The Camping Cookbook
£8.00No matter how far off the beaten track your wanderlust takes you, these foolproof, field-tested recipes will set you on your way, keep you on your feet, and reward all your efforts when you get back to camp.
The Captain’s Verses
£14.99‘This is Neruda at his most, expansive, extravagant and ecstatic.’ -Andy Croft, The Morning Star
Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitan as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.
The Chosen
£18.99One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone.
The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by this loss.
Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of my Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?
Hardy’s pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen – the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry – hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.
The City Always Wins
£12.99The City Always Wins is a remarkable novel from the psychological heart of a revolution. From the communal highs of pitched night battles against the police in Cairo to the solitary lows of defeated exile in New York, Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut is a unique immersion into one of the key chapters of the 21st century.
Bringing to life the 2011 Egyptian revolution, The City Always Wins conveys with extraordinary intensity all the stages of that place and that time through the lives of its two main characters Mariam and Khalil, ordinary young people caught up in an extraordinary moment.
Furthermore, The City Always Wins is a novel not just about Egypt’s revolution but about a global generation that tried to change the world.
Reminiscent of the writing of Jeet Thayil, Zia Haider Rahma and Nadeem Aslam, Hamilton’s prose is arrestingly visual, intensely lyrical and uncompromisingly political. A genuinely exciting new writer, he looks set to become a defining voice of his generation.
The Colony: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
£14.99SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
‘Vivid and memorable.’ SARAH MOSS ‘Luminous.’ Observer ‘I utterly ADORED it.’ MARIAN KEYES
He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea.
Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine – the authentic experience.
Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place – one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.
But the people who live on this rock – three miles long and half-a-mile wide – have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire. As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.
”Beautifully written.’ STELLA, The Telegraph ‘The Colony contains multitudes. . . with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water.’ The Times ‘The Colony is a novel about big, important things.’ Financial Times ‘Beautiful, haunting and incredibly powerful book.’ FIONA SCARLETT
The Comfort Book
£16.99Reflections on hope, survival and the messy miracle of being alive
It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learned while we are at our lowest. But then we never think about food more than when we are hungry and we never think about life rafts more than when we are thrown overboard.
The Comfort Book is a collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better. Drawing on maxims, memoir and the inspirational lives of others, these meditations celebrate the ever-changing wonder of living. This is for when we need the wisdom of a friend or a reminder we can always nurture inner strength and hope, even in our busy world.
A book of timeless comfort for modern minds.
The Complete Book of Electric Blues Guitar
£28.50This all-inclusive anthology of performers and playing styles from the last 80 years is the most authoritative and comprehensive source of blues guitar available today. Through rare photos and explanations of styles, tunings and equipment, Dave Rubin gives you insight behind the playing of the world’s greatest bluesmen. Artists covered include: Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Albert King, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and many more. This book also features over 130 professionally-produced audio tracks demonstrating the styles. Spiral comb bound so book will lay flat. Audio is accessed online using the unique code inside the book and can be streamed or downloaded.
The Conquest of the Red Man
£14.00The provocative wordsmith is back: this time with her first novel, The Conquest of the Red Man. It is the story of Corinne Zed, a penniless bourgeoise who makes a meagre living from writing. She decides, at the age of 39, to add a little piquant to her life – rich people are so boring – and experience romantic passion at long last. What could be more exciting than falling in love with a leftist who, in a previous life, planted bombs? The problem is that she loves to eat. It’s not reasonable to start a revolution when it’s time to eat and drink champagne. By the way, is revolution edible?
Always on the scout for her next great meal, Corinne experiences a political-literary love story that takes her from right to left, from Stendhal to Lenin and from Brussels to New York via Turin and Paris. Even if she discovers how to make a grand entrance into Leftie-land, will her dreams be fulfilled?
This caustic novel contains a generous dose of gustatory eroticism, fabulously crunchy nuggets, and a blow-job that would make Lenin turn bright red. Politics is never far away, but nothing gets in the way of the pleasure of reading – proof that the left is dissolvable in irony. It is also a sharp chronicle of our society.
The Dark Film
£5.99The Dark Film, Paul Farley’s first collection since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames, expands the poet’s research into ‘the art of seeing’, and all that humans project of themselves into the world. Farley’s great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, with the most apparently effortless of gear changes; he brings to our immediate attention things previously hidden – whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision, or right under our noses. The Dark Film is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding – as well as Farley’s most richly entertaining and rewarding collection to date.
