Behind every famous man is a great woman – and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart’s shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection. Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World’s Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.
‘When I come home and leave behind Dark things I would not call to mind …’ wrote Leslie Coulson, one of the many soldiers who tried to express his wartime experiences in writing: dreaming of an idyllic England in the face of the horror of the Western Front. Coulson was one of the hundreds of thousands who did not come home – but because of his poetry we glimpse something of his thoughts and experiences.
Today we can be grateful that so many of those who endured the First World War did write about it: giving us an unmatched view of an event which would otherwise be completely beyond our ability to imagine. The Writers’ War is a collection of excerpts from outstanding accounts of the First World War. It provides an essential insight to anyone interested in modern history or early twentieth-century literature. Extraordinary extracts bring the human experience of war brilliantly to life – from the terror of bombardment, or the camaraderie of military service, to the home front.
The writing reflects an enormous range of nationalities and personalities. It includes memorable poetry, fiction, and journalism. Some great names of modern English literature appear, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. In addition, there are superb accounts by foreign authors such as novelists Edith Wharton and Henri Barbusse, and flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. The Writers’ War gives an unparalleled insight into a world-changing event, and what it meant in human terms both to the writers and millions of others caught up in it.
Stephen Sawyer’s remarkable first collection is a book about politics – public dreams, private desires and common fears. From a Merseyside housing estate in the 1960s via Pinochet and Thatcher to the floods in Sheffield in 2007, these poems trace the sutures of power and resistance on the body and under the skin through the mediations of love, death, class, art and oppression. They raise questions about identity and belonging in a time of rapid structural and technological change, and celebrate the creativity and courage of individual and collective responses. There Will Be No Miracles Here is a book of passion and humour about people who live at the sharp edge.
Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard is a collection of poems that have been shouted at children from schools to church halls, silly tales that have been illustrated joyously by Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell and bound into a book. Perhaps you’ll want to annoy your family by reading them out; perhaps you’ll want to chuckle at them under the covers with a torch; perhaps you’ll want to stare at the pictures drawn by Mr Chris Riddell or maybe you’ll want to shout them aloud to capture the spirit of your poet, A.F. Harrold himself.
LONGLISTED FOR THE THEAKSTON OLD PECULIER CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR
Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month
The Times Crime Book of the Month
Mail on Sunday Thriller of the Week
‘Elegantly crafted, humane and thought-provoking. She’s top drawer’ Ian Rankin
This is how it begins. With a near-empty building, the inhabitants forced out of their homes by property developers. With two women: idealistic, impassioned blogger Ella and seasoned campaigner, Molly. With a body hidden in a lift shaft. But how will it end?
Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught in American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000).
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.
The latest in IRON Press’s long running series of small haiku books, to accompany the reprint of the author’s previous IRON Press haiku collection, Our Sweet Little Time, which also covered a year of the poet’s life. This new collection ranges from the traditional to the experimental, combining striking imagery with philosophical reflection.
In peace-agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters, as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past. In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women and the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security. In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.
In Three Dreams in the Key of G three female voices, Mother, Crone and Creatrix, unknowingly influence each other’s fates as each battles to assert themselves and discover their voices in hostile environments.
Piet Hoffman is the best undercover operative in the Swedish police force, but only one other man is even aware of his existence. When an amphetamine deal he is involved in goes badly wrong, he is faced with the hardest mission of his life: to infiltrate Sweden’s most infamous maximum security prison.
Detective Inspector Ewert Grens is charged with investigating the drug-related killing. Unaware of Hoffman’s real identity, he believes himself to be on the trail of a dangerous psychopath. But he cannot escape the feeling that vital information pertaining to the case has been withheld or manipulated.
