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Being Alive

Being Alive

£12.00

‘Being Alive’ is the sequel to ‘Staying Alive’, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who’ve wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. ‘Being Alive’ is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. ‘Staying Alive’ didn’t just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn’t read poetry for years because it hadn’t held their interest. ‘Being Alive’ gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A third companion anthology, ‘Being Human’ (2011), completes this modern poetry trilogy.

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Being Elvis

Hardback Paperback

Being Elvis: A Lonely Life

Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and traditionally black rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which simply blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America.

In Being Elvis veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world’s most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way.

Intimate and unsparing, Being Elvis explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, ultimately offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.

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belle and sebastian

Belle and Sebastian: Illustrated Lyrics

£20.00

ByPamela Tait, Stuart Murdoch

A beautiful collaboration between Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch and illustrator Pamela Tait: a unique visual reinterpretation of Murdoch’s favourite Belle and Sebastian songs.

From the imagined lives of the passengers riding Glasgow buses in the early 1990s to questions raised about the status quo and musings on the meaning of religion, Stuart Murdoch, frontman of Scottish indie pop band Belle and Sebastian, has written some of the most captivating lyrics of the past two decades. Belle and Sebastian recorded their first critically acclaimed album Tigermilk in three days, played a sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic, and famously forgot their drummer, dressed in his pyjamas, outside a Walmart. Their songs have animated many film soundtracks, developing a cult following that has helped to define the sound of indie music as we know it today.

The first book in the ‘Illustrated Lyrics’ series combines the words selected from over twenty-four years of Belle and Sebastian songs with specially commissioned illustrations from Scottish artist Pamela Tait, whose intricate and whimsical character illustrations Stuart Murdoch stumbled upon and fell in love with when he rediscovered old fan mail Pamela had sent to him over a decade ago. Set with expressive typography, this is an exceptional publication that will seduce even the most devoted fans to ‘see’ these wonderful songs afresh.

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Ben Johnson- Selected Poems

Ben Jonson: Selected Poems (Poet to Poet)

£3.99

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their introductions, the selectors offer a passionate and accessible introduction to some of the greatest poets in history. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was born in London, and became a leading poet, playwright and essayist of the Elizabethan age. In 1598he killed an actor in a duel but escaped hanging by pleading benefit of the clergy, and by 1616 had re-established enough Court favour to be awarded a pension by James I – in effect making him the first Poet Laureate.

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Beyond the Orchid House

Beyond the Orchid House

£4.99

ByRuth Elwin Harris

Sisters of the Quantock Hills is the compelling saga of the lives and loves of four sisters – Frances, Julia, Gwen and Sarah Purcell – and their neighbours, the Mackenzies. Set during the early part of the last century, the series encompasses two World Wars, and the sisters’ individual stories are told against the backdrop of major historical events happening at the time.

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billion-dollar-babies

Billion Dollar Babies

£15.00

Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies (Warner Bros. Records, 1973)

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Billy’s Drift

£6.50

ByCharles Ashton

This is the story of Billy Stuart. It tells of the hours he spends on the hills, catching rabbits in his bare hands or walking with his beloved dog, Drift. It tells of his troubles, his shocking accident and the mysterious events leading up to it. But it’s the story too of the narrator Theresa Thain. It tells her account of what happened eleven years before, and is interspersed with extracts from her diary of the following year, revealing her complex, often frustrating relationship with Billy. The two stories, though separate, are inextricably linked in their absorbing attempts to get to the heart of a seemingly impenetrable enigma.

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Birdsong on Mars

Birdsong on Mars

£11.99

The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, ‘fallen into birdsong on Mars’. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can’t yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet – on a human heath, tormented by loss – hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense.

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Birth School Metallica Death

£9.90

ByIan Winwood, Paul Brannigan

Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world’s biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock ‘n’ roll sagas.

No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group’s history and an insiders’ view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band’s limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet’s ‘HQ’ outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.

Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band’s inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.

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black-neon

Black Neon

£8.99

Lupita and Genesis have just wasted a drug dealer, stolen his stash and hit the open road with a suitcase full of dirty money. Little do they know that their road trip will set them on a collision course with a side of America darker and weirder than any of them have ever known.

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Black Teeth

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile

£12.00

ByAdelle Stripe

“You write what’s said, you don’t lie. Or say it didn’t happen when it did all the time…”

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile is a novel inspired by the life and work of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.

Best known for her classic black comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Dunbar wrote three plays before dying at a tragically young age. This new literary portrayal features a cast of real and imagined characters set against the backdrop of the infamous Buttershaw estate during the Thatcher era.

A bittersweet tale of the north / south divide, it reveals how a shy teenage girl defied the circumstances into which she was born and went on to become one of her generation’s greatest dramatists. Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile is a poignant piece of kitchen sink noir that tells Dunbar’s compelling story in print for the very first time.

Adelle Stripe’s writing has been described as ‘a genuine breath of fresh air’. Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile is her keenly anticipated debut novel.

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Black Water Sister

Black Water Sister

£14.99

This mischievous Malaysian-set novel is an adventure featuring family, ghosts and local gods – from Hugo Award winning novelist Zen Cho.

Her grandmother may be dead, but she’s not done with life . . . yet.

As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it’s not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, jobless and just graduated, she’s abandoning America to return ‘home’. But she last saw Malaysia as a toddler – and is completely unprepared for its ghosts, gods and her eccentric family’s shenanigans.

Jess soon learns her ‘voice’ belongs to Ah Ma, her late grandmother. She worshipped the Black Water Sister, a local deity. And when a business magnate dared to offend her goddess, Ah Ma swore revenge. Now she’s decided Jess will help, whether she wants to or not.

As Ah Ma blackmails Jess into compliance, Jess fights to retain control. But her irrepressible relative isn’t going to let a little thing like death stop her, when she can simply borrow Jess’s body to make mischief. As Jess is drawn ever deeper into a world of peril and family secrets, getting a job becomes the least of her worries.

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Blackbird, Bye Bye

Blackbird, Bye Bye

£9.95

Moniza Alvi’s new book is unified by birds. Her creations ‘Motherbird’ and ‘Fatherbird’ are inspired by her parents, and by the loss of her father and by his emigration from Pakistan. Among the many bird-related poems are versions of the French poets Jules Supervielle and Saint-John Perse, and poems ‘after’ the paintings of the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo. Blackbird, Bye Bye is Moniza Alvi’s first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection At the Time of Partition, published in 2013.

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Booth

BOOTH: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

£9.99

ByKaren Joy Fowler

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022. A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH. AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 OPEN BOOK.

‘Accomplished, immersive and profoundly satisfying’ Cathy Rentzenbrink ‘Effortlessly resonant … breathes rich imaginative colour in her characters’ Daily Telegraph

From the million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family.

SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS. ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER.

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.

‘In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority’ Guardian

‘Karen Joy Fowler’s novels are wildly inventive and deservedly popular’ Daily Mail

‘Booth is a triumph!’ Ruth Ozeki

‘Captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage … An unalloyed triumph’ Literary Review

‘Brilliantly recounts the story of the American theatrical dynasty that produced Lincoln’s assassin’ Sunday Times Book of the Month

‘Her finest, most beautiful novel to date’ Neel Mukherjee

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Boy About Town: A Memoir

£8.00

ByTony Fletcher

As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history.

Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity.

