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The Natural History of Selborne

The Natural History of Selborne

£14.00

ByGilbert White

A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments. Bird song and seasonal migrations were noted. The feeding habits of frogs, bats and mice were jotted into his diaries and nature journals, as were the simple delights he felt hearing a cricket in the meadow or a blackbird in the hedgerows. The extraordinary detail of the natural history he described has given us, two hundred years later, a glimpse into ecosystems untouched by industry and an account of how changes in global climate can affect local weather patterns. Gilbert White is now considered England’s first ecologist. The Natural History of Selborne is one the most published books in the English language. Yet the most enduring quality of his writing is the spirit of curiosity that bounds across every page, inspiring us to explore the abundance of life at our doorsteps and around our parishes.

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The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship Between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin

£18.00

“A wonderful, fascinating account of two stars of the post-war literary generation, and their mutual influence.” –Good Book Guide

Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were close from the moment they met as undergraduates at Oxford. They were, however, very different personalities. Kingsley was charming, sociable, and completely amoral whilst Larkin was awkward and insecure. Their relationship with one another is fascinating in part because it provided the inspiration behind their work. In fact, parts of Lucky Jim were based on Larkin’s life, a fact the poet begrudged for the rest of his life. An extraordinary study of one of the most controversial literary friendships of the twentieth century.

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The Odyssey

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.

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The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead

£9.99

BySimon Armitage

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.

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The Ormering Tide

The Ormering Tide

£14.00

ByKathryn Williams

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.

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The Perseverance

£9.99

ByRaymond Antrobus

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.

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The Poetic Hooligan

The Poetic Hooligan

£9.95

ByRichard Haldenby

Illustrated with over 100 original photographs

Anyone who experienced the hardships of being brought up in a two-up, two-down house in the fifties and sixties, without any hot water or an indoor toilet, will identify with Richard Haldenby’s ‘warts and all’ account of his childhood in the deprived backstreets of Hull.

But those troubled times provide just the beginning of his remarkable story.

After starting work at 15 during the austere 1970s, he was married at 20 and became a hardworking family man before the decade was over.

Behind this facade of normality however lay a much darker side, as he was drawn into the violent world of gang culture, street fights and football hooliganism…

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pls

The President’s Room

£8.99

ByRicardo Romero

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.

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The Price

The Price

£5.00

ByArthur Miller

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.

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The Professor

The Professor

£3.99

ByCharlotte Bronte

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.’

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quentin blake

The Quentin Blake Book

£30.00

A fully illustrated overview of the life and work of the universally loved Quentin Blake, released ahead of the artist’s 90th birthday in December 2022.

Quentin Blake is an artist who has charmed and inspired generations of readers. Tracing Blake’s art and career from his very first drawings – published in Punch when he was 16 – through his collaborations with writers from Roald Dahl and John Yeoman to Russell Hoban and David Walliams, to his large-scale works for hospitals and public spaces and right up to his most recent passions and projects, acclaimed author Jenny Uglow here presents a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake’s extraordinary body of work, with accompanying commentary by the artist himself.

With unprecedented access to the artist’s entire archive, The Quentin Blake Book reveals the stories behind some of Blake’s most famous creations, while also providing readers with an intimate insight into the unceasing creativity of this remarkable artist.

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The Rabbit Hutch

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

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The Reactive

The Reactive

£8.99

ByMasande Ntshanga

In a city that has lost its shimmer, Lindanathi and his two friends Ruan and Cecelia sell illegal pharmaceuticals while chasing their next high. Lindanathi, deeply troubled by his hand in his brother’s death, has turned his back on his family, until a message from home reminds him of a promise he made years before. When a puzzling masked man enters their lives, Lindanathi is faced with a decision: continue his life in Cape Town, or return to his family and to all he has left behind.

Rendered in lyrical, bright prose and set in a not-so-new South Africa, The Reactive is a poignant, life-affirming story about secrets, memories and the redemption that comes from facing what haunts us most.

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reater1

The Reater Issue 1

£8.00

The Reater brought together challenging new British writing with the best of Southern California. It features established names alongside excellent newcomers. Interleaved among the poetry and prose are interviews, reviews, and striking illustrations. The Reater is also the best U.K. outlet for new and reprinted material by the great names of L.A./Long Beach literature: Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, Fred Voss, Joan Jobe Smith and others.

