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Coven

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven

£14.99

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe first in a supernatural new series from the author of Wonderland , Her Majesty’s Royal Coven follows a top-secret government department of witches and the deadly threat to the nationt they must confront.

‘Juno Dawson is at the top of her game in this vibrant and meticulous take on witchcraft. Her characteristic wit and grit shine through’
Samantha Shannon

Hidden among us is a secret government department of witches known as Her Majesty’s Royal Coven.

They protect crown and country from magical forces and otherworldly evil, but their greatest enemy will come from within…

There are whisperings of a prophecy that will bring the coven to its knees, and four best friends are about to be caught at the centre.

Life as a modern witch was never simple … but now it’s about to get apocalyptic.

Prepare to be bewitched by Juno Dawson’s first adult series. A story of ancient prophecies and modern dating, of sacred sisterhood and demonic frenemies.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

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Heterogeneous

Heterogeneous

£10.00

ByAnthony Anaxagorou

Heterogeneous is the definitive anthology of Anthony Anaxagorou’s poetry – an extensive and revised selection taken from several previous volumes. The winner of the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, Anaxagorou offers the reader an insight into his poetry career with work spanning from 2009 to 2016.

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A Round of Drinking Stories

High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories

£9.99

Winner, “Best Anthology” at the Saboteur Awards 2019

Drinking stories are told by drunks, or about drunks; they are told in pubs, or set in pubs. They are stories where people drink, and stories which somehow induce a sense of drunkenness in readers and listeners. Anton Chekhov may or may not have drunkenly compared the experience of reading a short story to downing a shot of vodka, and F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that a good short story could “be written on a bottle.” Here is a collection of contemporary short stories written on and about bottles – stories about the comedies, tragedies, pleasures, pains and horrors of alcohol – all of which can be downed like (and perhaps with) a glass of vodka.

‘An intoxicating cocktail of stories. Drink deep, but be warned: there is darkness in the cup.’ Will Buckingham

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Hollywood

Hollywood

£9.99

ByCharles Bukowski

Henry Chinaski has a penchant for booze, women and horse-racing. On his precarious journey from poet to screenwriter he encounters a host of well-known stars and lays bare the absurdity and egotism of the film industry. Poetic, sharp and dangerous, Hollywood – Bukowski’s fictionalisation of his experiences making the film Barfly – explores the many dark shadows to be found in the neon-soaked glare of Hollywood’s limelight.

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Holt House

Holt House

£5.99

t’s a quiet house, sheltered, standing in a mass of tangled old trees called the Holtwood. Raymond watches it. He’s been watching it, through a gap in the fence at the bottom of the garden, for weeks. Thinking about the elderly owners, Mr and Mrs Latch, who took him in one night when he was a frightened boy caught up in an emergency. Mr Latch showed him something that was kept in a wardrobe in the spare room. He can’t remember what it was. He only knows how sick it made him feel. Raymond watches Holt House. He has to remember what he saw. He has to get inside.

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Home Home

Home Home

£6.99

ByLisa Allen-Agnostini

A coming-of-age tale with a twist: a clinically depressed Trinidadian teenager, who has attempted suicide, is banished by her mother to Canada to live with her aunt. She feels lonely and in exile. But with the help of her lesbian aunt, a gorgeous-looking boy and her Skyping best friend “back home” in Trinidad, she begins to realise that loving families can exist in different shapes and sizes. Then her mother arrives and threatens to take her back to Trinidad. Where then is home?

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Homunculus

Homunculus

£10.99

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies ‘one of the strangest documents of the human mind’, and W.H. Auden singled him out as a ‘really remarkable poet’. Womack’s versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

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Honest

Honest

£9.99

ByScott Tyrrell

Honest features all of Scott Tyrrell’s warmth, wit and frank openness delivered with the bittersweet edge of a middle-aged creative who may be having a mid-life crisis or an existential revelation. With dad jokes and badgers. And buttons.

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House

House

£9.99

Myra Connell’s House is a startling debut collection from a poet adept at turning the poem’s confines in rooms for the reader to inhabit. These poems are by turns enchanting and darkly disquieting; they invite us in, ask questions, look for clues and mark out telling absences. The house in question could be in the heart of the woods, high up on the moors, or lone block at the end of a lost urban terrace. A cast of characters come and go from its spaces, life moves onwards as the day fades to twilight. The outside world presses in at the windows, a wilderness awaits at the threshold.