Featuring a vibrant cast of supporting characters (from school friends to rock stars), and built up from notebooks, diaries, interviews, letters, and issues of his now legendary fanzine Jamming!, Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

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Brandon Pithouse

Brandon Pithouse

£7.95

There were once more than a thousand men and boys worked at Brandon Pithouse in County Durham. Today the site of the colliery is a green wilderness. John Seed has set out to recover the lost and silent world of Durham pitmen in the company of Walter Benjamin, Sid Chaplin and Charles Reznikoff. Composed of fragments of recorded speech, parliamentary reports and newspapers, Brandon Pithouse is a book about the experience of labour about the pain and danger of working underground, about the damage to the human body and about the human relationships created in such conditions. It is a study in the attachments and distances which shape our relationships to place and time, the negotiations required to reconnect ourselves to a world that ceased to exist in the 1990s. It is a set of notes for an unmade Eisenstein film and a footnote to chapter 10 of the first volume of Marx s Capital. And like any history, it is a ghost story.

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Brief lives – Christopher Meredith

Brief Lives

£9.99

ByChristopher Meredith

From the nightmarish first story set in the South China Sea in 1946 to the final piece, set nowhere at the end of time, Brief Lives demonstrates in a short compass a huge range in technique and milieu and a unity of theme and sensibility. It opens naturalistically but is distinctly non-realist by the close. We meet an ex-collier in 1950 anguishing over whether to return to the pit, a young mother in the early 1960s quietly shepherding those around her through a bleak Christmas day, an industrial chemist in this century plunged into vortices of memories that cause him to question his grasp of the world, and more. Meredith’s fiction has been marked by its willingness to push at literary boundaries, and Brief Lives is no exception: it is an intense distillation of Meredith’s abiding concerns to explore how memory shapes the present and the present shapes memory, the interplay between beautifully realised individual lives and the wider historical process, and the paradox of simultaneous human isolation and community.

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Brutally Honest

Brutally Honest

£9.50

ByMelanie Brown

The tell-all memoir from the loudest, proudest Spice Girl – and the truth behind the headlines

As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.k.a Scary Spice, has been an international star since her twenties. Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success.With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free.

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Bryony Lavery

£5.00

ByBryony Lavery

A Wedding Story
‘A spry if wintry comedy about a lesbian, a wedding-day bonk, and a mother who contracts Alzheimer’s… It dares to find failure and frivolity (a sure sign of dramatic honesty) in the face of domestic hell. Funny, frank and churning by turns, this struck me as a lyrical new play about the unlyrical business of coping when real life knocks on the door.’ Daily Express

Frozen
Winner of the TMA Best New Play award and Eileen Anderson Central Television Award for Best Play.

‘Bryony Lavery’s big, brave, compassionate play about grief, revenge, forgiveness and bearing the unbearable.’ Guardian

‘A major play… thrilling, humane and timely.’ The Times

‘Consistently surprising and even bravely comic… The almost thriller-like promise of the play’s climactic confrontation is like a time-bomb ticking in the back of your head.’ Independent

Illyria
A young war reporter gets abducted and finds herself in the midst of a cycle of violence, in a land crippled by hate.

More Light
‘Triumphant… A startlingly metaphorical play about the creation of art.’ Independent

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Bubblegum

Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop

£4.99

ByNick Brownlee

Has the global phenomenon that is Pop Idol completely ruined pop music, or is it just the natural revolution of a genre of music that has always been manufactured? From Tin Pan Alley via The Monkees and finally to boy bands, this is the complete history of the most successful genre of music ever. Manufactured acts have been the money-spinning mainstay of the pop industry for decades. Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop takes a decade-by-decade look at some of the music industry’s more cynical creations from the 1950s to the 21st century, encompassing acts such as The Monkees, The Bay City Rollers and The Spice Girls, as well as the phenomenon that is Pop Idol and its siblings.

This revealing study includes interviews with the movers and shakers of the pop world and the artistic armies behind their successes, including Chinn and Chapman, Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Simon Fuller, Paula Abdul and Cathy Dennis. The result is a comprehensive look back at some of the fly-by-nights of pop and a DIY guide to becoming a pop star, listing the dos and don’ts of making it in the pop music industry.

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Bunnyman- A Memoir

Bunnyman: A Memoir

£20.00

ByWill Sergeant

Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and ’70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War.