Contributors

Dean Wilson, Thomas Kretz, Andrew W. Pye, Carol Coiffait, Labi Siffre, Lisa Glatt, Seamus Curran, Peter Werner, Fred Voss, Ian Parks, Jacqueline Karp Gendre, Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, Dorothy Cowlin, Shane Rhodes, Devereaux Baker, Graham Hamilton, Joan Jobe Smith, R. Gerry Fabian. Photographs by James Brown & Simon Rees

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reater2

The Reater Issue 2

£8.00

The shadow of the moth flicks the page I’m reading. I look up to the white blindness of a tired yellow bulb hanging heavy with temporary heat. My eyes recoil, staining the page with silverfish jizz. After blinking a couple of times, I push the button, raise the nib and I’m back to this…

Contributors

Devereaux Baker, Andrew Parker, P.D. Oliver, Maurice Rutherford, Rosemary Palmeira, Joan Jobe Smith, T. Anders Carson, Matthew Firth, Jaqueline Karp-Gendre, Ian Parks, Brian Docherty, Fred Voss, Peter Knaggs, Dean Wilson, Jules Smith, Linda K, Seamus Curran, Peter Didsbury, Joanne Pearson, Charles Bukowski, Norman Jackson, Andy Fletcher, Geoff Stevens, Gerald Locklin, Labi Siffre, Carol Coiffait. Illustrations by Kevin Rudeforth

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reater3

The Reater Issue 3

£7.95

Issue 3 contains poetry by Brendan Cleary, Geoff Hattersley, Roddy Lumsden, Labbi Siffre, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Gerald Locklin, Greta Stoddart, Simon Armitage. Reviews of ‘On The Buses With Dostoyevsky’ by Geoff Hattersley, ‘Sacrilege’ by Brendan Cleary, ‘New Blood’ a Bloodaxe anthology, and ‘Carnegie Hall With Tin Walls’ by Fred Voss.

Issue 3 also includes the first ever published interview with Charles Bukowski entitled ‘Charles Bukowski Speaks Out‘ by Arnold L. Kaye. – This is the first time the interview has been reprinted since its original publication in ‘The Chicago Literary Times‘, March 1963.

Contributors

Brendan Cleary, Gerald Locklin, Khan Singh Kumar, Peter Knaggs, K.M. Dersley, Roddy Lumsden, Joan Jobe Smith, Labi Siffre, Lisa Glatt, Carol Coiffait, Tricia Cherin, Charles Bukowski, Sean Burn, Devreaux Baker, Jules Smith, Rodney Wood, Fred Voss, Richard Whelan, Greta Stoddart, Maurice Rutherford, James Prue, Ben Myers, Simon Armitage, David Hernandez, Charles Bennet, B.A.J. Evans, A.A. Dodd, Dave Wright, Gordon Mason, Ian Parks, Andrew Parker, Michael Curran, Dean Wilson, Daithidh MacEochaidh, Jon Summers, Janet Oliver, Fiona Curran, Denise Duhamel, David Lyall, Raymond Robinson, Mark Mckain, Geoff Hattersley. Drawings by David Hernandez

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reater4

The Reater Issue 4

£9.95

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The Reater 5

The Reater Issue 5

£7.95

ByShane Rhodes, Various

The Reater seems to carry on a colloquial poetic conversation between the east coast of Britain and the west coast of America with readers and writers listening in from many points in the middle. Much of the work it publishes has the rare quality of language overheard, avoiding the preached at spoken to told off stuff that sometimes characterizes grander or more traditional work.” Simon Armitage

“The streetwise slab-sized Reater is streets ahead of any other magazine in giving the reader a working report on the buzzy special relationship between British and American poetry. The new writers it generously showcases in each chunky issue are often as startlingly original as the more familiar names. All are in touch with our times as well as with our selves.” Neil Astley

Contributors:

Rodney Wood, Peter Ardern, Brian Docherty, Sean Burn, Virgil Saurez, Felicity Tumpkin, Steve Timms, Steve Sneyd, Jacqueline Karp, James Prue, Andrew Parker, Mary Rudbeck Stanko, Ken Smith, Peter Carpenter, David Roberts, David Lyall, Jacqueline Sousa, Jo Pearson, Brendan Mcmahon, Dave Newman, Anna Woodford, Finella Davenport, B.Z. Niditch, Robert Nazarene, Rosemary Palmeira.

Paintings by Dee Rimbaud

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The River

The River

£9.95

The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke’s debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on.

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Rolling Stones 1972

The Rolling Stones 1972 50th Anniversary Edition

£30.00

ByAmelia Davis, The Rolling Stones

The year 1972 brought together two legends of rock ‘n’ roll at the peaks of their careers: Jim Marshall and the Rolling Stones. Selected by LIFE magazine to photograph the Stones’ EXILE ON MAIN ST. tour, Marshall had a week of unlimited access. The results are his now-iconic images of the band, onstage in their full glory and backstage in moments of unguarded camaraderie. Marshall’s ability to capture the essential spirit of an artist and the transformative power of music is matched only by the Stones’ larger-than-life energy. Fifty years after these photographs were taken, they retain the power to thrill and inspire. This definitive edition presents the images as they were meant to be seen: at a larger size and in the rich, high-contrast tones Marshall favored. The original content is enhanced with never-before-seen proof sheets and two new essays by photographer and film director Anton Corbijn and Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue. This is the ultimate, immersive experience of one of the greatest moments in music history.

