• 0 Items - £0.00
    • No products in the cart.

Literature

The Glovemaker

£6.99

London, 1649. Oliver Cromwell is running the country, and a law targeting unmarried mothers threatens the life of glovemaker Rachel Lockyer. This is her story.

 

‘This is historical fiction at its best – it is absolutely steeped in atmosphere, and so vividly recreates the interregnum era that I felt as though I’d been transported there. Stacia’s prose has a beautiful originality; and her characters come alive with authenticity and humanity. They are loveable and infuriating by turns, but the reader always believes in them, and invests hopes and fears with them. The story kept me gripped from the very first page; by turns desperately sad, funny and heart warming. I have genuinely enjoyed this book far more than anything else I have read for several months. I loved it!’ Katherine Webb, author of The Legacy and The Unseen

The Hail Mary Pass

£7.95

The Hail Mary pass is an American football term. It is used when a ball is thrown blind in the vague hope a receiver will make the catch and deliver a last minute victory.

 

‘Fiona Curran is a bright and fiesty northern voice. She treads the landscape of the urban and the domestic, from the smokey fug of the betting shop to the lavendar scent of the bathroom. I like Fiona’s poems because she writes about real people who truly exist and whose lives and wine-fuelled loves I can believe in. I just love this. “The Hail Mary Pass,” is spunky, sexy and brash. This is a belter of a debut and I very very much look forward to the next verse.’ – Wilton Carhoot; Editor of The Slab.

The Handsworth Times

£8.99

Mukesh Agarwal sits alone in the Black Eagle pub unaware that a riot is brewing or that Billy, his youngest son, is still out on his bike…. A mile away in the family home in Church Street, Anila, the youngest of the three Agarwal girls, is reading Smash Hits and listening to Radio One as she sprawls across the bottom bunk unaware of the tragic loss that is about to hit the family…. It is 1981, factories are closing, unemployment is high, the NF are marching and the neglected inner cities are ablaze as riots breakout across Thatcher’s fractured Britain. The Agarwals are facing their own personal nightmare but their pain is eased by family, friendships and a community that refuses to disappear. THE HANDSWORTH TIMES is abook about loss, friendship and working together because there is such a thing as society.

The Harvest of Chronos

£10.99

An epic, homourous and quite unique historical novel which looks at Central Europe in the 16th century – a territory plagued by ceaseless battles for supremacy between the Protestant political elite and the ruling Catholic Habsburg Monarchy, as well as the ongoing battle between the sexes. In Kumerdej’s wonderful saga, history and fiction intertwine in wavelike fashion, producing a colourful portrait of the Renaissance; permeated by humanist attempts to resurrect antiquity through art, new scientific findings, and spirited philosophical and theological debates.

The Hat-Stand Union

£9.95

Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird’s protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird’s characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.

The Hill

£9.99

Angela France’s The Hill is a remarkable sequence of poems that leads us up the winding footpaths of Leckhampton Hill near Cheltenham. Under our feet are fossils and flora, bones and the relics of quarrying. France is masterful in capturing the sense of place and weaving the entrancing voices of the hill, its walkers and inhabitants, into the fabric of these formally adventurous poems that range from prose to ‘anglish’, richly worded and delighting in their shapes and sounds. Here, we encounter ghosts, foxes and ancient kings. We meet the protestors who, years before the Kinder Scout Trespassers, were standing up for their rambling rights and took the law into their own hands in 1902 when a landowner tried to enclose the hill they had walked for generations. And though history is never far from the surface, The Hill raises questions that are just as important today; who has the right to roam, whose land is it, anyway?

The Historians

£10.99

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020

 

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020

 

A Guardian Book of the Year 2020

 

A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020

 

An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020

 

A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century.

 

Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her ‘edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history’ ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.

 

Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother’s parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: ‘Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / … Their hands are full of words.’ Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: ‘We will not leave you behind’, a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.

The Howl of the Wolf

£9.99

A man does battle with a wolf, two sworn brothers lock horns – literally – as they drink and brag the night away, and an old man turns to his flame-bellied stove for comfort when facing a bitter winter alone.

