. * Time Out Portugal *The first novel by Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli is a brilliant story - dense and porous in turns - about the obscure ways of literary creation... Dazzling first novel * Expresso (Portugal) *The new star of South American literature. * Sol (Portugal) *Faces in the Crowd delivers a torrent of warmth, humour and life ...The lead character, a hardworking young mother, is obsessed with an obscure Mexican poet. As a narrator she is so distinctive and powerfully drawn you can't help but be pulled in. Within a few pages I was desperate to walk the streets of Manhattan in search of obscure Mexican poets myself -- Thomas Quinn * Big Issue *A poetically realised and fragile portrait of the fracturing nature of urban life... and the strangeness of ordinary human interactions -- Violet Hudson * Spectator *[Luiselli] blurs the lines between reality and fiction, past and present -- Antonia Charlesworth * Big Issue in the North *Haunting... this elegant novel speaks to the transience of reality... Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition * Publishers Weekly starred review *Vivid and urgent -- Patrick Nathan * Full Stop *Striking and mysterious * Wall Street Journal *Personal, honest, and wild... The most intoxicating of the ideas Luiselli presents almost seems like the prelude to a new school of literary thought... You come out on the other side of reading it with an indelible impression... Luiselli's voice is distinct, and her concerns are uniquely Luisellian * KGB Bar Lit Magazine *
£9.50
Granta Books The Men
Book Synopsis*Selected for 2022 previews by the Observer, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, & the Irish Times* 'Intriguingly strange' The Bookseller, Editor's Choice In a single moment, in every part of the world, every person with an Y chromosome vanishes: lovers, children, parents - even foetuses from the womb. Jane Pearson wakes on a mountainside the next morning to find her husband and son missing from their tent. Frantic and grieving, she sets out to find the one person she thinks can help - Evangelyne Moreau, the brilliant, charismatic leader of the Commensalist Party of America, whose heart she broke many years before. While Jane searches for those she has lost, a radically different society emerges, one that seems - at first - to be suddenly, blissfully safer than what came before. And then The Men appears online: uncanny video footage that shows the missing being herded through bizarre, otherworldly landscapes. Is it a hoax, or could The Men hold the key to bringing back those who were lost? And if so, what might be the cost? From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of impossible sacrifices that asks: what might we be prepared to give up to create a better world?Trade ReviewA dazzling work of speculative fiction * Observer *'Almost supernaturally propulsive, sometimes very beautiful... there are strange things here I am unlikely to forget. Sandra Newman is a genius' * Sarah Perry, author of Melmouth *Superb. A novel of hypnotic power and breadth from one of the most supple, dynamic voices around. Newman's talents never fail to impress me * Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish *Explosive... Dazzling and lyrical... Truly spectacular * Literary Review *A gripping, haunting novel that miraculously swerves both cheap misandry and the lazy pieties of contemporary rectitude * Spectator *Propulsive * i Paper *The Men really intrigues and disturbs... * Guardian *Compelling and enjoyable * Telegraph *Sandra Newman's fiction is characterised by audacious conceits, utopian thinking and apocalyptic fantasies * Observer *Newman hooks you in with her intriguing premise, asking unnerving questions about our present, and future * Stylist, Book List *A tale of white guilt, climate inaction and the gravitational pull of grief; of what - or who - we are willing to sacrifice to stay comfortable * TLS *Heart-breaking. The Men imagines a better world and what we might have to sacrifice to get there, and, at the same time, it's a brilliantly constructed sci-fi thriller, with a premise that hooks you in with a horrifying grip. I loved it * Bridget Collins *
£8.54
Granta Books The Tidal Zone
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME PRIZE 'She writes better than anyone I know about the way we live now... I loved this book... She is also very funny' Margaret Drabble On a day like any other, stay-at-home father Adam receives a call from his daughter's school. Miriam, his brilliant fifteen-year-old, has collapsed and stopped breathing; her heart has inexplicably stopped. The Tidal Zone shows the familiar world of a modern family turned inside out. From the complicated lives of teenagers to the complexities of marriage this is a moving, funny and instantly recognisable tale of 21st century domestic life. It confirms Sarah Moss as a unique voice in modern fiction and a writer of luminous intelligence. A poignant, engrossing and beautifully observed exploration of family life, from the acclaimed author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall. 'This is grown-up writing for grown-up readers, the kind of story that makes you think about your own life choices and close relationships.' Sunday Herald 'A novel for our times... An excellent read' Penelope Lively, Guardian 'A remarkable, passionate, funny and beautifully furious book' AL KennedyTrade ReviewSarah Moss's great gift is as a first-rate depicter of human emotions. Her character live and breathe in the way that readers need characters to do: as compassionate, sympathetic and recognisable individuals we can connect with utterly, as people struggling to cope with the realities of life... This is grown-up writing for grown-up readers, the kind of story that makes you think about your own life choices and close relationships. Few novels do that with such depth and clarity as Moss's has done so here -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *Sarah Moss is an impressively flexible writer... The Tidal Zone may be something of a pioneer as a novel... A novel for our times... An intensely contemporary novel, with swingeing criticisms of this country today... An excellent read -- Penelope Lively * Guardian *Sarah Moss is a writer of exceptional gifts, who can combine the profound and the prosaic, the contemporary and the historic, in a compelling narrative. She writes better than anyone I know about the way we live now, about our fears and obsessions and dreams, about mortality and parenthood and just keeping going from day to day. I love her work, and I loved this book. She gives us so much. She writes very freely and fearlessly, making up her own rules as she goes. She is also very funny -- Margaret DrabbleThe Tidal Zone is a remarkable, passionate, funny and beautifully furious book, full of love, history, justice and tenderness. I recommend it to any reader with a heart, or a head -- AL KennedyA breathtaking book that intertwines the sudden drama of catastrophe with the ongoing rhythms of domestic life. I haven't read anything that better nails the love and fear of parenting and the complexities of marriage with children -- Cathy Rentzenbrink, 'The most addictive new reads of July' * Stylist *In her first four novels to date Moss has proved to be a versatile writer... [The Tidal Zone] is different again, a contemporary story about a family whose ordinary lives are tipped into freefall when eldest daughter Miriam collapses one day at school. Granta is tipping this as her breakout novel and I do hope so - she deserves to be so much better known * Editor's Choice, Bookseller *Sarah Moss [is] a writer of consistently clever works. She's one of Britain's most underrated writers... One of the things Moss does so well in her novels is to play with your expectations. Here she shakes up the traditional mother-father roles. -- Fiona Wilson * The Times *A clever, well-constructed, moving, funny and very well-written novel, rooted in domestic reality but able to take on the big themes of mortality and the fragility and preciousness of life. Excellent -- Harry Ritchie * Daily Mail *Brilliant... [Moss] absolutely captures [...] the big dramatic action but also wonderfully pins the small currents and rhythms of domestic life... A rich and complex novel, very layered but also a fast, speedy and tense read... Literally breathtaking, [...] I had to remind myself to breathe again... [Moss] is such a good writer... all of the great questions of life and death are here -- Cathy Rentzenbrink * Monocle Arts Review *An astute storyteller [...] Moss taps into a range of experiences that you do not need to be a parent to feel and tackles this extremely uncomfortable subject with tact, plausibility and flowing prose. -- Natalie Bowen * Press Association *A sophisticated state-of-the-nation novel [that] delivers a powerful account of private fears in the face of public expectations and modern parenthood confronting gender politics... Animated by wry intelligence yet comparable to a Dutch painting of a domestic interior in its evocation of turmoil beneath stillness, Sarah Moss's fifth novel reprises her exploration of mortal and moral paradoxes... Bristling with contemporary teenage attitude, this coming-of-age story is about grown-ups, for grown-ups. -- Caroline Jackson * Country Life *Moss writes soulful, ambitious prose, which takes note of the familiar and mundane, but mostly dwells on a bigger, deeper picture. The nature of familial love, the grip of fear imposed by a seriously ill child, the guilt of yearning for escape; all are examined with intelligence and emotional charge -- Jane Graham * Big Issue *The Tidal Zone is rich in texture and detail, and Moss expands her narrative even further, folding in the story of Adam's father [which] adds a new dimension [...] introducing a way of living that relinquishes class systems, money, institutions and ideologies... Moss' language is unflinching and she convincingly captures Adam's inner life -- Cassie Davies * Literary Review *Moss's new novel begins with a couple of extraordinary pages describing three incidents in which a young girl's heart stopped... Moss is one of our most fearless novelists [who] underline[s] how precarious and illusory our cosy lives are -- Claire Allfree * Metro *Sarah Moss presents a beautifully crafted portrayal of liberal middle-class family life [to] explor[e] themes of parental love, fear of loss, the challenges of marriage, the work-life juggle, recovery and more... It captures things you know must be true but had perhaps never thought of... Gripping -- Jane Blackman * Oxford Times *Sarah Moss is an absolutely terrific writer... [A] richly detailed and beautifully observed novel [with] all the pace and excitement of a thriller. -- Cresside Connolly * Oldie *A big-hitter about every parent's worst fear, which in the hands of Moss doesn't become sensationalist or clichéd * Bookseller *I devoured this... it's definitely going to be one of my favourite books of the year... Profoundly moving, relevant and important -- Jen CampbellIf you enjoy Sarah Moss' writing then I think you will love this one... to my mind her best novel to date and if you haven't discovered her then you have treats in story... Sarah Moss traverses the territory with assurance and confidence. With each book I sense an author getting better and better... Having already made the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist twice, [Moss] must surely make it for a third time with The Tidal Zone and surely other accolades will follow -- Lynne Hatwell * Dove Grey Reader *Within two pages you know that this is a writer who has such talent, such ability... The writing style is perfect. It's amazing -- Mercedes MillsThe Tidal Zone has an astounding way of looking at a potential tragedy within one household and simultaneously shows how it is situated in the expansive tapestry of human experience. She does this writing in a way which is poetic, profound and filled with wry humour, but it's also a story firmly grounded in the small details of real life... The Tidal Zone magnificently captures the real grit and poignancy of daily life while framing it within a bigger picture. It's an emotionally affecting read with realistic and relatable characters that will keep you gripped worrying what will happen to them. -- Eric Anderson * Lonesome Reader *Brilliant... it examines the mundane and routing, questioning the futility of daily rituals that we hold dear. It's everyday magic * Domestic Sluttery *
£9.49
Granta Books Cold Earth
Book SynopsisTHE EXCEPTIONAL DEBUT FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE FELL 'I revelled in Cold Earth. Brilliant' Penelope Lively 'Chilling and remarkable... Moss is a master at evoking suspense' Guardian On the west coast of Greenland, a team of archaeologists searching for traces of lost Viking settlements receives news from back home: a deadly pandemic has swept across the world. As the Arctic winter approaches and their communications with the outside world fail, the six abandoned souls are left fighting for survival, writing letters to loved ones they may never receive. Cold Earth is a chilling, haunting and scarily prescient tale of grief, isolation and the will to survive. 'Unnerving, ambitious... utterly absorbing and - appropriately enough - very chilling' Daily MailTrade ReviewChilling and remarkable... Moss is a master at evoking suspense * Guardian *Unnerving, ambitious... utterly absorbing and - appropriately enough - very chilling * Daily Mail *I revelled in Cold Earth. Brilliant -- Penelope LivelyA sure-fire success -- Margaret Drabble * Guardian *Moss is such a master at evoking the suspense of both the dread and the anticipation of this situation that readers will be tempted to turn to the end of the book to relieve anxieties. Try to control yourself, if only for the sake of appreciating her technique -- Jane Smiley * Guardian *Moss's stark writing delivers stinging splashes of cold water. Every element of the novel is distilled for purity of purpose. Holding it, the white cover and the blue edges imitate an artefact carved from ice * The Times *A thought-provoking, suspenseful work that leaves the reader in no doubt about the fragility of the human condition: not just of the individual struggling to survive a hostile environment, but of a species that is changing its home planet in potentially deadly ways * Observer *A masterful study of the panic brought about by total isolation * Metro *
£9.49
Granta Books Just the Plague
Book SynopsisRudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis. Includes a new afterord by the author.