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Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones In the Beginning: With unseen images

£40.00

“ The photographs are amazing – the Stones are still practically children, messing around, pulling faces and writing the odd song . “
GQ

“The finest single collection of Stones photographs I have ever seen”
Bill Wyman

NEW, EXPANDED EDITION CONTAINING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOGRAPHS.

In 1965 the Rolling Stones were big and about to be huge, when Bent Rej was given unprecedented access to a year in the eye of the rock ‘n’ roll storm, accompanying the band on its first full European outing: the Satisfaction tour.

The Rolling Stones In the Beginning is Rej’s collection of more than 300 intimate photographs of the band on stage, on the road and at home, documenting a year in the life of the Rolling Stones as they enjoyed their first taste of popular success.

Long a fan favourite, this brand new edition offers an even closer look into the making of music history with images recently unearthed from Rej’s archives.

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The Rolling Stones- 50 Licks

The Rolling Stones: 50 Licks

£12.50

ByPete Fornatale

On July 12, 1962, London’s Marquee Club debuted a new act, a blues-inflected rock band named after a Muddy Waters song – The Rolling Stones. They were a hard-edged band with a flair for the dramatic, styling themselves as the devil’s answer to the sainted Beatles.

A young, inexperienced producer named Andrew Loog Oldham first heard the band at a session he remembers with four words: ‘I fell in love.’ Though unfamiliar with such basic industry practices as mixing a recording, he made a brilliant decision – he pitched the band to a studio that had passed on the Beatles. Afraid to make the same mistake twice, they signed the Stones, and began a history-making career.

This is just one of the 50 classic stories that make up 50 Licks. Many are never-before told, some are from exclusive interviews – including with elusive bassist Bill Wyman – and all are illustrated and told by the people who lived them.

Half a century on, the Rolling Stones are still the greatest band working. And this is the book to commemorate their unparalleled achievement in rock music.

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51RTYfZq53S

The Rolling Stones: Unzipped

£35.00

ByThe Rolling Stones

Featuring fresh insights from Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie, Unzipped digs deeper than ever before into the Stones’ archives to present a comprehensive collection of Stones artworks, instruments, stage outfits and notebooks alongside key work by some of the legends of rock photography.

For almost 60 years the Rolling Stones have helped shape popular culture around the globe. Unzipped captures the compelling character and dynamic spectacle of the band through distinctive photography and interviews with the Stones themselves, tracing their impact and influence on rock music, art, design, fashion, photography and filmmaking.

Evocative archive photos, artworks, outtakes and memorabilia, together with dazzling images of the band’s instruments and outfits, plunge you into the ever-changing world of the Stones. Many of the instruments and outfits are paired with pertinent archive photos, so you can examine the detail and see the objects in use. Peppered throughout with engrossing and insightful new commentary by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood, the book also features a compelling introduction by Anthony DeCurtis, which chronicles their career, and perceptive articles by some of their most important creative collaborators, including Buddy Guy, Don Was, Anna Sui, John Varvatos, Martin Scorsese, Shepherd Fairey, Patrick Woodroffe and Willie Williams.

Bold, glamorous and captivating – and beautifully bound and finished – Unzipped is the perfect showcase for ‘the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’.

With 400 illustrations, 370 in colour

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The Sacred River

The Sacred River

£6.50

ByWendy Wallace

Harriet Heron’s life is almost over before it has even begun. At just twenty-three years of age, she is an invalid, over-protected and reclusive. Before it is too late, she must escape the fog of Victorian London for a place where she can breathe.

Together with her devoted mother, Louisa, her god-fearing aunt, Yael, and a book of her own spells inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Harriet travels to a land where the air is tinged with rose and gold and for the first time begins to experience what it is to live. But a chance meeting on the voyage to Alexandria results in a dangerous friendship as Louisa’s long-buried past returns, in the form of someone determined to destroy her by preying upon her daughter.

As Harriet journeys towards a destiny no one could have foreseen, her aunt Yael is caught up in an Egypt on the brink of revolt and her mother must confront the spectres of her own youth.

Award-winning journalist and writer Wendy Wallace spins a tale of three women caught between propriety and love on a journey of cultural awakening through an exquisitely drawn Egypt. In prose both sumptuous and mesmeric, she conjures a sensibility akin to that of E M Forster and Merchant Ivory.