 

These are just some of the fascinating folk who inhabit the magical stories of Hong Ke. Set in Xinjiang, the gateway between China and Middle Asia, The Howl of the Wolf paints a colourful picture of frontier life in all its earthy glory.

The Iliad

£16.99

A stunning Penguin clothbound edition of Homer’s great epic, in E. V. Rieu’s classic translation.

The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization – an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. The story centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus’ killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer’s theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background..

Seven Greek cities claim the honour of being the birthplace of Homer (c. 8th-7th century BC), the poet to whom the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey are attributed. The Iliad is the oldest surviving work of Western literature, but the identity – or even the existence – of Homer himself is a complete mystery, with no reliable biographical information having survived.

E. V. Rieu initiated Penguin Classics with Allen Lane and his famous translation of theOdyssey was the first book published in the series in 1947. The Iliad followed in 1950.

The Island of Missing Trees: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022

£9.99

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2022
A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2021

A rich, magical novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World – now a top ten Sunday Times bestseller

It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.

In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.

Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence. The only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a Ficus Carica growing in the back garden of their home.

The Island of Missing Trees is a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature, and, finally, renewal.

‘This book moved me to tears . . . in the best way. Powerful and poignant’ Reese Witherspoon

‘A brilliant novel — one that rings with Shafak’s characteristic compassion’ Robert Macfarlane

‘A wonderfully transporting and magical novel’ William Boyd

‘This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime’ Polly Samson

The Kerosene Singing

£9.99

Alistair Noon’s new collection of poems, The Kerosene Singing, roams the borders and places on the edge of many things, whether that’s on the edge of nations and continents, of history or of the realms of possibility. A dynamic lyric energy enlivens everything it comes into contact with in these poems; where history, landscape and language loom large, Noon’s attentive rhythms and wit bring out the most subtle detail. These quicksilver poems invite the reader outand beyond, into new uncertain territories, subject to change without further notice.

The Last Hours

£20.00

June, 1348: the Black Death enters England through the port of Melcombe in the county of Dorsetshire. Unprepared for the virulence of the disease, and the speed with which it spreads, the people of the county start to die in their thousands.

 

In the estate of Develish, Lady Anne takes control of her people’s future – including the lives of two hundred bonded serfs. Strong, compassionate and resourceful, Lady Anne chooses a bastard slave, Thaddeus Thurkell, to act as her steward. Together, they decide to quarantine Develish by bringing the serfs inside the walls. With this sudden overturning of the accepted social order, where serfs exist only to serve their lords, conflicts soon arise. Ignorant of what is happening in the world outside, they wrestle with themselves, with God and with the terrible uncertainty of their futures.

 

Lady Anne’s people fear starvation but they fear the pestilence more. Who amongst them has the courage to leave the security of the walls?

 

And how safe is anyone in Develish when a dreadful event threatens the uneasy status quo..?

The Leopard’s Reward

£9.00

Why did Joe dodge his shift down the mine and what happened when his brother took his place? Why did an encounter with an upturned glass so terrify a group of newsmen? Just what was the dire prophecy of Seaman Flack? What will be the terrible consequence of Klara’s pregnancy? These and other intriguing questions are posed in Gerard Loughran s short stories, written after many years of foreign reporting and set in venues as far apart as Africa today and yesterday, Austria in the days when Jews couldn t be doctors, Germany in the distracted memories of an old soldier and our own not-quite-so-cosy Home Counties.

The Less than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote

£8.99

THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE is a modern fairy tale from the inner city, where the mundane becomes fantastical and the everyday ethereal, but where living happily ever after is often easier read than done. Donna Crick-Oakley walks on six inches of stories every day. She may live on the top floor of a tower block but she still pads her walls and floor with books to shut the real world further out. Or do they only shut her in? Armed with her myths and medieval adventures, Donna sets out to escape her isolation and change her home town to better suit her dreams.

The Lesser Bohemians

£13.99

From the writer of one of the most memorable debuts of recent years, a story of first love and redemption. One night in London an eighteen year old girl, recently arrived from Ireland to study drama, meets an older actor and a tumultuous relationship ensues. Set across the bedsits and squats of mid-nineties north London, The Lesser Bohemians is a story about love and innocence, joy and discovery, the grip of the past and the struggle to be new again.