£9.49
Granta Books The Night Interns
Book Synopsis"Stylish, mordant, and pitch-perfect - I read it in one sitting. If Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney had been junior doctors they might have come up with something like this" - Gavin Francis, author of Recovery --- Intravenous lines, catheters, bodies in distress, wounds: three young surgical interns working the night shift must care for - and keep alive - the influx of patients, while frightened and uncertain about what the night will throw at them. The Night Interns beautifully conjures the alien space of the hospital wards and corridors through the viewpoint of one of the interns, as he comes to terms with the bodily reality of the patients and the bizarre instruments of healing. Equally unsettling for the inexperienced junior staff are the dysfunctional hierarchies of the hospital workplace. Under intense pressure and with very little sleep, the interns become inured to their encounters with sickness, all the while searching for the meaning in their work. By turns moving, shocking, and darkly funny, The Night Interns fizzes with nervous energy, forensic insight and moral tension, as it evokes life and death on the frontline.Trade ReviewWith the dark humour and moral seriousness that make Austin Duffy's writing so captivating, The Night Interns brilliantly portrays the excruciating stress of constantly feeling that what is expected of you may well be more than you are capable of achieving -- Carys DaviesStylish, mordant, and pitch-perfect - I read it in one sitting. If Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney had been junior doctors they might have come up with something like this -- Gavin Francis * author of Recovery *A sharp shock of a book, visceral, and acutely affecting -- Lisa McInerneyThe Night Interns is an utterly immersive read. Duffy has managed to capture the claustrophobia, exhaustion and constant pressure of life in a contemporary hospital so effectively I could physically feel the tension on every page. A gripping, honest and incredibly important book -- Jan Carson * author of The Raptures *Entirely gripping... a fascinating but terrifying backstage glimpse of an apparently-functioning hospital where the director is a tyrant, the producer is unhinged, and the actors don't know their lines... This novel is to be prized on so many levels -- Claire Kilroy
£8.54
Granta Books History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Book SynopsisMargit is at the point in life when things should have cohered. She's married, she's got a degree, she's got friends who throw good parties, and yet she's still adrift, moving from one precarious job to the next. One day, a picture of some Mexican students catches her eye in a newspaper. The group of 43 had been ambushed by police in 2014 while travelling on a bus and disappeared without a trace. And so begins Margit's obsession with the 'desaparecidos'. As she heads off down the rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs of Google Maps, her idiosyncratic quest to uncover the truth of what happened begins to eclipse pretty much everything else. From a sharp and singular new literary voice, this is a novel that captures the texture of life in a frictionless city with drop-pin accuracy, while asking: is it possible to recover what is lost without losing oneself?Trade ReviewAn intelligent debut... Edwall is a talented writer and I look forward to seeing what she does next * Observer *Fizzes with smart observations on modern life * Daily Mail *It is a zeitgeisty set-up, with the air of a true-crime podcast about it... There is much to admire about this debut * I Newspaper *There's a real energy and poise to Edwall's prose and she has a delightful eye for the telling detail * Literary Review *With its blend of fact and fiction, History Keeps Me Awake at Night holds its own among other notable books of the genre in recent years... Compelling * Irish Times *Edwall's descriptions of Margit's life in London are starkly real, recognizable... Margit is a highly original and memorable protagonist * TLS *A bold, highwire novel... Edwall has produced an existential psychological thriller for aesthetes and lovers of cultural London and the world... A story cleverly told of a young woman involved in contemporary forms of global voyeurism -- Sally BayleyAn intelligent and zeitgeisty debut * Big Issue North *
£11.69
Granta Books History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Book SynopsisMargit is at the point in life when things should have cohered. She's married, she's got a degree, she's got friends who throw good parties, and yet she's still adrift, moving from one precarious job to the next. One day, a picture of some Mexican students catches her eye in a newspaper. The group of 43 had been ambushed by police in 2014 while travelling on a bus and disappeared without a trace. And so begins Margit's obsession with the 'desaparecidos'. As she heads off down the rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs of Google Maps, her idiosyncratic quest to uncover the truth of what happened begins to eclipse pretty much everything else. From a sharp and singular new literary voice, this is a novel that captures the texture of life in a frictionless city with drop-pin accuracy, while asking: is it possible to recover what is lost without losing oneself?Trade ReviewAn intelligent debut... Edwall is a talented writer and I look forward to seeing what she does next * Observer *Fizzes with smart observations on modern life * Daily Mail *It is a zeitgeisty set-up, with the air of a true-crime podcast about it... There is much to admire about this debut * I Newspaper *There's a real energy and poise to Edwall's prose and she has a delightful eye for the telling detail * Literary Review *With its blend of fact and fiction, History Keeps Me Awake at Night holds its own among other notable books of the genre in recent years... Compelling * Irish Times *Edwall's descriptions of Margit's life in London are starkly real, recognizable... Margit is a highly original and memorable protagonist * TLS *A bold, highwire novel... Edwall has produced an existential psychological thriller for aesthetes and lovers of cultural London and the world... A story cleverly told of a young woman involved in contemporary forms of global voyeurism -- Sally BayleyAn intelligent and zeitgeisty debut * Big Issue North *
£9.49
Granta Books An Ordinary Youth: A Novel
Book SynopsisA bestseller in Germany, Walter Kempowski's autobiographical novel is a sensorial coming of age story during the years of World War II and a chilling exploration of how one family adjusted to life under the Nazis Growing up in Rostock, in the north of Germany, Walter has a comfortable upbringing: quiet and content, he spends his days scheming with school friends and resisting the torment of his older siblings. But, as the country rolls toward war, the attitudes of his teachers, peers and family begin to slide, and it isn't long before the roar of falling bombs, charged silences and mounting intolerance begin to puncture Walter's carefree youth. Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, An Ordinary Youth is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. Here, Walter's academic struggle sits alongside his father's conscription; his brother's love of jazz burgeons amid the destruction of the barrages. And all the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries - communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations - running alongside the Kempowski family's daily rituals and occasional scandals. A bestseller in Germany on publication, An Ordinary Youth is all the more unnerving for the warmth, humour and empathy with which Kempowski imbues his hometown. Written with a sensorial immediacy, it is a meticulous chronicle of daily life in 1930s Germany, and a discomfiting exploration of the many forms that complicity can take.Trade ReviewFascinating and disturbing. Kempowski plunges the reader into the already running tide of one of history's great horrors so that we see it as if from within... An Ordinary Youth weaves an impressionistic web of nostalgia, complicity, terror, denial, love and dissidence into an unflinchingly honest re-creation of a time and place that still beggars understanding -- Carol BirchCompellingly immersive in all its intensely evocative detail, sometimes very funny, sometimes not funny at all, An Ordinary Youth reveals once again Kempowski's extraordinary gift... The appalling events of mid-twentieth-century Europe have been the subject matter of many fine writers: arguably none more truthful to the unsentimental, unheroic reality of the lived experience than Kempowski -- David Kynaston, author of Engines of PrivilegeDeeply uncanny. Doing justice to both the innocence of the boy he was and the moral judgment of the man he became, Kempowski creates an appealing and appalling case study in the banality of evil -- Adam KirschMesmerising... Intimate and immediate... A hypnotic immersion deep inside one of our continent's darkest periods and a book that from some angles feels chillingly contemporary * New European *
£17.09
Granta Books Though the Bodies Fall
Book SynopsisFrom an exciting new voice in Irish fiction, a powerful novel set on an Irish clifftop - a story about duty, despair and the chance encounters upon which fate turns
£9.49
Granta Books The End of Nightwork
Book SynopsisPol suffers from a very rare hormonal disorder that ages him erratically; when he was thirteen, his body aged ten years overnight, and now in his early thirties, he still has the outward appearance of a twenty-three-year-old. But with his condition dormant, Pol and his wife Caroline manage to live an ordinary life in Kilburn. They're happy enough, even if having a young child has put something of a strain on their marriage. That and Pol's obsessive interest in the writings of an obscure seventeenth-century Puritan prophet, Bartholomew Playfere, and his premonitions of ecological disaster and the end of the world. But while Pol is failing to complete his research on Playfere, he encounters a radical new movement that argues that all economic and political events are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young - that the 'hoarist' habit of violence, their need to conquer, has also affected how they treat the planet. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies. Against this increasingly fraught backdrop, Pol's dormant condition threatens to resurface - putting both the safety and happiness of his family at risk.Trade ReviewA novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable... There's a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things * Guardian *This debut novel glints with so many eye-catchingly surreal ideas - taking in invented historical figures, arcane medicine, absurdist politics, and vast conspiracies... Thoughtful, ambitious * Sunday Times *Rapturous, disruptive and quietly, complexly devastating, The End of Nightwork combines satire, elegy and fantastic portraiture to thrilling effect. A myriad of tender, terrifying cataclysms told with wit and true originality. A reckoning -- Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and The Liar's DictionaryArtful and ambitious... This is a debut teeming with ideas: about the nature of time, about politics, history, intergenerational trauma and how society should be structured. The novel is doing a lot, and having fun while doing it * Financial Times *A terrifically sympathetic, richly peopled and often very funny novel of family life and generational conflict... It manages to touch on both timeless and pressing concerns with sensitivity and humour * TLS *A strange and wonderful debut. A meditation on history and a lovingly-drawn portrait of a marriage, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's novel goes straight to the anxious heart of our present, preapocalyptic moment with grace, wisdom, empathy and a boatload of brilliant one-liners -- Paul Murray, author of Skippy DiesCottrell-Boyce's assured debut is a wildly original story that considers everything we face in the modern age and then some -- Debut Novelists You'll Love in 2023 * Evening Standard *The End of Nightwork is a rare thing; a novel of ideas that also happens to be deeply moving. There is wit and erudition here, but never at the expense of the book's abiding tenderness, insight and empathy -- Keiran Goddard, author of HourglassA brilliant novel. Aidan Cottrell-Boyce writes with a sharp eye for humour and emotional resonance. This is a time-tumbling, unexpected and arresting novel of apocalypse, upheaval and familial love -- Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness WideA totally absorbing novel on family, its pathos and its mysteries, on the end of our worlds, great and small, on how time fails us, and we fail time, with superb workings of comedy and political insight. As odd as life and as compassionate and engaging as a reader could hope for -- David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights OnOne of the best debuts to appear in a long time * The Tablet *[A] clever, idiosyncratic debut... There are some affecting and well-observed scenes * Mail on Sunday *The sense of calamity, of impending doom, of turmoil both internal and external, all seem like Britain as it exists today -- Best New Novelists of 2023 * Daily Telegraph *The End of Nightwork is a satisfyingly odd novel. It is both an urgent grappling with the frightening times we live in and a meditation on what Chaucer called "the woe that is in marriage" * I Paper *The End of Nightwork braids the domestic with the political, showing both in a state of collapse * Literary Review *A novel of ideas... its latter sections are thought-provoking and feature genuinely chilling moments * Press Association *There's a lot going on in this ambitious and singular debut by Cottrell-Boyce... Timely ideas, and ideas about time, take the fore here... the novel's human drama, [is] at times painfully acute * Daily Mail *A curious, demanding book that lingers in the mind * The Gloss *The End of Nightwork is a prescient book about an oncoming apocalypse but is also a moving love story -- Christian Lisseman * Big Issue North *
£9.49
Granta Books The Watermark
Book SynopsisTwo star-crossed lovers tumble between fictional worlds in this breathtakingly inventive exploration of the lives we lead and the stories we tell in the course of a relationship.