Hoffman has his insurance: wiretap recordings that implicate some of Sweden’s most prominent politicians in a corrupt conspiracy. But in Ewert Grens the powers that be might just have found the perfect weapon to eliminate him…
Through your blood talks us along a deeply personal yet undeniably relatable journey, through a turbulent adolescence into adulthood. Refreshingly frank, perceptive and funny, these poems are psalms of identity, broken tradition and desperation sung from the back lanes of a Midlands city. Born and raised in the Midlands, Toby Campion is a UK National Poetry Slam Champion and a World Poetry Slam finalist. Recipient of the Silver Wyvern Award and First Place in the Poetry on the Lake Prizes 2017, awarded by Carol Ann Duffy, Toby has performed his poetry on stages across the UK, from Glastonbury Festival to London’s Royal Albert Hall, and in countries around the world, including America, Italy, Spain, Albania and South Korea. His debut play, WRECK, won the Fifth Word Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright 2015. Toby’s poetry has been selected to represent the UK at numerous international conferences and events including Capturing Fire: International Queer Poetry Summit, the 18th Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, the Paris Poetry World Cup and Next Generation Speaks. Director of UniSlam and Resident Artist at Camden’s prestigious Roundhouse, Toby was one of the first resident poets of the River Thames.
From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit. Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit. Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.
Love is a complex feeling, which can be witnessed by everyone but equally can be taken away. Focusing on three different times in their life, the highs and lows of love are discovered in a range of poems written by Ioana. Ranging from the childhood expectations of love, the memories of past lovers and poems of lessons of love towards the narrator’s younger self, the nature of love is examined truthfully and passionately.
To Sweeten the Bitter is a collection by British Jamaican poet, Raymond Antrobus. After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him (Who I am now is something I need to remember). Upon returning to the UK Raymond travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.
Toxins (and other poisons) is a collection of short stories, all with the same common denominator: a man with a hat and a turquoise scarf, and a merciless, inescapable feeling of being trapped. The main characters, starting from a realistic condition, find themselves in situations that slowly begin to disconnect from reality, and become disturbing and weird, putting them in a condition of (sometimes dark, sometimes lighter and ironic) uneasiness. Toxins (and other poisons) is an overall story of glitches in the system, of individuals floating in a sea of social and technological stimuli, trying their best to fit in, yet failing because defecting of the skills that allow them to be suited to their world.
Travels with Chinaski is the lonely lurch into lunacy, anarchy, the drunken fall into disassociation, the paralytic collapse into alienation – the utter, utter headlong, bar-storming leap into the liberation of madness. Chinaski: the freedom, the fuck death, to fuck your only friend’s girl, to fuck over rat-infested bed-sit-land, to fuck your kidneys, your liver, your numerous court appearances and then to fucking care about your beautiful beat-up neighbour as she cries in the night. Chinaski walks into your life, side-stepping last night’s cold sick on the floor, he kicks you out of bed, he’s back from the dead and he is going to make you dance, rage and drink with sheer life. Chinaski is there for you like a hangover that’s moved in to stay.
Madness Can Set You Free
“Daithidh MacEochaidh’s words are delightfully wordy, swimming in the deep end of the language baths… I’m rereading Kerouac for ‘The Big Read’, and it seems to me that MacEochaidh shares some of his linguistic exuberance. More power to him!” – Ian McMillan
“Prose as raw as a manhir, designed to skin your knuckles” – Dai Vaughan
‘Playful, moving and wholly remarkable’ Guardian ‘A small miracle’ New Statesman‘Mastery of craft, resonance and deep feeling on every page’ Telegraph
Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity time, vivid storytelling that illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.
‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!’
Joe looked up from his comic and lifted his eye patch. There was a white pony in the yard. It was harnessed to a cart, a flat cart, with a wooden chest on it. A man was sitting at a front corner of the cart, holding the reins. His face was creased. He wore a long coat and a floppy high-crowned hat, with hair straggling beneath, and a leather bag was slung from his shoulder across his hip.
Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds’ eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.
‘All the exuberance and eccentricity, all the deep thought and resounding mythology of [Garner’s] best work’ Observer
‘Spare and allusive… luminous and understated’ Rowan Williams, New Statesman
‘Cryptic, evocative, sparely told and deceptively simple’ Carolyne Larrington, TLS
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR * A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR * A GUARDIANBEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
The Sunday Times Bestseller
A sweeping, unpredicatable novel about power, wealth and truth, told by four unique, interlocking voices and set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York.
Can one person change the course of history?
The long-forgotten author of a bestselling novel based on a legendary New York tycoon.
The real-life tycoon who attempts to set the record straight.
The young woman tasked with helping him – who turns detective in the process.