The Lightman System

£16.00

1974. Teenage siblings Ellie and Colin are on holiday when they fall for the same girl. From this strange meeting onward, Ellie’s musical talent takes her to new heights, Colin finds his own fascination in photography, and both seem set for fulfilment – until catastrophe overtakes Ellie and changes the shape of the whole family.

 

Years later, brother and sister must battle to understand what has befallen them.

The Limerickiad

£9.99

Every week for the last five years, award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been telling the story of World Literature in The Independent on Sunday. In limericks. With scrupulous regard to the rigours of the limerick form, Rowson has endeavoured to encapsulate humankind’s fascination with the written word in all its forms, whether poetry, drama or prose – as a series of bad jokes, cheap puns, strained scansion, excruciatingly contrived rhymes and pure filth. Now collected together for the first time, The Limerickiad: Volume 1 takes us from the Sumerian classic Gilgamesh to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, with both verse and illustration displaying Rowson’s reverence for the original texts. The Limerickiad promises to do for Literature what 1066 and All That did for History.

The Limerickiad II

£9.99

Following the success of The Limerickiad volume I, Martin Rowson continues to lower the tone by reducing literary classics to a series of terrible limericks. Mixing Low Comedy and High Seriousness, awful puns and dodgy rhymes, The Limerickiad volume II takes the story forward from John Donne to Jane Austen. Along the way he takes the piss out of Jacobean Tragedy, mangles all XII books of Paradise Lost and hangs out with some like-minded Augustan satirists before ridiculing the entire European Romantic movement.

The Limerickiad III

£9.99

Every week since 2006, the award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been making a fool of himself in The Independent on Sunday by reducing the work of some of the world’s best-loved writers to a series of puerile and filthy limericks. Following the success of the first two volumes of The Limerickad (from Gilgamesh to Jane Austen) The Limerickiad volume III lays waste to the literary greats of the nineteenth-century. Rowson mangles Melville, puts the boot into the Brontёs and defaces the complete works of Dickens. He even finds time to write a limerick in homage to its inventor (‘When a runcible fellow called Lear…’).

The Long Beds

£10.99

‘Beneath the surface of even the seemingly safest of poems, there is something lurking, almost as in old folk tales, a danger or a disquiet which is never far away.’ Andrew McMillian, PBS Autumn Bulletin

 

The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while – waking or dreaming – the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems’ imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.

The Marriage Portrait

£25.00

‘Every bit as evocative and spellbinding as Hamnet . O’Farrell, thank God, just seems to be getting better and better’ i newspaper
‘Her narrative enchantment will wrest suspense and surprise out of a death foretold’ Financial Times
‘Ingenious, inventive, humane, wry, truthful . . . better than her last novel’ Scotsman
‘Finely written and vividly imagined’ Guardian
‘In O’Farrell’s hands, historical detail comes alive’ Spectator

Marriage was her destiny. Now she must survive it.


The breathtaking new novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of Hamnet, winner of
the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.

**AS SELECTED FOR BBC RADIO 2 BOOKCLUB**

The Marriage Portrait is a dazzling evocation of the Italian Renaissance in all its beauty and brutality.

Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso. As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here. He intends to kill her.

Lucrezia is sixteen years old, and has led a sheltered life locked away inside Florence’s grandest palazzo. Here, in this remote villa, she is entirely at the mercy of her increasingly erratic husband.

What is Lucrezia to do with this sudden knowledge? What chance does she have against Alfonso, ruler of a province, and a trained soldier? How can she ensure her survival.

The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.

The Mermaid of Black Conch: A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

£9.99

Escape to the ocean with the entrancing, unforgettable winner of the Costa Book of the Year – as read on BBC Radio 4.

On a quiet day, near the Caribbean island of Black Conch, a mermaid raises her barnacled head from the flat grey sea. She is attracted by David, a fisherman waiting for a catch, singing to himself with his guitar. Aycayia the mermaid has been living in the vast ocean all alone for centuries.

When Aycayia is caught and dragged ashore by American tourists, David rescues her with the aim of putting her back in the ocean. But it is soon clear that the mermaid is already transforming into a woman.

