Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail is a Brighton-based writer, illustrator and creative producer. Original storytelling has always been at the heart of Abigail's career and she has spent a decade leading social media campaigns for some of the biggest TV &amp; entertainment clients in the world. Abigail also used to perform stand-up comedy and won several tiny trophies for her onstage humour; which involved life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs and rambling stories about her family.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

Abilio Estévez

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the award-winning Wyndham &amp; Banerjee series of crime novels set in 1920s India and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year 2025 Hunted. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and won various awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. 
 
 
He also co-hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast which takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons. 
 
 
Website: abirmukherjee.com Twitter, Threads &amp; Instagram: @radiomukhers Facebook: AuthorAbir

Abir Mukherjee

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James Sheard

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
PBS Autumn Recommendation 
 
The poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’ 
 
These are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing. 
 
James Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.

The Abandoned Settlements

Sharon Olds

‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’ 
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year 
 
Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

Odes

Alice Oswald

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize 
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize 
 
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 
 
Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. 
 
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. 
 
Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours – goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time – are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.

Falling Awake

J. O. Morgan

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference. 
 
This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions? 
 
Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.

Interference Pattern

Neil Rollinson

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

Talking Dead

Andrew McMillan

*Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award* 
 
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. 
 
We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory. 
 
Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart. 
 
Winner of the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Physical

Mark Doty

Mark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that – as Philip Levine says – ‘looks away from nothing’. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. ‘Pure appetite,’ he writes ironically early in the collection, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ And the following poem answers: 
 
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire 
at work all night, secretive: in the morning 
 
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, 
 
like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess 
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice? 
 
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Deep Lane

Sean Borodale

Human Work was written while cooking. It is the narrative of a voice in domesticity, at the alchemical heart of home – the hearth, or Hestia – where the kitchen is a stage for acts of eating and uttering; for the ebb and flow to the human mouth. The poems were written ‘live’ among pots and pans, beside chopping boards, between plates, bowls, knives, forks, spoons, and servings. Their time is the hybrid time of writing and cooking – where the dimensions of two activities hinge together. The poems occupy a shared space; the work is one work. They live together and cross-talk, like figures in a room, invoking an old story, perhaps one of our very first: how we make food to eat and share, how we draw and transform others’ bodies into being our own flesh and life. Implicit in ingredients are the stories of matter itself: without food there can be no other stories. 
 
Like the poems of Bee Journal these poems started life in notebooks, in situ. Their pages seem marked with the very process of their making: jam, grease, wine stains, crumbs of flour and spice, flecks of meat, fish, fruit, vegetable. Like Bee Journal, this is a book about communal purpose, a record of risk and response – a poetry of the moment, both immemorial and thrillingly modern.

Human Work

A Poet's Cookbook

Michael Longley

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize 
 
 
In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

The Stairwell

Robert Crawford

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

Testament

Fiona Benson

Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 
Winner of the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 
Shortlisted for the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection 
 
In this remarkable, intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological fast-forward from submerged Devonian forests and a Paleolithic cave-bear skull to the site of decommissioned submarines at HMNB Devonport, where the sea is ‘still a torpedo-path, / an Armageddon road’. She explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing – from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen – and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing. 
 
A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focussed exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity. In these poems, as in all the poems in this impressive debut, we feel keenly the sense of life lived at the edge of threat – catastrophe, even – but also on the cusp of beauty and happiness. Other poems about the bewildering loss of miscarriage are hard to read and impossible to forget, moving with grace and authority through great grief to arrive at a hard-won destination of selfless, unqualified love. 
 
‘I remember again / the corridor / of the labour ward // and that woman / sitting weeping / with her man // having given birth / to a death – / small grey face, // no breath, / something you cannot help / but love – // habibi, akushla, /I go home alone / but carry you, // courie you, / little slipped thing, / to the ends of the earth.’

Bright Travellers

John Burnside

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 
 
‘There are lines in All One Breath for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.’ - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the Year 
 
In this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since Black Cat Bone – John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are ‘all one breath’ and – with that breath – how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures – human and non-human – cause too much damage and hurt, that ‘we’ve been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are’, these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. 
 
He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies. 
 
One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment – when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between – and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down ‘to tell the lives of others’.

All One Breath

Jean Sprackland

In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’. 
 
This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. 
 
Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.

Sleeping Keys

Anne Carson

In a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called ‘G’, into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover ‘Sad’ (short for Sad But Great), a war veteran, and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the sombre house where G’s mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful picaresque verse invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.

Red Doc>

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize 
 
Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. 
 
Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'. 
 
Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

Stag's Leap

James Lasdun

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. 
 
At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. 
 
Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. 
 
Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

Water Sessions

Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle expertly lays the groundwork for a cultural road map of contemporary Jerusalem, utilizing the classic stranger-in-a-strange-land point of view that made his other books, Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Burma Chronicles, required reading for understanding what daily life is like in cities few are able to travel to. In Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Delisle explores the complexities of a city that represents so much to so many. He eloquently examines the impact of the conflict on the lives of people on both sides of the wall while drolly recounting the quotidian: checkpoints, traffic jams, and holidays. 
 