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how-to-be-a-bomb

How To Be A Bomb

£8.95

ByAndy Fletcher

Andy Fletcher’s poetry ranges from simple, stark, haiku-like lines to rambling dreamlike prose, by turn both delightfully surreal and as clear as a raindrop caught by sunlight. You will return to these words again and again and be rewarded with something fresh and arresting at each visit.

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How To Be A Poet

How To Be A Poet

£14.99

ByJane Commane, Jo Bell

As a natural follow-on to the 52 Project of 2014, this book aims to help poets taking the next step in developing, working and participating in the wider creative community as a writer. How to be a Poet combines practical advice and topical mini-essays that examine both the technical and creative dimensions of being a poet. It’s a no-nonsense manual where we’ve replaced the spanners with lots of ink, elbow grease and edits. At each step, we ask plenty of questions – what makes a poem tick over perfectly, how do we get it started when it stalls, and which warning lights should you never ignore?

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How To Kill Your Family

How To Kill Your Family

£8.99

They say you can’t choose your family. But you can kill them…

Meet Grace Bernard. Daughter, sister, serial killer…

Grace has lost everything. And she will stop at nothing to get revenge.

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Hull Speedway

Hull Speedway: Craven Park – The First Ten Years

£12.00

ByRoger Hulbert

The ten years since 1995, when speedway returned to Hull after a fourteen-year absence, have been a rollercoaster ride for the Vikings. A string of new owners oversaw successive periods of on-track success and failure, and closure often seemed imminent until the club finally succumbed in 2003. Bouncing back under Paul Hodder, the Vikings enjoyed their best ever season in 2004, winning the league title to herald in an exciting new era for the club and the city.

Charmed life, luck, tenacity, refusal to die – whatever – the first ten years at Craven Park have been anything but dull, and all this is brought to life in the second volume of Roger Hulbert’s history of the club, which like the first volume contains many quality photographs and all the relevant statistics to complement the narrative of Hull Speedway’s most recent era. It is an essential read for all fans of the club.

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Hydras Heads

Hydra’s Heads

£9.99

ByNora Gomringer

German poet Nora Gomringer is here translated into English for the first time by Scottish poet and editor Annie Rutherford. There is no simple equivalent to Nora Gomringer in the UK but Kate Tempest is perhaps the closest in terms of the way she is experimental wile remaining accessible and in her ability to stride seamlessly from stage to page to film to literature festival. These are poems which defy categorisation – interweaving the best of page and spoken word poetry to create something entirely of her own. They are poems which laugh, howl, stamp their lines. They are candid, wry, compassionate. There are poems about the darker times of Germany’s modern history, reworkings of myths and fairy tales, and a 3-page-long ode to sex against a wall. All brought perfectly into English by Annie Rutherford.

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I & I

I & I: The Natural Mystics

£9.50

The history of the original Wailers — Tosh, Livingstone and Marley — as never before told.

Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers — one of the most influential groups in popular music.

One of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines for the first time the story of the Wailers. It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, illuminating why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer.

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I Am Both

I Am Both Stranger and of This Place

£5.00

Poems from Indonesia and the UK by Rufus Mufasa, Irma Agryanti, Billy Letford, Mario F. Lawi, Roseanne Watt, Jamil Massa.

The Indonesia – UK Poetry Indigenous Language Exchange is a project conceived by the British Council, Makassar International Writers’ Festival, Contains Strong Language and Wrecking Ball Press to enable cultural and linguistic exchange between poets from East Indonesia and the UK.

This project also celebrates UNESCO’s Year of Indigenous Language. This project is part of the broader programme of events for the Indonesia Market Focus at London Book Fair and is supported by the Indonesia Ministry of Education and Culture, the Indonesia Agency for Creative Economy (Bekraf) and the Indonesia National Book Committee.

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I Just Stepped Out

I Just Stepped Out

£5.50

In October 2013 Felix Dennis was told he had terminal cancer. He was in the midst of a 30-day poetry reading tour, and characteristically he chose to continue, performing to sell-out audiences with his legendary verve and enthusiasm. He also began compiling this, his tenth, book of verse. Divided into two parts: the first, ‘Premonitions’, is a selection of poems written over the years when, in Dennis’s words, ‘the heart knew what the mind dared not perceive’. Having always lived on the edge, he intuited an early death. The second part, ‘A Verse Diary’, consists of poems slected by Dennis from the many he wrote between the date of his terminal diagnosis and his death. Poems which, he felt, were possibly the best he had ever written. Topped and tailed with the Author’s Notes, this book takes readers on a physical, emotional and psychological journey. Sadly, Felix Dennis did not live to see its publication.