£15.29
Granta Books Nineteen EightyFour
Book SynopsisA deluxe 75th anniversary edition of the most iconic British novel of the twentieth century, with an introduction by Sandra Newman, author of Julia and exclusive archival material
£24.00
Granta Books Study for Obedience: Shortlisted for the Booker
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2023 NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023 A powerful, compressed masterwork for fans of Shirley Jackson and Claire-Louise Bennett A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family's ancestors, an obscure though reviled people. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property...Trade ReviewA weird outsider, a religious town - and one of the year's best novels... Beguiling and smart... Bernstein's prose has a studied coolness, all concision and steady flow. Yet it develops a queasiness of tone as the narrator's dealings with the townsfolk become a painful comedy... Haunting... * Daily Telegraph *One of my favourite living writers... hypnotic... a complex and compelling book * GQ *Study for Obedience [...] spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality... Bernstein paints from a palette of dread... This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite * Observer *A story of abjection... This compelling book serves as a powerful castigation of those who would draw the lines of society and communal identity so as to narrow diversity and to punish those who dare to be different * Irish Times *[A] short, potent outing... a deliberately enigmatic, sporadically deadpan offering with a fair whiff of Samuel Beckett. But it's at its most compelling as the folk horror evolves, seemingly, into opaque revenge drama * Daily Mail *Remarkable... A beautiful, riddling tale, it's like nothing else you'll read this summer * Telegraph *Study for Obedience is a fully absorbing, beautiful and sinister portrait of becoming and unbelonging, of violence held in time and place, that enriches the reader's habitation of the world's intelligibility and its darkness -- David HaydenSarah Bernstein manages to combine cool, perfectly weighted prose with an extraordinary emotional sensibility -- Fiona MozleySarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience is at once a languid and sometimes harrowing journey into the truth of human animals living in a small community and the need for a woman to give voice to the strange and beautiful cruelties of life. This is a unique novel that is primal and eerie, where language creates silence and vivid images reflect a kind of earthiness where our most intimate selves live. The wide praise for Bernstein's remarkable writing is well earned. -- Asale Angel-Ajani, author of A Country You Can Leave
£11.69
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Age of Magic
Book SynopsisFrom Booker Prize-Winner Ben Okri. A group of world-weary travellers discover the meaning of life in a mysterious mountain village. Eight film-makers arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way. The Age of Magic has begun. Unveil your eyes. ALSO BY BEN OKRI: Astonishing the Gods, In Arcadia, A Way of Being Free, Dangerous Love.Trade ReviewOkri is incapable of writing a boring sentence * Independent on Sunday *Part narrative, part philosophy, part allegory... this novel offers the reader not just a story, but a series of intriguing and revelations on the mysterious and blurring of the lines between life and death, illusion and reality, and good and evil' * Daily Mail *A dreamlike modern fairytale... Strange and poetic' * The Times *Like the best fairy tales it has lines of smoothly lyrical beauty. You have to applaud Okri for it. To get a novel that's not a novel, that so blithely eschews the structural conventions of the novel, from a Booker-winning novelist is fresh and revitalising * Irish Times *As you'd expect from Okri, the emphasis is very much on the magical, beautifully written * Mail on Sunday *Okri's tale of eight filmmakers at a lakeside hotel feels like a philosophical enquiry, in which the cast of characters operate as mouthpieces, there to speculate on the notion of Arcadia * Sunday Herald *A sort of philosophical meditation on the idea of paradise. Okri's otherworldly literary approach has produced masterpieces * Independent on Sunday *
£7.59
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC In Arcadia
Book SynopsisFrom Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a voyage into the enduring myth of Arcadia and the mysterious painting it inspired. A lyrical novel about art and enlightenment that takes the reader from Waterloo Station in London to Paris and a four hundred year old enigma, the painting by Nicolas Poussin known as 'Et in Arcadia Ego'. 'We never write the book we think we are writing. We never read the book we think we are reading' BEN OKRI.Trade ReviewProfound and enchanting. * The Times *The journey has inspired writers from Homer and Chaucer onwards. Ben Okri gives it an ultra modern twist. * Daily Mail *Delightfully lyrical. A truly fascinating work and a hugely ambitious one. * Scotland on Sunday *
£8.54
Transworld Publishers Ltd The Sisters Grimm
Book Synopsis'Absorbing and beautiful - a great achievement.' BRIDGET COLLINS, bestselling author of The BindingThere are hundreds, possibly thousands, of sisters Grimm on Earth.You may well be one of them, though you might never know it. This is the story of four sisters Grimm – daughters born to different mothers on the same day, each born out of bright-white wishing and black-edged desire. They found each other at eight years-old, were separated at thirteen and now, at nearly eighteen, it is imperative that they find each other once again. In thirty-three days they will meet their father in Everwhere. Only then will they discover who they truly are, and what they can truly do. Then they must fight to save their lives and the lives of the ones they love. Three will live, one will die. You’ll have to read on to find out who and why . . .___________________'A darkly beguiling delight that’s perfect for fans of rich and imaginative fantasy books akin to Erin Morgenstern and Neil Gaiman.' CULTUREFLYTrade ReviewVividly drawn, evocative and complex, The Sisters Grimm is both absorbing and beautiful – a great achievement. -- BRIDGET COLLINS, author of The BindingOne of those rare finds: a vivid and fully-realised act of the imagination, written with the page-turning immediacy of the here and now, but overflowing with the wonder of the stories of old. -- ROBERT DINSDALE, author of The ToymakersA very grown up fairy-tale with more than a nod to Angela Carter and Philip Pullman . . . textured and complex . . . genuinely thrilling and emotional . . . it's never less than spellbinding. * STARBURST *A darkly beguiling delight that’s perfect for fans of rich and imaginative fantasy books akin to Erin Morgenstern and Neil Gaiman. * CULTUREFLY *An entertaining and clever examination of folklore, female empowerment, and the system that attempts to keep women in check.' * SciFiNOW *Van Praag spins a compelling, intensely poetic narrative of empowerment and self-realisation. * Guardian *
£9.49
Salt Publishing The Many
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016Observer Best Fiction of 2016Den of Geek Top Books of 2016Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it he questions the wisdom of his move, but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren to join him there.When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession. And the longer Timothy stays, the more deeply he becomes entangled in the unsettling experience of life in the small village. Ethan, a fisherman, is particularly perturbed by Timothy’s arrival, but accedes to Timothy’s request to take him out to sea. They set out along the polluted coastline, hauling in weird fish from the contaminated sea, catches that are bought in whole and removed from the village. Timothy starts to ask questions about the previous resident of his house, Perran, questions to which he receives only oblique answers and increasing hostility. As Timothy forges on despite the villagers’ animosity and the code of silence around Perran, he starts to question what has brought him to this place and is forced to confront a painful truth. The Many is an unsettling tale that explores the impact of loss and the devastation that hits when the foundations on which we rely are swept away.Trade ReviewThe Many unfolds like an unsettling dream, shifting illogically, asking the reader to accept leaps from reality to what seems like it may be fantasy (or may be a matter of perception). But it's not just a strange fable, there is humanity in it too: Ethan's palpable grief for Perran; the locals' struggle to adapt to a world in which their former livelihoods have become obsolete; the touches of tenderness in Timothy and Lauren's scenes together. Its portrayal of a community left behind by technology and bureaucracy, suspicious of the threat represented by 'outsiders', is recognisable and timely – perhaps even more so now than the author may have intended. * Learn This Phrase *Though it was perhaps not written with this in mind, reading the novel during the nightmarish toxicity of the EU Referendum gives it an interesting prescience in its exploration of a failing, unwelcoming community's reaction to an outsider, the decaying environment that surrounds them both and the looming warnings of a distant bureaucracy. That fishing quotas, ecology and environmental regulations are also part of the ongoing debate feeds into that sense of a discussion in microcosm. The sense of loss that permeates here is not just related to the personal, but to the social and communal as well. * Film and Other Assorted Buffery *The sparse prose is dark and intense, strikingly written with a haunting quality that sends shivers through the soul. * neverimitate *This book is powerfully written and haunting. Always teetering on the edge of the gothic, Menmuir describes a coastal community that is dreamlike, slightly out of focus, with its own rules that Timothy never grasps. At the same time, it is rooted in the real world: remote bureaucracy, plummeting fish stocks and maritime pollution have blighted the lives of the fishermen. * Blue Book Balloon *Menmuir’s homespun horror has flashes of Daphne du Maurier’s ghost-gothic and John Wyndham’s dystopia while displaying its own individuality and flair … Menmuir steers a steady course; the result is profound and discomfiting, and deserving of multiple readings. -- Catherine Taylor * The Guardian *At about the two-thirds point, I started to realize that I was not reading a conventional, if slightly off-kilter and moody, story about a man having a hard time getting his life back together in a semi-hostile village. No, The Many is a horrific, beautifully horrific, tale that I cannot shake, as much as I may like to. * The Mookse and the Gripes *It creates an effective sense of tension and psychological suspense along the lines of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw but passages where the men are out fishing in the gloom also invoke a feelings of intense meditation and a primal self-sufficiency similar to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I was slowly drawn into the novel’s bizarre climate of secrecy and impending doom. The Many is a brisk, impactful novel which poignantly portrays grief, solitude and an inhibited state of consciousness. * Lonesome Reader *an intriguing first novel -- Fiona Wilson * The Times *This is a novel that has to be read at one go but one of those rare stories that once you have reached the end you start reading it all over again. There are moments one has to pause and wonder if it is reminiscent of similar writing in the past and then realise it would be unfair to compare The Many to any other writing. Wyl Menmuir’s style is wholly original, it grips one with its exquisitely chiselled style to create a stunningly beautiful and memorable novel much like the Cornish coast is. -- Jaya Bhattacharji Rose * Confessions of an avid bibliophile *I found myself totally gripped. The kind of book where you end it still wanting answers and yet are unsure of the questions. It’s a wonderful book and the first book I’ve finished this year that I immediately wanted to read again. * Information Overlord *A parable on ecological destruction, a commentary on monotony and parochialness, an obscure examination of sorrow, an investigation into the mysterious workings of the psyche – The Many is weird and disorienting, yes, but original and wonderful too. * On Art and Aesthetics *Paperback of the Week It would be wrong to give away the precise reasons for his protagonist’s state, but as Menmuir’s allegory becomes decipherable, it is increasingly affecting, and the moment when we understand how the bay and its darkly looming ships might be the warped echo of an earlier, shattering scene is one of great power. -- Stephanie Cross * The Observer *He deserves 10 out of 10 when it comes to the creation of atmosphere, and Menmuir can certainly write… A writer to watch. * The Independent *If it is possible to describe a book as being rich on spare detail then The Many is it, like a stock reduced to its very essence, and I suspect it was this lack of extraneous waffle and digression in the company of Wyl Menmuir's beguiling writing style that grabbed my attention and kept me wedded to this novel in the days immediately after Port Eliot festival. * Dovegreyreader *An intriguing, evocative and formally ambitious debut. -- Luke Brown * Financial Times *
£10.44
Salt Publishing Bodies of Water