When observing the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations that call Jerusalem home, Delisle's drawn line is both sensitive and fair, assuming nothing and drawing everything. Jerusalem showcases once more Delisle's mastery of the travelogue.

Jerusalem

Chronicles from the Holy City

Joe Sacco

In late 1995 and early 1996, cartoonist/reporter Joe Sacco travelled four times to Gorazde, a UN-designated safe area during the Bosnian War, which had teetered on the brink of obliteration for three and a half years. 
 
Still surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the mainly Muslim people of Gorazde had endured heavy attacks and severe privation to hang on to their town while the rest of Eastern Bosnia was brutally 'cleansed' of its non-Serb population. But as much as Safe Area Gorazde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived. 
 
Since it was first published in 2000, Safe Area Gorazde has been recognized as one of the absolute classics of graphic non-fiction. We are delighted to publish it in the UK for the first time, to stand beside Joe Sacco's other books on the Cape list - Palestine, The Fixer and Notes from a Defeatist.

Safe Area Gorazde

The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95

Peter Redgrove

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

The Harper

Vicki Feaver

Split between dark and light, this book records the dichotomy of human experience with unflinching force and clarity. It deals with break-up, depression, illness and death. But it also reveals an intense involvement with nature and a capacity for healing and love. There are intimate personal poems reflecting on relationships with people and creatures; poems which enter the lives of real and imaginary characters, Keats and Medea and Blodeuwedd, for example; and also poems which engage with paintings and political events. 
 
Set in a territory which connects child with adult, myth with reality, the personal with the universal, the book shows a poet fully open to the richness and possibilities of the world but also aware of its violence and pain, not as a remote observer but as someone who is a part of it.

The Book of Blood

Matthew Sweeney

In this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. 
 
Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. 
 
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Sanctuary

A powerful graphic novel, capturing the heart of day-to-day life in occupied Palestine. 
 
In late 1991 and early 1992, at the time of the first Intifada, Joe Sacco spent two months with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, travelling and taking notes. 
 
Upon returning to the United States he started writing and drawing Palestine, which combines the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighty situation. He captures the heart of the Palestinian experience in image after unforgettable image, with great insight and remarkable humour. 
 
The nine-issue comics series won a l996 American Book Award. It is now published for the first time in one volume, befitting its status as one of the great classics of graphic non-fiction. 
 
&lsquo;The bar is set extremely high when it comes to graphic books and the Middle East: one thinks of Joe Sacco's Palestine' Guy Delise 
 
&lsquo;Palestine is utterly compelling, and as affecting as the work of any war photographer or poet&rsquo; Varsity

Palestine

Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. 
 
This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.

Selected Poems

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen's legacy is that of one of the most literate, daring, and affecting poet-songwriters in the world. Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work - including the legendary songs 'Suzanne', 'Joan of Arc' and 'The Chelsea Hotel', and elections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. 
 
Stranger Music brings together Cohen's song lyrics and a generous selection of his poetry and is a celebration of the legendary musician's extraordinary gift for language that speaks with rare clarity, passion and timelessness. 
 
'A massive record of the poet's imaginative journey, through beauty, through horror, through the extremes of love and despair, from the deepest abyss of self-abnegation to the rare and necessary moments of ecstasy. The language ranges from the exquisitely beautiful to the darkly obscene, from the romantically inspired to the ironically banal... A poetic record like no other' Toronto Star

Stranger Music

Selected Poems and Songs

The definitive selection of John Burnside's extraordinary and vibrant poems, taken from across decades but always stirring, curious, alert to the natural world and the people in it 
 
'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN 
 
Over thirty-five years and seventeen collections, John Burnside built a body of poetry that was consistently luminous, original and profound, always in thrall to the glamourie – a magical, fleeting enchantment – always in search of settlement, harmony and grace. 
 
His work is both intimately personal and universal, often moving through stages of vulnerability, turbulence, terror, and desire, to artistic positions that are sensitive and highly alert. He risked much for his art and its integrity, in order to arrive at a new and unique understanding of beauty and truth – and to offer a fresh angle from which to view the world, through nature, myth, and magic. For him, every poem was an alchemical transformation, a metamorphosis, an epiphany. 
 
'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched' Andrew O'Hagan 
 
'A master of language' Hilary Mantel 
 
'Burnside's sharp, suturing language allows us to know the world as it is: ragged and broken, yet full of impossibly fragile beauty' Rebecca Tamás

Driftwork

Charlotte Higgins

Ukrainian Lessons

Art in a Time of War

A book-length sequence of poems about place, time, illness and recovery 
 
Each of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present. 
 
Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath. 
 
In company with Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Pauline Stainer, Goyle, Chert, Mire employs a tough lyricism and taut line to scrutinise the natural world through historical and personal lenses. Alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still, these poems are a deep examination of landscape, body and mind. 
 
'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' Observer 
 
‘Accessible but worth close reading, she is among the best of her generation’ Herald

Goyle, Chert, Mire

Helen Longstreth

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. 
 
Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end. 
 
In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

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