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I From Nothing

I, From Nothing

£14.00

ByIsabel Tallysha-Soares

Luísa from Nothing, born Matilde Boshoff in 1911, is the last living heiress of Nothing, a vast estate in the wine countryside north of the Portuguese capital. Without heirs of her own, the only way to save Nothing from the nothingness of disappearance is to accept living. In anonymous company, Luísa tells the story of Nothing and the paradox of a place name that nullifies existence. Luísa is also a non-existence, with a name she never took but in which she has lived from birth.

Going back to the early 19th century when Nothing was created out of the chaos of the Napoleonic Invasions, Luísa traces the story of her family and its intersection with Portuguese and world history in a place where oddities and unpronounceable possibilities were always as natural occurrences as ghosts and werewolves. After a life of losses and brushes with the unfathomable, Luísa realises Nothing is her own eternal self.

Based on true events and characters…

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Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems

£8.00

Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative Collected Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.

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If these apples should fall

If These Apples Should Fall: Cezanne and the Present

£30.00

A penetrating analysis of the work of one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art by one of the world’s most respected art historians.

For more than a century the art of Paul Cezanne was held to hold the key to modernity. His painting was a touchstone for Samuel Beckett as much as Henri Matisse. Rilke revered him deeply, as did Picasso. If we lost touch with his sense of life, they thought, we lost an essential element in our self-understanding.

If These Apples Should Fall: Cezanne and the Present looks back on Cezanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. What was it, the book asks, that held Cezanne’s viewers spellbound?

At the heart of Cezanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour. T. J. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it. Above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cezanne’s achievement.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

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If This Were Real

If This Were Real

£7.95

ByGerda Stevenson

Gerda Stevenson s long-awaited first full-length collection is filled with music skipping rhymes, piano, fiddle and dance music, laments and lullabies. She sings about butterflies, snowberries, aunts, teachers, Pentland rain, Sarajevo roses, graveyards, driftwood and the lost Eden of childhood; about wild weather, warm companionship and unmarked graves, about Bosnia, Iraq, Syria the Pyrenees and Scotland. If This Were Real is a kind of autobiography in verse, informed by intense relationships with places and people, by the personal and the political, by family life and the wider community in her native Scotland and beyond. Stevenson s experience as an actor and singer/song-writer is evident in the rhythmic sound structure of her writing these are poems that demand not just to be read, but to be performed, spot-lit lies, floodlit truths, and shadowed ambiguities / in our retellings of the world s old tales .

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if-you-look-for-me

If You Look For Me, I am Not Here

£8.99

BySarayu Srivatsa

Long Listed for The Asian Man Literature Prize when published in India as THE LAST PRETENCE. When Malika loses her longed-for daughter at birth, it is not the only loss in the family: the surviving twin -a boy – loses the love of his mother. He grows up needing to be the daughter his mother wants, the son his scientist father accepts, and more, with the guilt of being the one who survived. In a recently independent India, haunted by its colonial past and striving to find its identity, he struggles to find his own self. Sarayu Srivatsa has created a moving family portrait, richly-coloured by the vibrant culture and landscape of India, where history, religion and gender collide in a family scarred by the past and struggling with the future.

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In Another Country

In Another Country

£9.99

ByDavid Constantine

The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do – sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don’t fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance – like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier.

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In the Blood

£16.99

ByAndrew Motion

In the Blood is Andrew Motion’s beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England – an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a terrible riding accident.

The tragedy shadows the book, feeding its mood of elegy as well as its celebratory vigilance. Written from a teenage child’s point of view, without the benefit of adult hindsight, Motion captures the pathos and puzzlement of childhood with great clarity of expression and freshness of memory. We encounter a strange but beguiling extended family, a profound love of the natural world, a troubled schooling, and a growing passion for books and writing.

By turns funny and elegiac, In the Blood is a wonderful picture of a vanishing England, a remarkable insight into a poet’s mind, and a deeply moving portrait of the bond between a mother and her son.

