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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Michael Ondaatje

From independence movements in Sri Lanka to train stations in contemporary Ontario, an intimate and witty selection of Michael Ondaatje’s most widely loved poems taken across fifty years 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric family, to his life in rural southern Ontario with its beloved rivers, celebrations of treasured friends, the close ties of children. 
 
Ondaatje is one of the great poets of love, and here we follow him through the exhilarations of youth into that ‘storm of music’, the passionate, sensuous swerves of longing and desire, until we reach the calm of that moment when ‘only a cloud’s reflection holding you up / You swim into late afternoon’. 
 
The Distance of a Shout offers us a glimpse into the interwoven life and art of one of our most cherished poets and novelists – a reminder itself of the power of great poetry to shine a light on living. 
 
'Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry' TERRANCE HAYES

The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems

Michael Symmons Roberts

An inviting and poignant new collection exploring our increasingly turbulent relationship with nature, from award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts 
 
'I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry... His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world' Jeanette Winterson 
 
'An outstanding writer' Sunday Times 
 
Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss. 
 
In Roberts’ previous work, his poems are attentive to glimpses of grace and presence, but always embodied and grounded. In this new book, that attention is sharper and more urgent than ever, at a time when the essential spiritual relationship between humanity and other forms of life is broken or lost. In a line from his collection Drysalter – ‘there is no way to the soul but through the body’ – he sets out the bearings for these new poems as attempts to tap into what D.H. Lawrence called ‘heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity.’ 
 
Some encounters in Dog Star are head-on, face-to-face, some are more slant, distant, missed connections. There’s an elegiac sequence for the poet’s mother with each step measured in animals, an extended riff on the world as an aquarium and our lives seen through water – creatures dead and living, met in the flesh or mediated via film or stories. This is a profound, remarkable book by one of our major poets.

Dog Star

Elizabeth McCracken

Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal guide for writers old and new 
 
‘A cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business’ Yiyun Li 
 
Write every day 
Show, don’t tell 
Write what you know 
Kill Your Darlings 
 
These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. 
 
McCracken has been writing for most of her life. For over thirty-five years, she has also taught creative writing to generations of students, including at Iowa, guiding many writers towards their own answers to the question of how to write fiction. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. 
 
A book about the life of an artist and a guide to fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource and will lead all writers, at any stage of their career, back to the page. 
 
'Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers' Garth Greenwell 
 
'An irreverent, thought-provoking and ultimately inspiring book about making art' Rumaan Alam 
 
'A world class writer and a world class writing teacher' Paul Harding 
 
'I would encourage every writer to read it' Rebecca Ivory

A Long Game

How to Write Fiction

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

Anne Enright

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life 
 
'Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer' THE TIMES 
 
'A joy to read' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices. 
 
'One of the best essayists alive' MEGAN NOLAN, OBSERVER 
 
'Confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels' INDEPENDENT 
 
'A glorious antidote to the mad, sad world' EIMEAR MCBRIDE 
 
'So alert, so attuned, so alive' LUCY CALDWELL

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Rory Stewart

From the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest is Politics 
 
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. 
 
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an urgent and inspiring portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria. 
 
These are stories of beauty and ingenuity, which also show us what a better politics might look like.

Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Kevin Young

A new poetry collection about loss, legacy and African American history, from the poetry editor of the New Yorker 
 
'One of the most important poets of his generation' Washington Post 
 
Kevin Young's new poetry collection, written over sixteen years, tells stories of community, nationhood and resistance, inspired in part by other lives. He starts in the bayous of Louisiana, and speaks from the voices of Millie and Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American 'Carolina Twins' - born into enslavement who later toured the world as free women. 
 
Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: 'It's like a language, / loss -', he writes, 'learnt only / by living - there - '. Evoking the history of poetry, Young's new collection is defiant and playful, elegant and devastating - his voice shaping sorrow with music, humour and wit. 
 
'Keeping up with him is like trying to keep up with Bob Dylan or Prince in their primes' New York Times

Night Watch

John Burnside

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets 
 
'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
John Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages. 
 
Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability – its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed – and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany – a sudden, spiritual manifestation. 
 
There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a ‘dwelling place’ – a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace. 
 
'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
‘A titan of literature' KATHLEEN JAMIE

The Empire of Forgetting

Michael Longley

A collection of Michael Longley's greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years as one of the Belfast triumverate, alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon 
 
'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS 
 
'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEY 
 
The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet. 
 
It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty. 
 
'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS 
 
'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement

Ash Keys

New Selected Poems

Robert Crawford

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

Old World

Fiona Benson

The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet 
 
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE 
 
In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft. 
 
Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution. 
 
In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic. 
 
‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison 
 
‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson 
 
A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ Guardian

Midden Witch

Alex Dimitrov

'Ecstasy stands out for its brutal examination of the transience of Eros ... Campy and fun' Guardian 
 
In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. 
 
He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity – even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. 
 
In ‘Today I Love Being Alive’, we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring ‘I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather’; in ‘Poppers’, he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, ‘thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life’, and issuing a warning to himself and us: ‘Poetry / is not a self-help book.’ 
 
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy. 
 