The tycoon’s wife, whose missing journals come to haunt them all, long after her death.
In a city devoted to making money and making stories like no other, where wealth means power, who gets to tell the truth? And to rise to the top of a glittering, destructive world, what – and who – do you have to sacrifice?
‘One of the great puzzle-box novels, it’s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner’ – Telegraph
‘Genius’ – Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to the boy king’s tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt – its geography, history, culture and legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again – not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact.
First published in 1834, Two Old Men’s Tales is made up of two novels told by old men reflecting on events in their respective pasts. The Deformed tells of the “deformed” Earl of St. Germains, heir to the Marquis of Brandon. After his step-mother gives birth to a son, Lord Louis, who is as good-looking as his mother, the young Earl is neglected. He finds companionship in Lilia, a poor relative. The Admiral’s Daughter relates the story of Iñez, daughter of Admiral Thornhaugh, who is intended to marry Captain Harry Vivian, an honest and sensible naval officer. On one of his visits he brings with him his friend Laurence Hervey, a character quite different from Vivian. Vivian marries Iñez, while Hervey goes away to Paris for five years. When he visits his old friend and his wife, he is captivated by Mrs. Vivian, leading to an elopement and the consequences attendant upon such a drastic action, a time when honour was defended with pistols at dawn.
‘Two Tongues is a collection of singularly energetic grace, whose rueful, restless poems are as fascinated by what others want us to be, as by what we want to be ourselves.’ -W. N. Herbert
Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi’s Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion – spatial, verbal and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.
Engaging above all with the matter of England in the here and now Simon Armitage focuses his attention on the conflicts within society today. The result is his wittiest, most alertly combative and impassioned collection to date.
Presenting some of the most noteworthy pieces from a remarkably influential West Indian poet, this anthology sheds light on the lesser-known literary accomplishments of Una Marson. Revealing the work of a woman whose writing pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworth-inspired passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to marginalized subjects, this collection includes, in addition to her well-known poems, previously unpublished work from the 1930s through the 1950s. Striving to answer the question of how one writes as a modern black woman reaching out to the poor and powerless, this extensive selection embodies an exceptionally significant poetic achievement.
Alex Ferguson is an experienced writer successful in radio, television and radio. His Radio Four series My Uncle Freddie ran for six seasons and in 1997 won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Comedy & Light Entertainment. Alex is the founding writer of Corin & Vanessa Redgrave’s Moving Theatre with successful productions of his plays The Flag and Casement at Battersea Lane and the Riverside. In 1997 Alex won the Guinness National Award for Pub Theatre with Big Mama. In 2004 he won a regional Royal Television Society nomination for the short film Lads and was selected for the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum at the Screenlit Festival in April 2010 with Painting Over The Cracks. Alex has a commendable history in radio & television drama and was the Creative Director of the Bold as Brass Theatre Company that he founded in 1997 until 2008 when he became Life President. His collection of short stories, My Uncle Freddie [2004] and Uncle Freddie & The Prince Of Wales [2010] are available from Iron Press, Cullercoats, Northumberland. His first venture into juvenile fiction, the spooky story, Tiggie, is published by AuthorHouse and is available on Amazon.
During the Yule season of 1153 Malcolm mac Alasdair is sent to serve the half-Scottish, half-Viking Earl of Orkney, who is on a quest to regain his earldom from a treacherous cousin. Malcolm is an artistic boy with no knack for warfare, he is certain that he will only hinder the young earl – and get himself killed in the bargain. His father’s reason for sending him out on this adventure does nothing to allay his fears: in a vision he has seen Malcolm go to Orkney with Earl Harald. But this vision is incomplete – he hasn’t seen Malcolm return…
Tony Hoagland’s zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry’s hilarious ‘high priest of irony’, a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge. Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty is his first new collection since What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). The poems – and title – try to make sense of the situation of the individual in our time, and in America in particular – Hoagland’s obsessive main subject. They worry over how to preserve a sense of self and values, connectedness and cohesiveness, in an era of market-driven culture, dazzling but toxic entertainment, and degraded and degrading idiocies cultivated by mass culture.
PI John Craine has come to Hale Island to get away from it all – the memories and the guilt, and a past that just won’t let go.