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In the Event

In the Event

£10.99

ByJohn Birtwhistle

John Birtwhistle has said that ‘one writes each poem just to learn how to write it’, and insists that he ‘doesn’t care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One’s Own Voice’. The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice comes through. For all their variety of forms and ideas, his poems are consistent in their visual precision, their scrupulous phrasing and their formal clarity. These qualities are brought to everything he touches, whether it is a passing moment of childhood, a natural detail, a wryly stoic observation, or perennial emotions in the face of events from before birth (first foetal movements) to after burial (removal to an ossuary).

Many scores of individuals are named or make their appearance in some way. If one poem is satiric, the next is unashamedly lyrical. Several reflect on the adequacy of art, and a feature is the stream of very short pieces by way of illustration or riposte, like the border of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wit and feeling are so interwoven in Birtwhistle’s technique, that when it comes to the register of loss and death he is able to find what an otherwise hostile critic admitted ‘can be a kind of bridled eloquence’. Word frequency analysis shows a high incidence of time, thought, light, morning, child, apple tree, painting and fossil.

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Incendium

Incedium Amoris

£8.95

Steve Ely s new book takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris ( The Fire of Love ) by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole . The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, scepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant s revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalising capital, a guerilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia.

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Inferno

Inferno

£18.99

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.

Describing Dante’s descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

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Insistence

Insistence

£9.95

A new child should mean new hope. But what if that’s no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words home and love dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, Insistence takes stock of the parent’s responsibility to her child, the poet’s responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. In a long poem, Darcy revisits Inger Christensen’s 1981 Alphabet, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima. In Darcy’s ‘Alphabet’, the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. Described by David Wheatley as `boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem’ with ‘cunning and humour’, Ailbhe Darcy’s poems interrogate cosmopolitanism as much as they do rootedness, love as much as grief.

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pla

It’s Always Summer Somewhere

£20.00

Felix White, for reasons often beyond him, has always been deeply in love with cricket. His passion for the game is at the fore on the BBC ‘s number one cricket podcast and 5Live show, Tailenders, which he co-presents with Greg James and Jimmy Anderson. It’s Always Summer Somewhere is his funny, heartbreaking and endlessly engaging love letter to the game.

Felix takes us through his life growing up in South West London and describes how his story is forever punctuated and given meaning by cricket. Through his own exploits as a slow left arm spinner of ‘lovely loopy stuff’, to the tragic illness of his mother, life with The Maccabees and his cricket redemption, Felix touches on both the comedic and the tragic in equal measure. Throughout, there’s the ever-present roller coaster of following the England cricket team. The exploits of Tufnell (another bowler of ‘lovely loopy stuff’), Atherton, Hussain et al, are given extra import through the eyes of a cricket-obsessed youth. Felix meets them at each signposted moment to find out what was really behind those moments that gave cricket fans everywhere sporting memories that would last forever, sending the book into an exploration of grief, transgenerational displacement and how the people we’ve known and things we’ve loved culminate and take expression in our lives.

It’s Always Summer Somewhere is an incredibly honest detail of a life lived with cricket. It offers a sense of genuine empathy and understanding not just with cricket fans, but sports and music fans across the world, in articulating our reasons for pouring so much meaning into something that we simply cannot control. Culminating in the heart-stopping World Cup Final in 2019, the book finally answers that question fans have so often asked… what is it about this game?

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IttIme

It’s Time

£12.00

ByEamonn Lynskey

Eamonn Lynskey’s poems live on the edge of things – people’s ordinary lives as much as global concerns – and like all edges they can be razor-sharp. His is a voice unafraid to speak about political urgencies but also well sourced in everyday language and available form. A thought-provoking, unsettling collection of questions rather than answers.

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JSS-BACH

J SS Bach

£14.00

ByMartin Goodman

J SS Bach is the story of three generations of women from either side of Germany’s 20th Century horror story – one side, a Jewish family from Vienna, the other linked to a ranking Nazi official at Dachau concentration camp – who suffer the consequences of what men do.

Fast forward to 1990s California, and two survivors from the families meet. Rosa is a young Australian musicologist; Otto is a world-famous composer and cellist. Music and history link them. A novel of music, the Holocaust, love, and a dog.

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Jack

Jack

£18.99

ByMarilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.

Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher’s child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson’s greatest achievements.

‘Jack is the fourth in Robinson’s luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet’ OBSERVER

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