'A rollicking paean to pleasure, an ode to realness and resilience ... Raw and honest and deeply personal' New York Times 
 
'Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god he's here' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 
 
*A most anticipated queer book for Spring 2025 in Electric Literature*

Ecstasy

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

Amelia Loulli

One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now. 
 
*Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025* 
 
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest' ANDREW MCMILLAN 
 
'Original, essential... An unforgettable collection' FIONA BENSON 
 
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world. 
 
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.

Slip

A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction 
 
**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023** 
 
'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
In this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins. 
 
Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness. 
 
Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation. 
 
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*

Ruin, Blossom

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

A Year of Last Things

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD** 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* 
 
This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism 
 
'A beautiful, necessary book' 
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic 
 
'Every poem is a masterpiece' 
OLIA HERCULES, author of Mamushka 
 
With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context. 
 
Central to this book is ‘a timeline of hunger’, a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian) – Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 – ‘brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past’ – and closes in Donetsk in 1929: ‘we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated.’ Through the poet’s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their ‘bones Holodomor / lives on’. 
 
Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression – about staying alive while always hungry.

Food for the Dead

Anne Carson

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years 
 
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER FOR POETRY 
 
'Effortlessly readable and – a word critics don’t often use about her – fun' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'I'm a big fan... She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism' TEJU COLE 
 
As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, drawn and annotated by the author. Several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like the New Yorker and the Paris Review. 
 
Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: 
 
Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word "idea", the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them "wrong".

Wrong Norma

Seán Hewitt

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

Rapture's Road

From the author of All Down Darkness Wide

Leontia Flynn

A collection about motherhood at a time of continuous crisis - from one of Ireland's most important poets 
 
'Everyone should be reading her' 
OBSERVER 
 
'One of the most accomplished poets of her generation' 
GUARDIAN 
 
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world. 
 
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all that: to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song. 
 
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.

Taking Liberties

Ocean Vuong

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 
 
'One of the most important poets of his generation' 
ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical 
 
'Powerful' 
DUA LIPA 
 
'Redefines our idea of what an elegy can do it, what it is for' 
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic 
 
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems contend with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit. 
 
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time is a Mother is a return and a forging-forth all at once.

Time is a Mother

From the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Patrick McGuinness

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves 
 
'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd' 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall. 
 
The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed: 
 
It's the anniversary of my mother's death, 
and it's my mother's birthday - 
the day she short-circuited the tenses, 
made the current flow both ways. 
 
A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

Blood Feather

Sharon Olds

Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life 
 
***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST*** 
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen' 
OBSERVER 
 
'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it. 
 
Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'

Balladz

Julian Aguon

'A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love - of the land, the ocean, the elders and the ancestors - warms the heart and moves the spirit.' - Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple 
 
Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice-for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. 
 
Aguon beautifully weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Bearing witness and reckoning with the challenges of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness. 
 
A powerful and bold new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific who are fighting to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites and obtain justice for generations of harm. 
 
In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy and triumph, and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.

No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies

With an introduction by Arundhati Roy

**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE ** 
 
 
'One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.' Sebastian Barry 
 
Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

The Slain Birds

Mark Pajak

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE** 
 
'Fresh, urgent, alive... genius' PATIENCE AGBABI 
 
This assured and arresting first collection moves deftly and with purpose into private, hidden places - a locked shed, the dark of a battery farm, a murky riverbed, a late-night bar - to show, unflinchingly and in cinematic detail, what we might otherwise choose not to see. Sight is both a gift and curse, of course: given or taken away in poems of windows and curtains, torches and blindfolds, and yet here - following in the tradition of Oswald and Heaney - each image is freshly minted through a cool, objective eye. 
 
Every poem seeks to inhabit those seemingly small but pivotal moments which have monumental, sometimes mortal, consequences. For Pajak, time is fluid: a blink can be 'slow as an eclipse', our lifetimes are fleeting, our deaths often lingering and seldom peaceful or painless. 
 
Vivid and visceral, steadily examining violence, sexual encounters, childhood and ageing (a dying grandmother's 'slow pink eyelids, those quick teaspoon breaths'), cars and cities, and Nature - full of wonder and threat - Slide is always asking pertinent questions: illuminating brutality, frailty and tenderness, the responsibility of those who witness - whether voyeur, bystander or reader. This is a charged, beautifully observed and thrilling debut.

Slide

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 
 
The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter Mother'. 
 
The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.' 
 
Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.

Ephemeron

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021** 
 
A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, 'one of the poetry stars of his generation' (Los Angeles Times). 
 
'We sleep long, / if not sound,' Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, 'Till the end / we sing / into the wind.' In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South - one poem, 'Kith', exploring that strange bedfellow of 'kin' - the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. 'Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead.' 
 
Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering, precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them - of us - poetry can save.

Stones

'Fans of Anne Carson, rejoice!... Carson's depth of knowledge about Greek mythology coupled with her poetic sensibility and illustrations is sure to breathe new life into this oft-told story.' Lit Hub 
 
H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous "Labours of Herakles") to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome. 
 
"I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape," said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

H of H Playbook

Lucid, lyrical, and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness. 
 
Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. 
 
Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 
 
‘I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 
 
** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**

Learning to Sleep

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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