From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool’s punk club, Eric’s, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents’ council estate house, and to finding a community – friends, enemies and many in between – with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few.

It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like ‘Lips Like Sugar,’ ‘The Cutter’ and ‘The Killing Moon’. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.

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Bushcraft Survival

Bushcraft Survival

£6.99

In BUSHCRAFT SURVIVAL Ray Mears travels to some of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses in the world, and experiences first hand the survival techniques of different indigenous cultures.

From the Hudson Bay in Canada, via Tanzania and the jungles of Venezuela, to the moors and highlands of Britain, BUSHCRAFT SURVIVAL explores a range of locations and techniques from indigenous peoples. Drawing on centuries of knowledge as well as his own experience, Ray demonstrates how our enjoyment of the wilderness comes through respect for our surroundings and the people, plants and animals that live there.

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Byron

Byron and the Beauty

£8.99

ByMuharem Bazdulj

Byron and the Beauty is loosely based on Byron’s biography and takes place during two weeks of October 1809, during his now famous sojourn in the Balkans. Besides being a great love story, this is also a novel about East and West, about Europe and the Balkans, about travel and friendship and cruelty. Bazdulj marvellously combines facts with imagination, history and romance, resulting in an exceptionally beautiful novel. The author’s style has something of the subtle lyricism and chronicle-like tranquillity of his countryman Ivo Andric, but also a touch of the oriental baroque richness associated with Orhan Pamuk, making this a book which is both erudite and innovative, with a daring sense of humour.

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Caminante

Caminante

£7.99

Milner Place: Born 25/1/30… First job timber faller before doing National Service 1948/50… Some time at Agricultural College but opted out… worked as barman… managed farm and estate… got involved in horse racin… 1953… sailed to South Africa… worked as undergound surveyor copper mines… managed fruit farm…1955 returned to England to manage another farm, left and entered journalism…1958… sailed to new York …1958/61… Bahamas, did some surveying work. Bought a dinghy and learned to sail. Then a sloop, freighting and fishing… skippered for Burl Ives… took over yacht in Miami… returned to England… left for Majorca…Dec 1961… smuggling run to Algiers during war, cargo one man… Supplemented income by smuggling money from England for Brit living abroad…1962… took over staysail schooner, working Balearics and wintered yacht in Ibiza…spent time in Bilboa and Madrid…Sailed to Italy, left Autumn 1963…wintered Madrid…1964…bought sloop and summered Burnham-on-Crouch…1965…took job as captain of ketch built in Holland and sailed her to Lisbon…met Count of Barcelona and his son (now King of Spain). Wintered in Gibraltar and Tangiers, then to Cadiz and Seville…back to Lisbon where did several ocean races with Count of Barcelona…quit job with ketch and sailed with Count for England…1966 Autumn…sailed own sloop to Bordeaux and via Canal du Midi to Toulouse…left for Denmark to convert a working trading schooner to a yacht… 1967…sailed same to Malta to effect conversion…did a delivery to Greece (minus keel)…August 1968 quit job and returned Spain…then France to pick up own sloop…lost it off Spanish coast, wandered round Andalucia, returned London courtesy of consular services…back to Malta to do honeymoon charter for couple, sailing to Tunisia via Lampedusa…1969…employed as consultant by Forte’s International Hotels on projects in Sardinia and Greece…left for Ecuador for job as consultant Tourist Investments S.A…9 months organizing marlin fishing fleet, Punta Carnero…left for Peru under threat of charge of Piracy, consultancy work on Manu River project, others in Brazil and Panama…1971… England and then Grand Canary, where scratched a living as a photographer…1973…took off for Mexico to write unsuccessful novel…1976…moved to Majorca now with partner, Dorothy and stepson Paul…1977 first poems published in Spanish…trip to Canada – hashish smugglers – didn’t…1979/82…Boroughbridge, N.Yorks… worked as petrol station attendant, filling shelves at supermarket, night-watchman and running a B&B…1982/87… ran hotel in Alston, Cumbria until bankrupt…Jan 1987…came to Huddersfield, went to workshops, became sort of poet.