Book SynopsisShortlisted for Best Novella in the 2017 British Fantasy AwardsDen of Geek Top Books of 2016Ginger Nuts of Horror Top 20 Books of 2016After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown and finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium.Years later, Wakewater House is renovated into modern apartments and Kirsten moves in, fresh from a break up and eager for the restorative calm of the Thames. But her archivist neighbour, Manon, fills her head with the river’s murky past and with those men of science and art who were obsessed with the drowned women who were washed up on its banks. As Kirsten learns more about Wakewater’s secrets, she becomes haunted by a solitary figure in the river and increasingly desperate to understand what the water wants from her.Trade ReviewRelishing in its genre coding and richly atmospheric, Bodies of Water is a fascinating debut and demonstrates the promise of V.H. Leslie as a novelist. It's a book for reading by the fire with a blanket ready to draw around yourself as the brilliant chill sets in and takes hold. -- Becky Lea * Film and Other Assorted Buffery *Bodies of Water is a modern Gothic masterpiece, a haunting and moving story filled with rich, tender writing and an ending that manages to be both melancholic and uplifting at the same time, it is a confident start to Leslie's novel writing career. -- Jim Mcleod * Ginger Nuts of Horror *it excels is in its commentary on the treatment of Victorian women as well as its hair-raising and unsettling tone. -- Erin Hull * The Bookbag *Bodies Of Water is a solid article. It’s well-researched and it puts a different spin on a well-used format. It’s got enough of the history that intrigues many people without treading the same path. Recommended. * The Worm Hole *And, in the end, neither the heart of this book nor the nature of woman can possibly be reached, for to reach such ends would be to destroy them. The book’s ramifications shimmer on – frightful and transcendent in tidal irresistibilities. * Dreamcatcher *The writing is simply gorgeous, at times lyrical and beautiful in its simplicity, with hints of magical realism/folklore and fantasy and the tension was always present throughout. It is quite a creepy, eerie and very atmospheric read and, for someone who has never liked the water much, a damn scary one at times. * Book Magpie *✭✭✭✭ Millie remains a haunting presence and influences both outcomes for Evelyn and Kirsten. A real ghostly presence or imagined through some mental disintegration of our protagonists? I’m not quite sure and I don’t think it matters. For some reason that I can’t articulate, I really liked the book, even though it is a million miles from my preferred reading genre. * Col’s Criminal Library *
£8.54
Salt Publishing The Chameleon
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prizes 2019Shortlisted for The Betty Trask Prize and AwardsLonglisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2019John is infinite. He can become any book, any combination of words – every thought, act and expression that has ever been, or ever will be, written. Now 800 years old, John wants to tell his story. Looking back over his life, from its beginnings with a medieval anchoress to his current lodgings beside the deathbed of a Cold War spy, John pieces together his tale: the love that held him together and, in particular, the reasons for a murder that took place in Moscow fifty years earlier, which set in train a shattering series of events.Samuel Fisher’s debut, The Chameleon is a love story about books like no other, weaving texts and lives in a family tale that leads the reader on an extraordinary historical journey, a journey of words as much as of places, and a gripping romance.Trade ReviewThe Chameleon could be considered something of a love story, both about books, and between the people that read them. It follows the story of a family through the years, the memories that shaped them, and the impact of past events on their relationship through the years. In the early stages of the novel we meet a man who is approaching the final days of his life, but in this novel a man’s mortality is portrayed from the perspective of someone infinite, someone who has lived for centuries. * The Owl on the Bookshelf *A fantastic new talent (recommended by Eley Williams!) … [a] mesmerising debut novel (and it really is brilliant). * The Book Hive *Over the weekend I read and hugely enjoyed The Chameleon by Samuel Fisher. It is a novel narrated by an 800-year-old shapeshifting book. It can turn into any book it wants to. It tells the story of the people who have owned it down the years. -- Scott PackAs well as being a new novelist, Fisher is also a founder of Peninsula Press, a small independent publisher whose list to date shows a predilection for innovative and experimental voices. It’s a partiality replicated in this wonderful, funny and audacious debut. Who knows what my copy of The Chameleon will turn into while my back is turned but I look forward to discovering whatever voice or artefact Samuel Fisher will throw himself into next. -- John Boyne * The Irish Times *You might expect a debut by a bookseller to be a hymn to the joy of books, but writing from the actual viewpoint of a book (here the narrator, who can transform himself into any combination of words, places himself at the centre of various events over the past 800 years) takes that love to a whole new level. Fisher has so much fun with this tricksy conceit that the very human story he settles on (amid nods to Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges and Dylan Thomas), of a cold war spy looking back on a life, takes time to hit home. That it eventually does is testament to his infectious enthusiasm for the power of the novel. -- Ben East * The Observer *Be it a love story, a thriller or a work of history, a written account makes those it depicts last forever. Revelling in its own wizardry, The Chameleon weaves a captivatingly reflexive tale around the life-giving possibilities of the printed word … Fisher practices a deft sampling technique, mixing in snippets of literary classics into his tale and reflecting on their relevance. The result is a compelling narrative and a subtle meditation on literary history. * Hackney Citizen *It seems only natural that if a bookseller was going to write a novel, it should be about books. Fortunately that's exactly what Wivenhoe’s Samuel Fisher has done although The Chameleon, which was released by cool indie publishers Salt this week, is a very different kind of book altogether. That’s because Samuel’s main character John can become any book, any combination of words, every though, act and expression that has ever been, or will ever be, written. -- Neil D’Arcy Jones * Colchester Gazette *This is undoubtedly a literary novel about a family and relationships, but also it’s about a love of books and it’s a spy story. It’s not surprising that the author set up a bookshop, you can almost imagine him spending time rooting through the stock and absorbing stories for this novel. -- Paul Burke * Nudge-Book Magazine *The concept of a self-aware book is the kind of literary conceit that, in the wrong hands, could lead to the worst excesses of post-modern fiction. The book does, after all, identify with Borges’ tale of the infinite library as though it’s “an autobiography written by a future version of myself”. Roger’s story, in turn, is essentially quite a slight vignette that would struggle to fill a novel on its own. But by marrying them together, Fisher balances and intermingles the two strands so that they sustain an engrossing, satisfying and quite touching novel. Greater love hath no book than that it would transform itself into a biography of its most cherished owner. -- Alastair Mabbott * The Herald *Writing a book as the Book is no small feat. One would expect it to be formally inventive, rich with the works of others yet boundlessly original – replete with unusual vocabulary and recourse to every image ever written. It is a credit to the author and to Salt Publishing that The Chameleon carries it off with aplomb. -- Venetia Welby * Review 31 *Fisher’s handling of tone, dialogue and prose that allows the story to be the star of the show. The narrative of Roger and Margery’s relationship, and the affect of the wars of the 20th century on multiple generations of their family is compelling and genuinely pulls at the emotions, while the depiction of 1950s Moscow and London creates an atmospheric noir backdrop. The book’s playfulness and wit allow the novel time to breathe and to entertain. Its stylistic peculiarities augment and bring depth to the plot, rather than usurping its role as the main event. -- Robert Greer * London Magazine *Like its namesake, this little book slithers and slips away from categorisation. Refusing to be pinned down, it is uniquely mischievous and marvellous. I’m quite sure Fisher could have made extremely good novels out of any one of its stories in The Chameleon. Instead, he chose to tell them all, and in doing so gave us a masterpiece. -- Elanor Dymott * Judge, The Betty Trask Prize *
£9.49
Salt Publishing Gamble
Book SynopsisShortlisted for The Encore Award 2019Greg Gamble: he’s a teacher, he works hard, he’s a husband, a father. He’s a good man, or tries to be. But even a good man can face a crisis. Even a good man can face temptation. Even a good man can find himself faced with difficult choices. Greg Gamble: he thinks he can keep his head in the game. He thinks he’s trying to be good. Until he realises everyone is flawed.And for Gamble, trying to be good just isn’t enough.Trade ReviewA stunning read. * Blue Book Balloon *Some readers may sympathise with Greg in his loveless marriage, with the child that was a mistake, with the threat of bad news hanging over him and a longing to be free of his domestic shackles. Others might really dislike him. I did. However, I was compelled to read to the end to find out exactly what he’d had done, and it’s because of the quality of writing. Read it yourself and see. * Nudge *A quietly chilling depiction of what lies just below the surface of an outwardly ordinary and respectable family. A desolate yet riveting read. * Neverimitate *Landscape is a cauldron for Kerry Hadley-Pryce’s intensely creepy and evocative writing. -- Georgina Bruce * Black Static *
£9.49
Salt Publishing You
Book SynopsisBig Issue in the North Summer Reading RecommendationA man boards a train, hoping to see the daughter he has heard nothing from for seven years. As he travels towards his destination, he restlessly revisits the events that blew apart their seemingly perfect world.With acute insight, sparkling imagination, and vividly arresting prose, Phil Whitaker explores the very best and worst that families can do, and asks: what are the forces that shape us; and, against powerful traumas reverberating down the generations, can true love prevail?Trade ReviewBrilliant, innovative, gripping, hellish, unbelievable truth. You is driven by honesty, humanity, compassion and love. A guaranteed page-turner. A story of supernatural hope over terrible experience, of understanding and even forgiveness. I won’t say any more. To unpack the magic of this art would spoil You for you. -- Nick Child * The Alienation Experience *You, by Phil Whitaker, tells the story of a father whose teenage daughter cut him out of her life after he left her mother. Told in flashbacks as he makes his way across the country to meet her for the first time in seven years, unsure if she will turn up at the rendezvous, it is a tale of inherited hurts and modern manipulation. The premise may sound familiar but its execution soars above similar tales, offering the reader an incisive portrayal of family breakdown and the damage caused by a vindictive parent from a father’s point of view. -- Jackie Law * neverimitate *The “you” of Whitaker’s emotionally charged novel is the narrator’s daughter. Stevie Buchanan, fiftysomething art therapist, is a victim of “parental alienation”, a severing of relations between parents and children as a result of marriage or relationship breakdown. In urgently, insistently addressing his daughter, a 21-year-old student, Stevie does the very thing he is prevented from doing in person, as he has been estranged from her for seven years. His desperation fuels flights of imagination in which, together, the pair revisit scenes of family history going back generations to examine the domino effect of traumas that repeat themselves with devastating effect. -- Jane Housham * The Guardian *You can be appreciated on a number of levels. Firstly the language and the writing which is of the highest quality. Whitaker seems to put his prose together effortlessly creating word pictures and word thoughts that stay with you for several pages. Secondly his ability to characterise again seems to be effortless. I’m sure it isn’t! But for the reader it’s the end result that resonates and the characters here, especially Stevie, are real and substantially drawn. Thirdly, and arguably most importantly the theme of this book, parental alienation. If it’s not a term you’re familiar with, take heart. Neither was I. But I am now and how! -- Gill Chedgey * Nudge Book Magazine *
£8.99
Salt Publishing A Perfect Explanation