But within hours he stumbles across the dead body of a young girl on the beach. When the police arrive the body has inexplicably disappeared. Or – in his already tormented state – did Craine imagine it in the first place?
Determined to get at the truth, Craine starts asking questions. But it seems no one on the island is talking. And all too soon he finds himself tangled up in a deadly network of fear and violence.
Someone has a dark secret to keep, and Craine is getting in the way…
SIGNED COPY
From the beginning, the poet was a wanderer, a storyteller, an imaginer of bridges between worlds. Zaffar Kunial is just such a poet and guide for us today. Yet his territory extends much further afield than those of the past – through Kashmir, where his father was born and now lives, to the Midlands of his mother’s birth, and further north to ancestors in Orkney, as well as through language, memory and time. Already an acknowledged star of the Faber New Poets scheme, Kunial has won admirers in such measure as to ensure that Us is one of the most anticipated debuts in recent times. Across its pages, he vocalises what it means to be a human being planting your two feet upon the dizzying earth – and he does so delicately, urgently, intimately – in some of the most original and touching ways that you will read.
Humanity explored through poetry. Twelve poets put their words first.
BBC Radio 1Xtra and Asian Network teamed up with BBC Contains Strong Language for Words First, a scheme aimed at finding the best emerging spoken word talent in the UK.
USE WORDS FIRST is a collection of 12 poets from Words First brought together in a brilliant anthology edited by Jude Yawson, co-writer of Stormzy’s Rise Up: The Story So Far and contributor to the SAFE anthology edited by Derek Owusu.
Exploring themese of identity, connectivity and mobilisation, USE WORDS FIRST brings together eclectic styles and people all exploring humanity in their own unique ways. This is a snapshot of some of the struggles, inspirations and muses of young Britain today expressed through poetry that spans from the personal to the political and is always full of beauty and power.
“Is there a poet writing in Ireland who feels so profoundly and knows more surely love’s obsessions, its piercing chronicles, its succour and sorrows than Anne Fitzgerald? The poems in Vacant Possession char the page, leaving their imprint, imperishable, unique.” – Frank McGuinness
A novel from the Booker-Prize winning author Stanley Middleton. Rejacked and reissued in Windmill.
Mary and David Blackwell are content in their marriage but when Mary, a talented opera singer, is offered the chance to sing in America, everything changes. David, a music teacher and amateur cellist, is left behind in England and, when he suddenly stops hearing from her, he must decide how to carry on and what to do.
‘It is a very, very long time since any book made me physically cry. But Stanley Middleton’s Valley of Decision did just that, twice… The story is simple… Anyone, well almost anyone, could write that story… But only Mr Middleton could turn it into something approaching a small masterpiece.’ Martyn Goff, Daily Telegraph
Verse Matters harnesses the power of everyday stories, highlighting the strength and inspiration that comes from speaking out proudly in unsettled times. This anthology of poems and prose, edited by award-winning Sheffield-based writers Helen Mort and Rachel Bower, brings a diverse range of voices to the fore, from celebrated contemporary poets like Malika Booker, Liz Berry and Hollie McNish to first-time published writers from home and abroad. What brings them together is the extraordinary, ordinary tales they tell each other, and their determination to be heard.
Virga is the third book of poems by Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo, following on from his acclaimed collections Spirit Brides (2006) and Gumiguru (2014).
Set in the twentieth century, Virga features historical events woven together by the weather. From the spiritual silence of a sundog during the 1911 Japanese Antarctic Expedition, to the 1921 World Championship chess matches in the Cuban heat, to the final hours of a young Bavarian mountaineer in the Bernese Alps in 1936 and strange white clouds decimating whole villages in northern Cameroon in 1986 – the poems capture stories of a rapidly evolving century beneath an ancient, fragile sky.
The title relates to the meteorological phenomenon in which a column, shaft or band of rain or snow is seen falling from a cloud but never reaching the earth – evaporating before touchdown. Like Gumiguru, which has so much to do with weather, Virga continues with it, its impact on our daily lives. But, here, his geography broadens out to include wider worlds and different histories artfully strung together by the poet’s fascination with the elements.
Togara Muzanenhamo was shortlisted for the Jerwood Alderburgh First Collection Prize and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.