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The Satsuma Complex

The Satsuma Complex

£16.99

‘Funny, clever and sweet… there is a lot of Mortimer’s ridiculousness’ – Sunday Times
‘The much loved comic proves adept at noirish fiction in a debut whose surrealist humour sets it apart’ – Observer

My name is Gary. I’m a thirty-year-old legal assistant with a firm of solicitors in London. To describe me as anonymous would be unfair but to notice me other than in passing would be a rarity. I did make a good connection with a girl, but that blew up in my face and smacked my arse with a fish slice.

Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.

And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life…

A page-turning story with a cast of unforgettable characters, The Satsuma Complex is the brilliantly funny first novel by bestselling author and comedian Bob Mortimer.

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the scene

The Scene of My Former Triumph

£7.95

ByMatthew Caley

Matthew Caley’s debut Thirst [1999] was nominated for ‘The Forward Prize For Best First Collection’ and much acclaimed: “shaped and honed to a mosaic brilliance” – Ken Smith.

‘Stunning invention and remarkable versatility’ – Sophie Hannah.

“Thirst is a joy -comic, witty, even touchingly poignant” – Time Out.

This second collection ‘The Scene Of My Former Triumph‘ extends his patrol across the liminal borders between urban myth and the myth of pastoral escape.

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The Sea on Fire

The Sea on Fire

£5.00

ByHoward Cunnell

When they were young men, Kim and his best friend, Garland Rain, travelled the world. They worked as dive guides, living free and easy by the sea. Garland is still out there, but Kim’s life is different now. He’s married and a father of three.

Still longing for the freedom of the water, Kim agrees to help Garland run a one-time trip to the spectacular Brothers Islands in the Red Sea. What neither man expects is just how badly wrong it will go. Drugs and violence collide, and not everyone returns safely.

Back on dry land, Kim finds that the decisions you make in the moment can come back to haunt you, even follow you home.

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The Sea, the 70s and the Passage

The Sea, the 70s and the Passage

£12.00

ByGraham Durrant

Yearning for a life at sea from the age of 13, the author couldn’t wait to leave home and join the British Merchant Navy. But to do that was harder than he’d thought.

Profound dyslexia (undiagnosed in the 1960s) offered him little prospect of getting qualifications and in 1968 he left school at 15, just after his parents’ marriage had broken up. But perseverance in hardship, plus a chance meeting on a train, launched him on a round-the-world odyssey, sailing on many different ships out of the Royal Docks, London.

It was a real education – in more ways than you’d ever imagine.

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Secret To Not Drowning

The Secret To Not Drowning

£8.99

ByColette Snowdon

How did the girl who once dreamed of being a Charlie’s Angel become such a cowed and submissive woman? Marion’s life appears perfectly fine but she is controlled and bullied by her husband, her only respite a once a week trip to the local swimming pool. A chance meeting with an old school-friend develops into a secret relationship. She could leave her abusive and unfaithful husband. But is it too late?

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The Secret World of Polly

The Secret World of Polly Flint

£6.99

ByHelen Cresswell

“Have they told you?” His voice was lowered now, he was speaking of secrets to be told.
“Told me? What?”
“Of the lost village…”

As soon as she arrives in Wellow, Polly Flint knows there is magic in the place. And she should know because she is an unusual girl who can see things others can’t.

Polly Flint seems to be able to call up a village that had disappeared from the face of the earth – and the people who lived in it, as they slip in and out of time.

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The Seeker King

The Seeker King

£11.50

A woman in the audience once handed Elvis a crown saying, “You’re the King.” “No, honey,” Elvis replied. “There is only one king — Jesus Christ. I’m just a singer.” Gary Tillery presents a coherent view of Elvis’s thoughts through such anecdotes and other recorded facts.

We learn, for instance, that Elvis read thousands of books on religion; that his crisis over making bimbo movies like Girl Happy led him to writers such as Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, and Helena Blavatsky; and that, while driving in Arizona, an epiphany he had inspired him to learn Hindu practice. Elvis came to believe that the Christ shines in everyone and that God wanted him to use his light to uplift people. And so he did. Elvis’s excesses were as legendary as his generosity, yet, despite his lethal reliance on drugs, he remained ever spiritually curious. When he died, he was reading “A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.” This intimate, objective portrait inspires new admiration for the flawed but exceptional man who said, “All I want is to know and experience God. I’m a searcher, that’s what I’m all about.”

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Seven Moons

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: Winner of the Booker Prize 2022

£16.99

ByMaali Almeida

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

A searing satire set amid the murderous mayhem of Sri Lanka beset by civil war

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest.

But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Karunatilaka is back with a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.

‘Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’ The Booker judges

‘Recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita … Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history’ Guardian

‘Outstanding… the most significant work of Sri Lankan fiction in a decade.’ New European

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