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019Longlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2019Observer: Fiction to look out for in 2019The i Paper’s 30 of the best new debut novels to read in 2019Scottish Review of Books: 2019 in ProspectAs featured on BBC Woman’s Hour, Sky Sunrise and London Live‘Filled with cerebral intensity and scintillating dialogue’ —The Desmond Elliott PrizeExploring themes of ownership and abandonment, Eleanor Anstruther’s bestselling debut is a fictionalised account of the true story of Enid Campbell (1892–1964), granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll. Interweaving one significant day in 1964 with a decade during the interwar period, A Perfect Explanation gets to the heart of what it is to be bound by gender, heritage and tradition, to fight, to lose, to fight again. In a world of privilege, truth remains the same; there are no heroes and villains, only people misunderstood. Here, in the pages of this extraordinary book where the unspoken is conveyed with vivid simplicity, lies a story that will leave you reeling.Trade ReviewEleanor Anstruther’s superb debut, A Perfect Explanation (Salt, March), the fictionalised story of the granddaughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll, who sold her son to her sister for £500. -- Alex Preston * The Observer *I have read many stories of minor historical figures and the troubles they encounter despite their privileged existences. This tale offers much more depth and nuance than is typical. The writing pulls the reader under the skin of each character from where they may view the pain of selfish frustrations. There are truly shocking moments yet they are never sensationalised. Rather there is a balance in the telling that allows the reader to form their own opinions. The complexities of family relationships and the pressures these create offer much to consider. A riveting tale of grown children damaged by the relentless actions of their entitled parents. Well paced and skilfully written, this is a haunting, recommended read. -- Jackie Law * neverimitate *A Perfect Explanation is an extremely engaging story of the bizarre culture of the aristocracy, where love is secondary to money, and the cycle of maternal deprivation across generations is difficult to escape. * Annecdotal *The book is both a revelation but also deeply poignant as mental illness estranges Enid and her options narrow … Using letters and archival evidence, and acknowledging her debt to her father 'for giving me this story in the first place', Eleanor Anstruther has explored her subject with objectivity laced with compassion. It's hard not to feel desperate sorrow for Enid, and for a family floundering in the face of something they couldn't bring themselves to accept nor understand. -- Lynne Hatwell * dovegreyreader *Eleanor has cherished her role as the family’s retrospective therapist. In her head she listened to the voices of all her relatives; she tried to understand the culture that surrounded them, and she feels she’s finally put their pain and agonies to rest. -- Joanna Moorhead * You Magazine *Gripping, insightful and written with a breathtaking elegance and eloquence that makes this first novel doubly impressive, Anstruther’s beautifully crafted story sets out to examine and understand how the intolerable weight of expectation and responsibility can damage and destroy lives. -- Pam Norfolk * Lancashire post *Based on the true story of Enid Campbell, a duke’s granddaughter whose battles with mental illness cost her custody of her children, Anstruther’s debut novel follows a desperate Enid as she offers to give her son to her sister for £500. With a narrative that moves fluidly between time periods, this is a historical read that really resonates. * Woman Magazine *Eleanor Anstruther has written an astounding debut novel that bravely and completely brings to life a difficult family history. It also deftly holds up a mirror to our own world and asks us who are we to judge, when behind closed doors our family may not be as perfect as we like to show to the outside world either. I loved it. * Years of Reading Selfishly *You can’t fail but be touched by A Perfect Explanation and the tragedy of a family torn apart by abandonment, lack of communication and understanding, anger and jealousy. There are no winners in this story, which is the saddest part of it. * Over 40 and a Mum to One *This is just superb. Elegant, intense, completely bewitching. -- Xan BrooksI was gripped by A Perfect Explanation, and found it to be a compelling and fascinating debut which explores the extraordinary story behind Enid Campbell, and how a woman coming from a seemingly privileged world is impacted so heavily by the pressures and traditions that surround her. * The Owl on the Bookshelf *This is a story of family ties and allegiances, deeply buried secrets, status and wealth. It also looks unflinchingly at the struggles of motherhood and mental health. If you’re a fan of family drama’s spanning over a number of years then I would recommend this book, the fact that it’s based on real life events gives it that extra fascinating gravitas. * Bookish Chat *This is an outstanding family history put together in a way that tells of paths that were demanded to be followed through tradition, heart breaking that children could be used as a means to an end or sadly hidden away. In the epilogue the author describes how the writing of this book came about, Finetta the only one, besides her father that she ever knew. The feelings have been put together as how she believes they would have occurred and this worked perfectly for me. This has to be one of my favourite reads of this year. Just outstanding! -- Susan Hampson * Books from Dusk Till Dawn *This is as much a story of emotional deprivation as of entitlement or riches, and one which underlines that no group has a monopoly on humanity, fragility or fallibility – these are universal and so is this devastating and exquisitely written novel; we are all just people, in the end. -- Isabel Costello * The Literary Sofa *Throughout the book Anstruther perfectly combines human drama and emotion with evocative settings and haunting description. Each individual comes alike thanks to the writer’s skilful descriptions and human-focused narrative, which hones in on each member of the family and brings them to vivid life. * Dorset Book Detective *This is a fascinating and heartbreaking read. I often find that the books I enjoy the most, are ones with flawed characters who frustrate the life out of me. A Perfect Explanation did that – I really wanted to reach into the story and bang some heads together; and when I didn’t feel like doing that, I wanted to mother the children who were denied the love and care they needed … It’s a fabulous book which deserves a very wide audience. * Emma’s Book Blog *Writing this, I find myself less concerned with the story – although it’s undeniably riveting – & more enamoured of the storytelling. With the way the author lays her words on the page. This book unfolds in layers of exquisitely fierce prose. The dialogue scalds – characters show scant compassion for Enid & her situation. They are often horribly, crushingly cruel. She was clearly a deeply flawed woman but obviously ill & a victim of the mores of the time. -- Carol Lovekin★★★★★ It’s a quirk of fiction that the most extraordinary stories are those that have their origins in real human affairs and this is a prefect example of truth proving stranger than fiction. In lesser hands this story could come across as a curio or an idiosyncratic tale but Anstruther has taken something that might appear marginal and imbued it with psychological depth and great emotional understanding. A Perfect Explanation will brings it home to everyone just how connected we all are, how common our unhappinesses and joys can be. -- Paul Burke * NB Magazine *★★★★★ A moving exploration of a life plagued by mental illness, A Perfect Explanation is a tale of historical fiction told through modern eyes – sympathetic, studied, and beautifully written. -- Luke Marlowe * The Bookbag *A Perfect Explanation, is a fictionalised account of how her father, Ian, came to be sold to her great aunt Joan for £500. It’s a sombre, anguished tale of tradition, motherhood and inheritance within an appallingly dysfunctional clan where “heritage dictates and heritage always wins”. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Observer *Eleanor Anstruther never met this troubled woman, but she recreates her with empathy and compassion in this novel, which has been longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize for debut fiction. Anstruther’s writing is elegant and intelligent, and the closest possible thing to a perfect explanation. -- Kate Saunders * The Times *Almost all the protagonists were dead by the time Miss Anstruther was born, but, armed with the facts revealed to her by her father before he died, as well as family archives, she has used her imagination to bring her family vividly back to life through a novel that is both beautifully written and transfixing. -- Richenda Miers * Country Life *
£11.69
Salt Publishing Flotsam
Book Synopsis‘By turns beguiling and unsettling, Flotsam examines grief and loss through the eyes of an extraordinary child’ Rachel SeiffertTrine and her mother live in a cottage on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. The family leads a lonely existence, but each person has adapted in their own way. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, while Trine loves playing on a wartime shipwreck. That is, until she loses her brother.In her taut style, Meike Ziervogel tells a coming-of-age story from 1950s Germany – a place still haunted by war. A place where people pretend not to notice the ghosts.Trade ReviewZiervogel grew up in Germany and this taut, mysterious novel not only conjures female subjectivities and grief, but it also paints a haunting portrait of the country in the 1950s Germany, with its greater sense of loss, and the looming spectre of crimes committed during the war. -- Arifa Akbar * The Guardian *The writing has a dark and haunting quality yet there is much beauty in its concise construction. The story ebbs and flows with the ghosts of the past and the effects of the isolated location. Both Trine and Anna show a resolve that can be unsettling, beguiling – perhaps because young women are not expected to behave as they do. An astute and arresting tale… -- Jackie Law * neverimitate *This is not an easy book to write about without muffling the small shocks and perplexities which readers should experience for themselves. Told first from Trine’s perspective then Anna’s, it’s the briefest of novellas yet it provokes more thought than many books three times its length. Written in often lyrical yet spare, clean prose, Flotsam is haunted by grief, leaving much for readers to deduce for themselves. * A Life in Books *★★★★★ If you’ve read Ziervogel before you will be aware of her ability to tell a dark, haunting story of loss and grief in mesmerising prose. Flotsam excels in this regard, it depicts the cruel way a separation is inflicted upon the living and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Flotsam looks at the psyche of the nation, the greyness of the post war world as the country attempts to modernise and leave the past behind. Heart breaking and thought provoking, this elegiac and insightful novella is poignant, timely and deeply intelligent. -- Paul Burke * NB Magazine *Anna’s experience of World War Two and the consequences of an event in the War, dominates her daughter’s life. Flotsam asks how will the next generation live in the shadow of such destruction, when so much of that history is left silent? Wonderfully concise yet powerful, Flotsam seems simple while offering a layered intelligence that should be valued. -- James Doyle * Bookmunch *
£9.49
Salt Publishing The Retreat
Book SynopsisSince childhood, Sandra Peters has been fascinated by the small, private island of Lieloh, home to the reclusive silent-film star Valerie Swanson. Having dreamed of going to art college, Sandra is now in her forties and working as a receptionist, but she still harbours artistic ambitions. When she sees an advert for a two-week artists’ retreat on Lieloh, Sandra sets out on what might be a life-changing journey.Trade ReviewNovels set on islands have a habit of taking nasty turns, as this example slyly acknowledges. But readers of Alison Moore’s Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse will know that her speciality is slow-building unease rather than obvious jump scares. So it is with this, which follows two frustrated creatives, painter Sandra and novelist Carol, as they seek inspiration on two adjacent, isolated islands. -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *In this new book, a would-be painter called Sandra joins an artists’ retreat on an island called Leiloh where “contentment is assured”. In a parallel story, Carol, an aspiring writer, travels to a deserted island so that she can finish her novel. Although the worlds of these characters are contemporary and largely realistic, this is a story laced with the tropes of fairytale and myth. Emblematic and intentionally flimsy, Sandra and Carol are often described in terms of adverts, plays and books. The atmosphere of the islands is eerie and unsettling, the writing imbued with a deliberate simplicity and distance. -- Alice Jolly * The Guardian *I’ve loved all four of Alison Moore’s previous novels for adults – the most recent being Missing published in 2018 – and this was no exception. I particularly admire the ability to make relatively ordinary situations seem macabre. I also love the visual imagery: how objects are planted, as they might be in film, as clues to how we might interpret the story. No doubt I missed several in The Retreat, but picked up on doubles and mirrors; fantasy and fairy tale; and the small, smaller and smallest islands like matryoshka dolls. -- Anne Goodwin * Annecdotal *I very much enjoyed the writing and I feel that a lot more emotion was stirred up as I read than I was expecting. * Intensive Gassing About Books *★★★★★ I had not read anything by this author before but I was captivated by the writing and I will be seeking out her other books. The bullying nature of the group and the sense of a lifelong dream turning into a nightmare for Sandra was really unsettling. I loved the references to other books set on Islands and to fairy tales. * Book Blogging Bureau *This is a fantastic book with great drama and plot and beautiful writing. I loved the characters the chemistry the sprit they had in this story. Every chapter exciting to read you love this book. -- Rhianydd MorrisWhilst most of The Retreat is given over to Sandra, personally I found Carol’s narrative to be the most compelling. Alison Moore has perfectly captured the unsettling feeling of isolation, combining this with a delightful sense of the weird to create a not-quite ghost story that revels in its atmosphere. As the novel progresses, Carol’s narrative also begins to shed new light upon Sandra’s predicament, creating a compelling yet uneasy narrative that left me feeling somewhat unsettled by the time I turned the final page. * The Shelf of Unread Books *Artists’ retreats are usually portrayed as places of solace and inspiration, but Alison Moore’s intriguing novel offers a bracing counterpoint. She depicts the island of Lieloh, home to the former movie star Valerie Swanson, as a strange and threatening place, full of enigma and artifice. When aspiring painter Sandra Peters joins the retreat, it proves to be anything but a relaxing trip away. -- Alexander Larman * The Observer *Moore was previously nominated for the Booker Prize. Her new book follows Sandra, a middle-aged receptionist and would-be painter who visits an artists’ retreat only for her ambitions to wilt under the backbiting of fellow residents. While narrative tension comes mainly from her social discomfort, there’s mystery, too, thanks to a secondary thread about an aspiring novelist in search of creative solitude. Darkly funny and poignant. -- Anthony Cummins * Mail on Sunday *I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being. -- Nina Allan * The Spider’s House *The Retreat is a small masterpiece of disconnection. -- Kate McLoughlin * TLS *The two narratives tie up in unexpected ways, right down to the novel’s final disturbing revelation: Moore has wrapped her clever, devilish thriller around an elaborate study of artistic insecurity. -- Catherine Taylor * FT *Alison Moore’s engaging fifth novel, in which things recur, mirror and nestle within one another, filling the pages to saturation. -- Anna Aslanyan * Literary Review *Immediately intriguing, this beautifully written novel hums with slowly building tension. -- Sheila Grant * NB *