The Dark Side of the Moon
£5.00The Dark Side of the Moon is one of rock’s most fully realised and elegant concept albums, and a stunning exploration of the madness, anxiety and alienation rooted in the band’s history – and particularly in the tragic tale of their one-time leader Syd Barrett. Drawing on interviews with bass guitarist and chief songwriter Roger Waters, guitarist Dave Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and the album’s supporting cast, The Dark Side of the Moon is a must-have for those who want to know more about one of the most compelling, commercially successful and mysterious albums ever made.
The Dark Stuff
£6.99A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits – books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century.
In The Dark Stuff Nick Kent profiles twenty-two of the most gifted and self-destructive talents in rock history. From Brian Wilson to Syd Barrett, the Rolling Stones to Neil Young, Iggy Pop to Lou Reed, he offers intimate portraits that are unimaginable in the world of today’s market driven music business.
The Debutante & Other Stories
£9.99A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans.
In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.
The Deep Purple Family: Vol 1
£14.99Renowned rock author Martin Popoff’s exhaustive and detailed timeline of Deep Purple milestones – often to the day – looks at the band’s influences, cultural milieu, tours, recording sessions, charts, singles, certification news, break-ups, personal stuff, trivia, mixed with lots of artist quotes to add to the entries, turning the book into a quasi-oral history but loaded with factual matter.But this book is not just about Deep Purple but the whole family of bands that surrounds it. Weaved in and out of the story are the dastardly diaries of Rainbow, Whitesnake, Ian Gillan Band, Gillan, Paice Ashton Lord, all the solo projects, guest slots, even Captain Beyond, Warhorse, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ Superstar, Bedlam, Elf, Episode Six, The Outlaws, and Trapeze.The book also touches on a whole host of other artists including the likes of Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, Moxy, Silverhead, Hard Stuff, Lord Sutch, Warpig, Vanilla Fudge, Brian Auger, Judas Priest, James Gang, Angel and Legs Diamond – but always with contextual explanation that make this book such a fascinating read and an absolute smorgasbord of facts surrounding one of the greatest rock bands’ of all time.
The Devil’s Playground
£7.99In his debut novel, Stav Sherez – author of the best-selling Carrigan & Miller detective series – explores a history of terror and mass murder rooted in Europe’s murky past.
In a forgotten corner of a rain-lashed park in Amsterdam, the body of a tramp is found. The scarring on his body suggests he may be the latest victim of a serial killer terrorizing the city, but the police can find no name, only the telephone number of a young Englishman.
Jon Reed is summoned from London to identify the body of the man he once knew as Jake Colby. With a killer on the loose, he and the detective in charge of the case are determined to help uncover the truth of what happened, no matter where that may lead them.
The Distance Between Us
£12.99This is a son’s search for his father. A familiar theme, but one that, across the generations, can occasionally unearth something rather powerful. In The Distance Between Us that son is Renato Cisneros, a talented writer and a well-known journalist, and that father is the former Army General Luis Federico ‘El Gaucho’ Cisneros, one of the most important figures in the recent history of Peru.
Renato Cisneros digs into his own family history to understand and demystify the figure of ‘El Gaucho’: the controversial Secretary during the regime of Francisco Morales Bermúdez and, shortly after, the country’s Minister of War. In this book, the intimate perspective and the passage of time reveal the unknown truths about a man, a family and an entire country.
The Drift
£5.90The poems in Alan Jenkin’s magnificent collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age.
The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure – his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions – acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.
The Empire Strikes Back
£20.00Indian art has gone through a boom period in parallel with the extraordinary economic rise of the subcontinent from an agrarian state to a high tech axis of the new global economy. With new money came a new gallery system. With bigger spaces came bigger art and the sheer scale of ambition led to a break into the international market, which is always keen to find a new spectacular presence in the art world. The new art has also been created against a background of communal tension and violence. The exploration of identity, a common enterprise for artists internationally, is all the more challenging in the context of India under transformation. Above all Indian artists are faced with the legacy of their history and the ghosts of the Raj.