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Canada

Canada

£7.95

ByJohn Hartley Williams

John Hartley Williams’s Canada explores a country of the mind, where whatever mania comes to mind becomes its own reality, and writing happens automatically. In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems which make you feel like the hairs on a pony’s neck. Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on the alarums of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final coda blows innocence off the map for good and all. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 1997.

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Carol Ann Duffy: Collected Poems

£30.00

ByCarol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy’s first Collected Poems includes all of the poems from her nine acclaimed volumes of adult poetry – from Standing Female Nude to Ritual Lighting (2014) – as well as her much-loved Christmas poems, which celebrate aspects of Christmas: from the charity of King Wenceslas to the famous truce between the Allies and the Germans in the trenches in 1914. Endlessly varied, wonderfully inventive, and emotionally powerful, the poems in this book showcase Duffy’s full poetic range: there are poems written in celebration and in protest; public poems and deeply personal ones; poems that are funny, sexy, heartbroken, wise. Taken together they affirm her belief that ‘poetry is the music of being human’.

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Case Study

Case Study

£14.99

ByGraeme Macrae Burnet

“I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.” London, 1965.

An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling – and often wickedly humorous – meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

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Case Study

Case Study

£9.99

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GORDON BURN PRIZE

‘A page-turning blast.’ Times

‘Genuinely affecting … a very funny book.’ Guardian

‘Burstingly alive and engaging.’ Telegraph

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED HIS BLOODY PROJECT.

‘I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.’

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman suspects charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite of involvement in a death in her family. Determined to find out more, she becomes a client of his under a false identity. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both sides: the woman’s notes and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

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Centenary Selected Poems

£14.99

Centenary Selected Poems marks the poet’s 100th birthday and is the first book to reveal the full range of his poetry. All his natural and invented voices speak here – animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by famous, imaginary and anonymous people – in all sort of forms and styles – sonnets, science fiction constructions, concrete poetry, sound poems, his own invented stanzas – together with his evocations of place, in particular his inexhaustible home city of Glasgow. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

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Cherry Pie

Cherry Pie

£9.99

ByHollie McNish

Cherry Pie is a collection by Hollie Poetry, inspired by her grandparents’ advice on newspapers, war, sex and tinned cherries. The poems collected in Cherry Pie hold personal meaning for Hollie as well as being those which are most often requested by audiences in theatres, pubs and at festivals up and down the UK. The book is illustrated by a selection of artists from across the globe.

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Chris Killip

Chris Killip

£50.00

ByKen Grant, Tracy Marshall-Grant

The definitive, full-career retrospective of the life and work of Chris Killip (1946-2020), one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers.

‘I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution. It happened all around me during the time I was photographing’ Chris Killip, 2019

Grounded in sustained immersion and participation in the communities he photographed, Chris Killip’s keenly observed work chronicled ordinary people’s lives in stark, yet sympathetic, detail. His photographs are recognized as some of the most important visual records of 1980s Britain; as editor of this book Ken Grant reflects, they tell the story of those who ‘had history “done to them”, who felt its malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer with whom they shared so much of their lives, refused to yield or look away.’

Published to coincide with the first full retrospective of Killip’s life and work at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, this book, designed by Niall Sweeney & Nigel Truswell at Pony Ltd, presents photographs from each of his major series alongside lesser-known works. It includes a foreword by Brett Rogers, in-depth essays by Ken Grant tracing Killip’s life and career, and texts by Gregory Halpern, Amanda Maddox and Lynsey Hanley.

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Chump Change

Chump Change

£9.99

A largely autobiographical novel which tracks three crazy weeks in the turbulent, alcohol-bingeing life of Bruno Dante as he awaits the death of his father. The result is a harrowing descent through a Hollywood hell that roars with anger at the falseness of American values.

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