£9.49
Salt Publishing Elephant
Book SynopsisIn a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus. But a hundred years later an American academic feels the boy may have invented the elephant as the only kind and uplifting being in dark times.Trade ReviewWhat Elephant provides to the reader is a gloriously absorbing story about storytelling, as rich in suspense and vitality as it is in incidents and images that dare you to disbelieve them. An ice-bound Russian lake is filled with the frozen bodies of neatly dressed office girls. A zeppelin appears above Wentworth Woodhouse, equipped with a harnessed undercarriage that can carry a full-grown Indian elephant away from imminent danger. -- Miranda Seymour * Financial Times *At the centre of Pickering’s meticulously researched narrative is the gigantic female elephant, a metaphor for lost innocence and uncorrupted simplicity the fast-industrialising capitalist world feels apprehensive of. Alexei’s dream about ‘the river of dark fire’ is actually an echo of Schopenhauer’s account of ‘the anarchic, artistic Wille, the raw power behind creation’. The elephant, as Natasha fails to convince the émigrés, ‘is a counter to the inhumanity of our digital age’ -- Bhaskar Roy * Outlook Magazine *I enjoyed Elephant hugely. Such an original and beguiling story. It is, like the best fiction, simultaneously so precise and particular, while yet resonating with so many contemporary universals … An intensely readable and stirring novel. -- Stephen Fry
£9.49
Salt Publishing Fox Fires
Book SynopsisA lost girl and a sprawling map of an unsettling city.Wren Lithgow has followed her concert pianist mother around the cities of Europe for almost two decades. When they arrive in the mysterious city-state of O, where Wren was conceived during a time of civil war, she resolves to find man she believes is her father.As the city closes in around her, Wren gives herself over to a place of which she understands nothing, but to which she feels a profound connection, in a story of the watchers and the watched, the ways in which we conceive of home and, finally, the possibility of living on our own terms.Trade ReviewMuch as I enjoyed the author’s debut, Booker-longlisted The Many, this tale has a more fluid and accomplished feel. There are similarities in the shadowy undercurrents, and the skill with which threads are woven together. Menmuir has spun a fascinating web that captured this reader’s attention fully. I was left sated while still thinking through issues raised. A piercing, thought-provoking and highly recommended read. -- Jackie LawI have a particular love for books like this, constructed with such care and meticulousness; each image overlapping and reflecting the ones before and after. Maps, patterns, paths; attempts to see and attempts to blind; revelations and occlusions - all combine to create something rich, original and powerful. -- Charlotte Hobson, author of “The Vanishing Futurist”Menmuir evokes well an atmosphere of Stasi-like surveillance and paranoia. Although the novel is written in the third person, the pronoun ‘I’ suddenly appears, alarmingly, over halfway through, and we realise that Wren is being watched by a new narrator. The novel makes important points about identity and state bureaucracy — but how beguiling to do so through a haunting fairytale. -- Alex Peake-Tomkinson * The Spectator *Fox Fires is a reading experience that feels like a dream. Author Wyl Menmuir is a wonderful writer and the story carries us along beautifully, but there’s always a sense we’re reaching for something just beyond our grasp, the way Wren is reaching for her father. Fox Fires is the follow up to the extraordinary Booker-longlisted debut novel The Many, a tough act to beat.This is a fascinating and worthy successor, and Menmuir is carving out a delicious niche for himself as the king of multiple layers of meaning. -- Sheffield Telegraph * Anna Caig *
£9.49
Salt Publishing Dreamtime
Book Synopsis‘So, where is he then, your dad?’ The world may be on a precipice but Sol, fresh from Tucson-desert rehab, finally has an answer to the question that has dogged her since childhood. And not a moment too soon. With aviation grinding to a halt in the face of global climate meltdown, this is the last chance to connect with her absentee father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa. To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, a place where sea, sky and earth converge at the forefront of an encroaching environmental and geopolitical catastrophe; a place battered by the relentless tides of history, haunted by the ghosts of its past, where the real and the virtual, the dreamed and the lived, are ever harder to define.In Dreamtime Venetia Welby paints a terrifying and captivating vision of our near future and takes us on a vertiginous odyssey into the unknown.Trade ReviewFiction to look out for in 2021 A host of dazzling second novels in the offing … Venetia Welby’s exquisite and hallucinogenic Dreamtime is set in a near future in which we have lost the battle against climate change. -- Alex Preston * The Observer *Welby’s vision of our cobbled-together future—lives lost to the glamour of screens while civilisation corrodes—has an energy and charm of its own. Her descriptions of an earthquake-cracked Tokyo carry the noodley whiff and steamy press of Blade Runner’s neon-washed landscapes. And the hopelessly hybridised culture of Okinawa, where the stars and stripes jostles with local animist shrines, pulses with colour. It even left me with a hankering for “taco rice”, a dish as bastardised as its Tex Mex via Tokyo roots. -- Alex Diggins * Exacting Clam *Venetia Welby’s arresting blend of chaos, love, mystery, myths and the supernatural, animals both real and shapeshifting, and the consequences of abuse in the private and public spheres, illustrate how human relationships are complicated and tricky. The world conjured by Welby is weird and elusive, as is the relationship of humans with Nature. Her beautifully stylized writing has a lyrical strange quality to it. The future is envisioned as being one of increased disempowerment. * BookBlast *Venetia Welby’s new novel, Dreamtime, is set in 2035, a time of rising sea levels and extreme weather events. It follows Sol as she completes a stint in rehab in Arizona, grappling with the trauma of her upbringing in a cult and searching for her absent father. -- Jemima Skala * Literary Review *Dreamtime is an often deeply disturbing, haunting and nightmarish read, and yet is complete and realistic in an organic way. Welby doesn’t pretend she has any answers. The novel is, in essence, a presentation of harrowing truths and the confusion they cause. It’s not the first book to wrangle such themes against the backdrop of environmental catastrophe, and it won’t be the last. But it is probably the best you’ll read this year. * High Rise and Ink *This remarkable, disturbing work of literary fiction is like Heart of Darkness meets The Tempest. Revisiting the Animal Groom fairytale, it is set in the not-too-distant future, when humans are clinging onto existence by their fingernails thanks to environmental devastation. The human and environmental costs of violent, dominating masculinity are inescapable. At the same time, true love between a man and a woman is capable of transcending the bleakness. * Wild Women Writing Club *This uniquely multi-layered, multi-genre storyline, is wonderfully textured, brutally and frighteningly intense, deep and rich in atmosphere, ever evolving and written by an author who has complete confidence in the visual imagery of her words to lift the narrative and dialogue from the pages and make it come sickeningly to life. * Fiction Books *Welby’s writing style is original and uncompromising – as she proved in her debut, Mother of Darkness. Dreamtime is a step up but not away from this ability to conjure empathy for those whose behaviour is rebarbative. The sense of place – and how out of place incomers can be with their self-entitled behaviour – adds strength to a captivating tale tinged with regret. Man’s destructive behaviour continues despite the clear warnings of where it will lead. This is a disturbing journey exploring many varieties of abuse – of people and place – and the ripples triggered. A story laced with shadows and beauty that reminds the reader how much we look away when to see becomes challenging. An arresting window into a future that is worryingly believable. -- Jackie Law * neverimitate *This book is such a unique experience, it takes you to a place where you have to hand yourself over to the narrative, and trust that you will, more or less, return. It has a narcotic effect as it transports you to a near future, and the final ceremony that Dreamtime are putting addict, Sol, through before she is considered ‘cured’ and is released to the world beyond the dome, to the arid ,dry deserts of Arizona. * Rachel Read It *What a scintillating surprise this incredible book is, the cover is indeed mesmerising and its detail definitely sets the tone for its enthralling contents. When I read the details for this novel, what attracted me to it, was my own fascination of how other people, Venetia in this case, envision the future! Trust me, Venetia’s fictitious concepts for what’s instore for the world; are deliciously horrifying and if you thought the Covid-19 pandemic has been trying…then what might come next, will blow your mind, mine is still reeling from the possibilities. * The Fallen Librarian *
£10.80
Salt Publishing Licensed Premises
Book Synopsis‘Nobody believes what they see on TV, so they want to look for something else, an alternate reality, or a conspiracy theory, and it’s interesting to explore it, Twitter is fucking full of it, especially now. It’s no wonder people round here are into it, but you don’t have to read all that shit, just have some mushrooms and wander round Lidl off your tits.’In these fourteen northern tales, Campbell takes us from the edgelands of Manchester to the cloistered villages of The Peak District, Northumberland and Scotland, and illuminates the lives of outsiders, misfits, loners and malcontents with an eye for the darkly comic. A wild-eyed man disturbs the banter in a genial bookshop. A fraught woman seeks to flee a collapsing reservoir. A failed academic finds solace in a crime writer’s favourite pub. A transit van killer stalks a railway footpath. A poet accused of plagiarism finds his life falling apart.Trade ReviewIn Licensed Premises there is a greater willingness to take risks, to step outside the straitjacket of Carverian restrictions. There is even a stream-of-consciousness experiment in ‘Reeks’, after the style of Jack Kerouac, after the style of Marcel Proust! Yes, really. Although Campbell sees himself as a storyteller and not a social historian, these stories could stand as a record of our time as the work of Gaskell, Dickens, and Mayhew did to a previous century. If you want to understand our modern cities and modern work, let Neil Campbell be your guide. -- Richard Clegg * Bookmunch *
£9.49
Salt Publishing The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories
Book SynopsisHowell’s much-celebrated stories interweave elements of the commonplace with darkness, subterfuge and sheer weirdness, all realised with natural narrative flair. In this striking new collection, we see Howell explore a wide range of cultures, including Hawaii, Portugal and Japan, alongside these are period tales, and sinister and sexual encounters, all related with a cool eye for our desires and obsessions.Trade ReviewBrian Howell’s latest collection of short stories, The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories (Salt, 2022), is wonderfully weird. What can be done in a short story, which is much harder to sustain over the length of an entire novel, is to explore feelings and situations that are off-kilter, at odds with the norm. These are narratives that push the boundaries of acceptance and conjure feelings of uneasiness, sometimes even repulsion, but that also challenge views on how people choose, or are forced, to live. Bearing in mind these elements, I feel The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories, although not for everyone, is not only wonderfully weird, but also weirdly wonderful. -- Laura Besley * Everybody’s Reviewing *
£9.49
Salt Publishing Gods Country
Book SynopsisGuy Flood, returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother's funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.