INTRODUCTION BY ZEHRA JUMABHOY
The English River
£12.00Virginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river’s upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers and was familiar with all aspects of the Thames and its hinterland: both the natural world and the people whose lives are intimately connected with the river. In recent years, she has returned to the Thames, working for a summer as an assistant lock-keeper, and walking its length to record and respond to its landscapes, river life and river folk as a poet and photographer. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland’s Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. The English River is her first book-length poetry collection, showing many new sides to this multi-talented artist: as poet, nature writer, storyteller and photographer. The foreword is by Pete Townshend. ‘Virginia’s story is about the river and the people who work on it, especially those who man the locks. She captures a view of the upper reaches of the River Thames that is entirely fresh. There are glimpsed moments of the claustrophobic beauty of the wooded parts that contrast with the open expanses of uplifting countryside where the river meanders through woodland and farmland. Focussing on the professionals who work on the river, and who manage the locks and the flood plains around them, Virginia suggests – as she works as a lock-keeper’s assistant – that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work. She herself becomes enchanted, that is certain. She makes herself vulnerable in the most romantic way, working and writing and evoking everything she sees and feels as both a storyteller and poet, and as photographer.’ – Pete Townshend, musician
The Essence of an Hour
£12.99“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
It’s 1941, the last summer of American innocence, and eighteen-year-old Lillie Carrigan is desperate to love and be loved, to lose her virginity, to experience her life’s great, epic romance. Preoccupied with whiskey and cigarettes, sex and Catholic guilt, Lillie unknowingly sets in motion events leading to death and estrangement from her two best friends.
A decade on, Lillie is still haunted by the ghosts of that summer. Did she act solely out of youthful naivety and adolescent jealousy? Or perhaps there were darker forces at work: grief, guilt, sexual assault, and the double standards of her strict religious upbringing. Searching for patterns and meaning in the events of that year, and anxious to understand the person she has become, Lillie reflects on the darkness of her tarnished youth and confesses her sins.
The Feelgood Movie of the Year
£9.99‘My poor old heart, I’ve left its drawbridge down.’
Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father’s skeleton clocks. Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the tidy hem of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something beyond our squeaky comprehension. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up.
The Fetch
£14.99Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic. Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal.
The Five Wounds
£16.99JULY INDIE BOOK OF THE MONTH
It’s Holy Week in the town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla is to play Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep.
Vivid, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and Tio Tive, keeper of the family’s history. In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, Kirstin Valdez Quade brings to life the struggles of her characters to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
The Glass Aisle
£9.99The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park. In the book’s title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses the canal to the site of an old workhouse. Tormented by the voices of former “inmates”, he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem’s present-day walker. The collection is in three parts. In the first section, a thematic poem, ‘The Hesitant Song’, “orchestrates silence” while playing “the sea’s soft pedal” to convey the loss of a mother’s songs. Familiar “visitors” from earlier books: Brown Helen, Catrin Sands et al, haunt poems where the sea and music hold a nineteen-sixties childhood in its place. The book’s closing cadence combines love poems with some raw elegies.
The Glovemaker
£6.99London, 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
£7.95The 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
£8.99Mukesh 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 Hardest Climb
£16.00After becoming the first man to conquer the highest peak on each of the seven continents at the first attempt, Alistair’s hardest climb was surviving a brain haemorrhage. Foreword by Sir Chris Bonington. The book is fascinating and inspiring, and contains some stunning photographs from Dr. Sutcliffe’s climbing expeditions. His wife Clare also makes personal contributions at the end of each chapter.
The Harvest of Chronos
£10.99An 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
£9.95Playful 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 Hidden Language of Symbols
£30.00A stimulating narrative and reference resource that guides the reader through the most significant symbols from worldwide art history.
Why do we reach for the red rose on Valentine’s day? Where did the owl gain its reputation for wisdom? Why should you never trust a fox? In this visual tour through art history, Matthew Wilson pieces together a global visual language enshrined in art: the language of symbols.
Symbols exert a strong hold in the image-saturated 21st century, and have done so for thousands of years. From national emblems to corporate logos and emojis, our day-to-day lives abound with icons with roots in the distant past. Expert art historian Matthew Wilson traces the often surprising trajectories that symbols have taken through history, from their original purposes to their modern meanings, identifying the common themes and ideas that link seemingly disparate cultures. Thus we meet the falcon as a symbol of authority from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to the medieval aristocracy; the dog as stalwart companion from the classical era to the Renaissance; and the mythical phoenix as a symbol of female power connecting a queen in England with a goddess in China. We also see moments of radical reinterpretation and change: the transformation of the swastika from an auspicious symbol of hope to one of hate.
From Palaeolithic cave paintings to contemporary installations, Wilson deftly guides us through this world of symbols, showcasing their enduring ability to express power, hope, fear and faith, and to create and communicate identities, uniting – or dividing – the people that made them.
The Hill
£9.99Angela 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?