This is the story of their love affair, of an island and of the great wide sea.

‘Mesmerising’ Maggie O’Farrell author of The Marriage Portrait

‘A unique talent’ Bernadine Evaristo author of Girl, Women, Other

‘Not your standard mermaid’ Margaret Atwood author of The Testaments

VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

The Midlands

£8.99

The Midlands is the second collection of poems by Tony Williams, following his acclaimed debut The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Beginning in the Midlands themselves, where Mercian kings sleep under wurzels near the local Asda, his poems open out into tragi-comic paeans on dog walks, photocopiers, shut shops and lunchtimes, and meditations on what it means to be a person living, wonkily, anywhere. But beneath the word-play and tomfoolery, something strange is brooding in the caverns underneath the hill. History is coming for you, and if you set out to meet it, you’ll never find your way home…

The Odyssey

£14.99

Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead

£9.99

A high-ranking government minister with a colourful past is sent on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul. When his trip ends up in a bar-room brawl, he becomes Europe’s most wanted man overnight. Chased by the authorities, damned by religious leaders, pursued by those looking for vengeance and head-hunted by fanatics, his odyssey begins.

Plunged into the ancient past, Odysseus must now contend with all the unworldly beings and unnatural phenomena that stand in his way. The Cyclops, the Sirens, witches, whirlpools and flesh-eating armies must all be overcome in the struggle for survival and the long voyage back home.

Simon Armitage’s The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in September 2015 then toured the UK in a co-production with English Touring Theatre.

The Ormering Tide

£14.00

PUBLISHED 22/03/2021

 

 

The Ormering Tide is a coming of age story set amidst a series of darkly foreboding events. Rozel lives with her triplet older brothers and her parents in the bay of a small island. One of her brothers goes missing and the family’s landlord, Mr Willow, is implicated as the menacing truths are discovered. The island is rich with nature; and the islanders’ lives and the steady passing of the seasons contrast sharply with the realities of violence and inevitable revelations. The Ormering Tide explores the inherent human need to keep – and bury – secrets.

 

 

Kathryn Williams’ first novel, The Ormering Tide, is about processing the past, after the fact. This is a brooding and astonishing debut from the Mercury Music Prize nominated singer-songwriter.

 

 

The Ormering Tide shines as brightly as the beautiful shell from which this novel draws its title and is as impressive and adventurous as the author’s music.

The Perseverance

£9.99

The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.

The President’s Room

£8.99

Translated by Charlotte Coombe.

 

In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.

 

The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn’t come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what’s really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted . . .

 

Ricardo Romero has been compared to Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cortázar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll’s laboratory), The President’s Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.

The Price

£5.00

This edition of Miller’s play The Price features an extensive introduction by Jane K. Dominik which includes: a chronology of Miller’s life and times; a summary of the plot and commentary on the characters, themes, language, context and production history of the play. Together with over twenty questions for further study and detailed notes on words and phrases from the text, this is the definitive edition of the play.

 

 

The play concerns two brothers who must return to the home of their deceased father prior to its destruction to dispose of the furniture crammed into the attic. Exhibiting many features characteristic of Miller’s work including sibling rivalry, confrontation with the past and with their memories, the effects of the Great Depression and the war in Vietnam, the pursuit of a dream, and the responsibility one must assume for one’s own life, The Price is recognised as one of Miller’s major works.

The Professor

£3.99

The Professor, eventually published in 1857, was actually Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, completed as early as 1846. The deliberately unromantic hero is William Crimsworth – the only time the author used a male narrator – in a story based on her own experiences as a language student in Belgium. The theme was reworked with a woman as the leading character in Villette (1853) and it has always been an interesting point of comparison for keen readers of Charlotte Bronte’s work. ‘… as good as I can write. It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre.’

The Rabbit Hutch: THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER 1 BESTSELLER

£16.99

*Winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize *

 

* A Waterstones Book of the Year for 2022*

 

* A Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award *

 

‘Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny’ Guardian

 

Blandine isn’t like the other residents of her building.

 

An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents – neighbours, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

 

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

 

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her flat with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

 

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

‘Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies-the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster

1 11 12 13 15