£10.44
Salt Publishing The Peckham Experiment
Book SynopsisGuy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem. In 1968, JJ’s ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie’s development company have built. When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated. Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics. It’s a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice – opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken – that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand.Trade ReviewCharlie Jellicoe, 85, erudite, gay, leftist, former property developer, sits in his flat in Peckham’s famous modernist Pioneer Centre, penning a eulogy on the eve of his twin’s funeral. Throughout one drunken night, he rehashes a lifetime of love and war, of corruption and compromise, idealism and betrayal, with magnificent acid wit, because old age should burn and rage at close of day. -- Rose Shepherd * Saga Magazine *A new novel featuring Peckham’s famous Pioneer Health Centre – the striking modernist building on St Mary’s Road that was created to promote the wellbeing of the working-class familites and is now flat – will be published next month … The action unfolds through the fragmentary memories of a now 85-year-old Charlie, whose twin brother JJ has recently died. As he prepared for the funeral, he relives their history, family and politics. * The Peckham Peculiar *★★★★ For all its topical resonance – amid a national housing crisis and the long aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire – the novel’s fatalistic register and taut, controlled narrative voice, by turns doleful and sardonic, set it apart from the preachier political allegories that are currently in such oversupply. Ware’s narrator has kept the faith, but he is under no illusions: “the universe is not moral and history has no arc. Its trajectory is an irregular spiral, turning constantly in upon itself ... If there is an end, a destination beyond mere annihilation, it is lost to sight.” -- Houman Barekat * The Telegraph *London itself is a central character here, as seen through the eyes of now 80-something queer quantity surveyor Charlie. We join him on the night of his twin brother's funeral and as he tries to write a eulogy (while getting increasingly sloshed), Charlie recalls the city's journey from the idealism of the actual 1930s Peckham Experiment – which encouraged working-class families to actively participate in their own well-being – to institutional corruption; the power cuts of the three-day week, the rise of Enoch Powell and, above all, the devastating collapse of the tower block that his brother built … there are shades of the great Gordon Burn in Ware's portrait of period, place and class. -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *‘Housing is at the heart of everything’: the shadow of Grenfell looms over an engaging, deeply impressive novel about utopian aims in London’s building history. -- Keiran Goddard * The Guardian *Although the majority of the novel is told via reminiscence, its nominal present is the day of the 2017 election, which saw the Conservative party lose its majority and Corbyn’s Labour party deliver the biggest increase in vote share since the second world war. And setting the novel at that precise moment in history is what makes it one of the most moving books I have read in some time: not because of the party politics, but because of the horrific events that occurred in the days that followed. Less than a week after the polls closed, 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire. This is the image that haunts the pages of The Peckham Experiment, the logical and tragic result of shifting from multiple models of social provision to a single model that prioritises profit, no matter the ultimate cost. The novel leaves the reader in no doubt that we are living in the perpetual aftermath of what Charlie terms progressive collapse: “It’s what we call it when a structural failing spreads through a building, like dominoes knocking down their neighbours.” -- Keiran Goddard * The Guardian *The novel begins on the eve of JJ’s funeral, with Charlie struggling to write a eulogy for his 85-year-old brother. Confined to a mobility scooter (‘like Dennis Hopper on Medicare’) and drunk on brandy, Charlie is a seductively irreverent narrator. Witty, wise, queer and possessed of a fierce social conscience, he revisits their parallel lives in a fluid monologue that’s as Beckettian as it is Steptoe and Son. Ware is refreshingly sharp on twin psychology: ‘I never believed I’d bury him. I’m older. Surely it should fall to you to bury me… No one wants to be last. We should have gone together… A plane crash.’ -- Jude Cook * The Spectator *When the tale opens, eighty-five year old Charlie is trying to put together a eulogy for JJ whose funeral is the next day. The writing style captures the voice of an elderly man whose body may be failing him but who is not yet ready to join his dead brother. They may have been identical twins but were also individuals. In telling their story the reader is reminded that socialism in Britain has always been multifaceted. The interweaving of countrywide and family politics is masterfully done. -- Jackie Law * Neverimitate *Charlie’s narrative voice is dense and discursive, his recollections haphazard at times, but still sharp. It’s a voice that can weave together the personal, political and historical. As a result, the twins’ experiences reflect undercurrents that play out across broader society in the novel. It’s fascinating to read. -- David Hebblethwaite * David’s Book World *If you’d told me I would have been riveted by a novel about mid-twentieth century housing before I’d read it, I might have been sceptical but then I’m someone who can’t seem to get enough of the minutiae of Danish politics portrayed in ‘Borgen’. Although it’s not mentioned in his novel, Ware chose to set it just days before the Grenfell Tower disaster. Five years later, its grim aftermath is still grinding on. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. -- Susan Osborne * A Life in Books *
£10.44
Salt Publishing Cole the Magnificent
Book SynopsisThe orphan Cole wanders the world, seeking the fabled Underground City which he has promised his love Sigrid he will find. Somewhere else entirely, Niven sits in a palace garden taking lessons in astronomy and architecture, dreaming up ways to escape being married off to one of her father’s friends.Cole’s story is pieced together from folk songs and fragments as he travels ever onwards towards his destiny: a new life even stranger than the one before. Niven too will learn what it means to leave the garden of childhood. Their world is one of witchcraft and wishing, wisdom and regret, as they slowly learn how much it is possible to love, and suffer for the sake of love.Comic, grotesque, lyrical, and immensely readable, Tony Williams’s fantasy picaresque is a reader’s delight. A sweeping yarn through the darkest of ages, filled with rogues, lovers, murderers, swindlers, and saints.Trade ReviewCole the Magnificent is a picaresque, fantastical tale of the life (or lives) of a man, Cole, following his adventures as he progresses through a mythical pre-Norman Britain, from adolescence to old age, and beyond. It is episodic and poetic, by turns evoking Norse saga tradition and then putting post-modern quotation marks around it. Hard to encapsulate, it is sweeping, tricksy, violent, elegant, substantial, trifling, virtuoso, whimsical, colourful, deadpan, infuriating and nonsensical. It is, in its way, brilliant, but may not be for everyone. -- Bernard Hughes * The Arts Desk *
£11.69
Salt Publishing The Moon is Trending
Book SynopsisThis new short story collection from Clare Fisher explores of feelings of failure around gender, sexuality, and work, that arise in a success-obsessed capitalist culture. Dazzling, playful, and experimental, it veers between the real, the surreal and the absurd.Trade ReviewClare Fisher's short fictions go a long way. She writes with humour and insight and real skill, about our bodies and our selves, and the world we're in, and about the fragile net of thoughts that holds us. -- Keith RidgwayShort though its components are, it doesn’t do to read The Moon Is Trending through all the way through. You’d think it’d be easy to read twenty-seven very short stories in one go, but it didn’t play out like that. I read one, sometimes two—no more than three—in a row at a time. It works to be dipped into and out of. To be picked up and put it down. To be gone back and forth to. To be recommended. -- JL Bogenschneider * The London Magazine *Sharp, playful, often surreal and just as often soulful shards of contemporary and queer life and longing. -- Lucy Caldwell
£9.49
Salt Publishing The Way to Work
Book SynopsisHave you ever boarded your morning commute and wished you’d never arrive at your destination? That is what happens to the protagonist of The Way to Work. Having boarded what he assumes to be his usual 8:08 service, he soon discovers that all is not as it first seemed.Does this train stop at any station? Do the carriages ever come to an end? And where is the colleague he thought he saw, as he took his place in the quiet coach? Our narrator reflects on his job as salesman for a cat litter manufacturer as he wanders down-train in search of answers – yet the sliding doors that close behind him appear to be malfunctioning, and every person he meets seems to remember very little of their past.Seduction, destiny and salvation all come into play as this relentless novel unfolds, and we discover precisely where the 8:08 is heading and just who is in charge.
£10.44
Salt Publishing Our Island Story
Book SynopsisDenis Klamm, feckless scion of two former Leaders, returns to the Island for his father's funeral, only to find it sinking. Or the sea rising it depends what you believe. Either way, they're all going to drown unless the young, idealistic and newly-elected Leader, Jessica King, really is the saviour long foretold by Our Island Story.But Jessica is only Leader because Ari Spencer, the special advisor's special advisor, has made it so. She wants solutions; Ari offers schemes. She wants to solve the climate crisis, house the homeless and bring justice for the victims of police brutality in a decade-old incident that Ari, for reasons of his own, would rather nobody looked at too closely. Or at all.While Denis falls under Jessica's spell and sets out to make the sort of grand romantic gesture guaranteed to attract attention, Ari hatches a plot to pit conspiracy theory against myth, unleashing a maelstrom of populism, ambition, religion, treachery, lawlessness, old wounds and new battles
£10.44
Salt Publishing Birdeye
Book SynopsisBirdeye shows us what the hippy dream looks like fifty years on, when the secrets which were masked by free spirit and a determined nonconformism force their way to the surface.Liv Ferrars is 67 years old and has lived a full life. Her twin daughters, Mary and Rose, are grown, she has survived breast cancer and she has welcomed numerous wanderers to the Birdeye Colony she founded with friends Sonny and Mishti over forty years before. Birdeye, once a pilgrimage-worthy commune in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, is now well past its heyday but Liv still holds the weekly Sharing with Mishti and Sonny, and Rose, whose additional needs mean she remains dependent on her mother. Then one late winter's morning a stranger named Conor appears. That same night Sonny and Mishti make a devastating announcement, and when Mary flies in from London to persuade Liv and Rose to move to England, Liv resists what others see as Birdeye's inevitable collapse. Conor seems to offer a lifeline, but
£10.44
St Martin's Press Hotel Laguna
Book SynopsisIn 1942, Hazel Francis left Wichita, Kansas for California, determined to do her part for the war effort. At Douglas Aircraft, she became one of many Rosie the Riveters, helping construct bombers for the U. S. military. But now the war is over, men have returned to their factory jobs, and women like Hazel have been dismissed, expected to return home to become wives and mothers.Unwilling to be forced into a traditional woman's role in the Midwest, Hazel remains on the west coast, and finds herself in the bohemian town of Laguna Beach. Desperate for work, she accepts a job as an assistant to famous artist Hanson Radcliff. Beloved by the locals for his contributions to the art scene and respected by the critics, Radcliff lives under the shadow of a decades old scandal that haunts him.Working hard to stay on her cantankerous employer's good side, Hazel becomes a valued member of the community. She never expected to fall in love with the rhythms of life in Laguna, nor did
£13.49
Henry Holt & Company Inc Off the Books
Book SynopsisA captivating debut following a cross-country road trip that will make you believe in the goodness of people, Off the Books sheds light on the power in humanity during the most troubled of times.Recent Dartmouth dropout Mei, in search of a new direction in life, drives a limo to make ends meet. Her grandfather convinces her to allow her customers to pay under the table, and before she knows it, she is working as a routine chauffeur for sex workers. Mei does her best to mind her own business, but her knack for discretion soon leads her on a life changing trip from San Francisco to Syracuse with a new client.Handsome and reserved, Henry piques Mei's interest. Toting an enormous black suitcase with him everywhere he goes, he's more concerned with taking frequent breaks than making good time on the road. When Mei discovers Henry''s secret, she does away with her usual close-lipped demeanor and decides she has no choice but to confront him. What Henry reveal
£20.39
WW Norton & Co The Latinist
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Ingenious.... a superb literary suspense novel that calls to mind an earlier such debut, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.... Like the classics that inspire it, The Latinist is an inventive wedding of the elegant and the barbaric." -- Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post"Smart and fast-paced.... [A] sparkling debut.... A contemporary classic." -- Clea Simon - Boston Globe"Prins’s confident, engrossing debut novel.... contains more than enough twists to keep you turning the page until the very end." -- Chris Murphy - Vanity Fair"A devilishly clever and terrifically entertaining campus novel/philological whodunnit that also happens to be a brilliantly sly riff on Ovid’s Apollo & Daphne.... A remarkably polished and skillful first novel." -- Daniel Mendelsohn"It would have taken me a single night to read the book except that I kept pausing to pursue tantalizing nuggets of information, ranging from choliambic verse to amputation practices of yesteryear. [A] cleverly plotted adventure about an American student who falls prey to the schemes of her malevolent adviser—a tale of passion, suspense and archaeology. (That’s what I call a ‘triple threat’!)" -- Molly Young - New York Times"Oxford University graduate student Tessa Templeton trusts her dissertation adviser, Christopher Eccles—but should she? ... The Latinist, which twists around the Daphne and Apollo myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, culminates with a deeply satisfying blow to the treachery of academia." -- Jason DeRose - NPR, Best Books of 2022"An engrossing psychological thriller.... an absorbing drama about obsession, abuse of power and intimate violence." -- Sharmila Mukherjee - Minneapolis Star Tribune"Brilliant.... Delves deep to question the blurring line between love and obsession, between a yearning for truth and a desire of power." -- Jianan Qian - The Millions"Propulsive.... a campus novel turned psychological thriller.... The novel invites us to see Tessa as Daphne, manipulated by but ultimately escaping Eccles’s Apollo, yet it also asks us: what happens to her humanity along the way?" -- Ayelet Haimson Lushkov - Los Angeles Review of Books"This cerebral thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat.... Prins’ analysis of the toxic relationship between advisor and student is nuanced and thoughtful.... The Latinist succeeds as both literary fiction and thriller; it is every bit as suspenseful as it is intellectually intriguing, with many of the features of A.S. Byatt’s Possession." -- Hannah Joyner - Washington Independent Review of Books"Within the first few pages of this book, I knew I was in the hands of a masterful storyteller. The Latinist is imaginative, propulsive, and wildly intelligent. What a joy to encounter a thrilling and singular new voice in fiction." -- Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest and Good Company"A novel about love and scholarship, ego and obsession, coercion and consent—a brilliant, marvelously infuriating puzzle of a book that combines the globe-trotting exploits of The Da Vinci Code with the smarts and literary gifts of A. S. Byatt. A terrific debut!" -- Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement"Brainy and deftly plotted, The Latinist enchants with its deft inversions of power, its witty poetic inventions, and its passion for languages old and new. A lovely debut." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and The Air We Breathe"Mark Prins weaves together an extremely contemporary plot—an American academic caught up in the machinations of her advisor at Oxford—with a much older plot—the discovery of a second-century Roman poet. The two thrillingly intertwine and the result is a wonderfully suspenseful novel. The Latinist is a brilliant debut." -- Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field" The Latinist is a whip-smart tale of obsession that teeters on the knife-edge of suspense and literary fiction; Mark Prins is a worthy successor to Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, and Ian McEwan." -- Alexandra Andrews, author of Who Is Maud Dixon?"With its ambitious young scholar, an ancient tomb, and a scheming advisor, The Latinist is a twisty and memorable new addition to the campus-novel genre. Mark Prins propels you through his tale of breakthroughs and retribution while delivering a sharp commentary on power dynamics in academia. A cunning and insightful read—I couldn’t put it down." -- Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives and Lesson in Red"Darkly disturbing and luminously told.… Every twist is delicious and every turn breathtaking as Mark Prins’s devilish debut revels in a scholarly world of cunning, ruthlessness, and dangerous obsession. Funny, erudite, and utterly absorbing, this is a merciless tale to be relished like a guilty pleasure." -- Christopher J. Yates, author of Black Chalk and Grist Mill Road"Prins’s riveting tale of love, power, and possession matches deep characterization with an intriguing plot involving ancient texts, necropolises, and archaeological sites. Fans of academic thrillers will dig this." -- Publishers Weekly
£12.34
Hodder & Stoughton The French Postmistress
Book SynopsisIn yet another tale with more ups and downs than a Pyrenean horizon, things are about to get grizzly.Trade ReviewPraise for THE PARISIAN'S RETURN: 'A humorous insight into French living' * Tatler Ireland *Praise for L'AUBERGE: 'Entertaining drama in small-town France.' Best new paperbacks * Woman and Home *Following in the footsteps of "Chocolat", this is an ideal holiday read. * www.beachtomato.com *
£9.49
Amazon Publishing The Rose Girls
Book SynopsisThirty-year-old Celeste Hamilton's life is at a crossroads: she has just left a disastrous marriage, and her estranged mother has recently died, leaving the family's rose business in jeopardy. Reluctantly, Celeste returns to the family home, a moated manor house in Suffolk, to help her two younger sisters sort out the estate and revive the business.Having endured the fallout from her mother's Narcissistic Personality Disorder when she was younger, Celeste is filled with self-doubt and crippling insecurities. But she must find the strength and courage to take charge and make some tough decisions to keep the old house from falling down around them.The Rose Girls is an uplifting, tender and romantic story of courage, perseverance and the healing power of family.
£8.54
Kensington Publishing Two Parts Sugar One Part Murder
Book Synopsis“Snappy dialogue, a well-drawn supporting cast and an irresistible canine companion all add delicious flavor. Gulp this book down or savor it, but consuming it will guarantee a sustained sugar high.” –The New York Times Book Review In a brand-new culinary cozy series with a fresh edge and a delightful small-town setting, the acclaimed author introduces Maddy Montgomery, a social media expert who’s #StartingOver in small town Michigan after inheriting her great-aunt’s bakery…and a 200-pound English Mastiff named Baby.A CrimeReads Most Anticipated Book Of 2022When Maddy Montgomery’s groom is a no-show to their livestream wedding, it’s a disaster that no amount of filtering can fix. But a surprise inheritance offers a chance to regroup and rebrand—as long as Maddy is willing to live in her late, great-aunt Octavia’s house in New Bison, Michigan, for a year, running her bakery and cari
£14.39
Simon & Schuster The Last Chairlift
Book SynopsisJohn Irving’s fifteenth novel is “powerfully cinematic” (The Washington Post) and “eminently readable” (The Boston Globe). The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics.In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them,
£22.49
Hodder & Stoughton The Woman in the Blue Cloak
Book SynopsisFrom the author of Thirteen Hours - A Sunday Times '100 best crime novels and thrillers since 1945' pickThe Woman in the Blue Cloak is a brilliant novella which will thrill and entertain fans of Deon Meyer's much-loved detective Benny Griessel.Benny Griessel is a cop on a mission: he plans to ask Alexa Bernard to marry him. That means he needs to buy an engagement ring - and that means he needs a loan.So Benny has a lot on his mind when he is called to a top-priority murder case. A woman's body is discovered, naked and washed in bleach, draped on a wall beside a picturesque road above Cape Town. The identity of the victim is a mystery, as is the reason for her killing.Gradually, Benny and his colleague Vaughn Cupido begin to work out the roots of the story, which reach as far away as England and Holland... and as far back as the seventeenth century.Trade ReviewPraise for Deon Meyer's Benny Griessel series * - *One of the best crime writers on the planet * Daily Mail *Crime fiction with real texture and intelligence. * Independent *The narrative is well-plotted, and the novel brings to life the rich and volatile diversity of contemporary South Africa. There's nothing flashy here, just a good story, very well told. Would there were more like it. * Spectator *Tells a cracking story and captures the criminal kaleidoscope of a nation. * Times Literary Supplement *Deon Meyer is not just South Africa's greatest crime writer, he's up there with the best in the world * The Times *
£12.34
Amazon Publishing The Murmur of Bees
Book SynopsisFrom a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel—her first to be translated into English—about a mysterious child with the power to change a family’s history in a country on the verge of revolution. From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats—both human and those of nature—Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined. Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.Trade Review“The book’s publication in the United States by Amazon Crossing announces a writer whose absorbing yet accessible prose and gift for sprinkling the mystical into a deeply human narrative is sure to draw comparisons to Latin American greats, such as Isabel Allende.” —The Washington Post “Sofía Segovia is already a famed author in Mexico, and with The Murmur of Bees she’s poised to become an international favorite too.” —POPSUGAR “A unique and deftly penned novel by an author with a genuine flair for the kind of narrative storytelling that holds the readers rapt attention from beginning to end, The Murmur of Bees is unreservedly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review “Acclaimed Mexican author Segovia’s first work translated into English is a gorgeous novel of family, friendship, land, and murderous envy, a tale reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s early tales…With the help of a gifted translator, Segovia skillfully envelops readers, fully engaging their senses and imagination in this wonderful novel.” —Booklist “The Murmur of Bees is unpredictable and heart-rending, a novel both grand in scope, capturing the fate of a country in flux, and deeply personal, with its intimate portrait of a family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.” —Brooklyn Digest “Ms. Segovia combines a subtly magical atmosphere and unique, yet believable characters with kinetic narration to craft a story with broad appeal.” —San Francisco Book Review “This is an incredible book by a great writer. I encourage everyone to run to obtain a copy. I await other books by this author.” —Historical Novel Society “A magical-realism romp from Mexico, Sofía Segovia’s The Murmur of Bees—her first novel translated into English—offers a dizzying swirl of history, family lore, tragedy, redemption, and, of course, magic.” —Washington Independent Review of Books “The Murmur of Bees by Mexican writer Sofía Segovia is the rare novel in historical fiction, realistically framed within historical events—the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish flu—and, at the same time, filled with preternatural circumstances and fantastic characters that have earned Segovia comparisons with magical realism writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. It is universal at heart but also deeply imbedded in its setting.” —Historical Novel Society
£16.99
Arsenal Pulp Press Little Fish
Book SynopsisLambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett's latest novel explores a transgender woman's experiences as she discovers her grandfather may have been transgender himself, and what that might mean for her.
£17.09
Arsenal Pulp Press Shut Up You're Pretty
Book SynopsisA high-wire collection of darkly humorous stories about a young woman floating in and out of her skin.
£14.39
