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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.

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.

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?

J SS Bach

£14.00

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.

Jack

£18.99

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

James Kelman (Writers and their Work)

£4.99

One of the most powerful and provocative writers to have emerged in Britain in recent years, James Kelman has engendered a good deal of controversy over his widely reported, but often misconceived use of `bad’ language words. This introduction to the whole range of his works, from the early short stories through the plays and essays to the Booker Prize winning novel How Late it Was, How Late and the latest experimental fiction, examines the embattled Kelman’s literary politics. H. Gustav Klaus pays close attention to the Scottish culture in which Kelman’s writing was nurtured, to the uncompromising treatment of the `underclass’, the intricacies of the narrative voice and the existentialist anguish behind it. A writer of international reputation now, Kelman’s principled anti-authoritarianism raises uncomfortable questions about the continuing reality of class, dominant social and literary values and the role of writers in our time.

Jane Eyre

£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.

Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre was immediately recognised as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847. Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.

Jerusalem

£10.00

Radio Castle, the voice of Jerusalem. Your local news broadcast from the bed of housebound ex-fireman, John Edward. His son doesn’t want to join the family business, and his wife is in love with the town’s ex-policeman, but Radio Castle continues to broadcast despite everything life throws at John Edward. When the coveted position of Entertainment Secretary at the Jerusalem Social Club comes up, only one man stands between John Edward and his dream – a certain ex-policeman. As two old adversaries square up, who will get the girl and who will get the job?

 

This dark musical comedy premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse in November 2005.

Jew Suss: His Life and Afterlife

£6.00

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), better known as Jew Suss, was a court Jew, who advised the Duke of Wurttemberg. Clever and handsome, even ostentatious, he fitted easily into court life, despite his humble origins. However, his unpopular economic policies made him enemies and when the Duke died suddenly Suss was arrested, convicted of ‘destestable abuses’ and exectued in Stuttgart in an iron cage. His spectacular rise and fall inspired a media outpouring in the eighteenth century and he has been much written about subsequently. In the twentieth century two films were made about him, one British in 1934, the other German in 1940. Goebbels took an active interest in the latter. After the war its director, Veit Harlan, was tried for Crimes against Humanity for having made the film. Despite his acquittal, the film’s association with the Holocaust remains controversial to this day.

John Beard

£30.00

As the first major documentation of John Beard’s work, this definitive monograph provides a visual chronology of Beard’s work from 1978-2011. Featuring a highly original design presentation and exacting production standards, this beautifully created book contains essays by Stephen Bann and Anthony Bond, two of the art world’s leading cognoscenti. Their sympathetic and comprehensive appraisal of Beard’s art will be of great interest to art students and academics, curators and all thosewho are interested in the visual arts.

 

Designed by multi-award winning designer John Warwicker, a founding member of the influential design-group ‘tomato’, the book also contains a 180-page plate section of Beard’s work. A thing of beauty in its own right, this book will be highly sought after by admirers of Beard’s distinctive work and by design-conscious book buyers and art collectors the world over.

John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star

£9.90

In his lifetime Gielgud was acclaimed as the finest classical actor of the twentieth century and Jonathan Croall’s biography from 2000 was instantly recognised by critics as a masterful achievement, one that was ‘unlikely to be surpassed’ (Sunday Telegraph). Since that time however a considerable amount of new material has come to light and the passing of time has allowed a new candour. John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star sees this peerless biographer return to his subject to offer the definitive life of Gielgud.

 

For this new biography Croall’s exhaustive research has included over a hundred new interviews with key people from his life and career, several hundred letters from Gielgud that have never been published, scores of letters written to him and archived versions of his film and television work. As Gielgud worked increasingly in this medium during the last third of his life much greater attention is given to this than in the earlier work.

 

Fresh light is thrown on his professional relationships with figures such as Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans, and on turbulent episodes of his private life. The overall result is a a much more rounded, candid and richly textured portrait of this celebrated and complex actor.

Jubilee Lines: 60 Poets for 60 Years

£6.50

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy brings together a dazzling array of contemporary poets (sixty in fact) to write about each of the sixty years of Her Majesty’s reign. An all star line up – which includes such celebrated writers as Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Wendy Cope, Geoffrey Hill, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott, alongside some of the newest young talent around – address a moment or event from their chosen year, be it of personal or political significance or both. Through a series of specially commissioned poems, Jubilee Lines offers a unique portrayal of the country and times in which we have lived since 1953, culminating in an essential portrait of today: the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, the way we honour and remember. Brilliantly introduced by Carol Ann Duffy, Jubilee Lines is an unforgettable commemoration: not only a monarch’s reign but of a way of life.

Judderman

£5.99

London, early-1970s. In a city plagued by football violence, Republican bombings, blackouts and virulent racism, a new urban myth is taking hold. Among the broken down estates, crumbling squats and failed projects of a dying metropolis, whispered sightings of a malevolent figure nicknamed the Judderman are spreading. A manifestation of the sick psyche of a city, or something else?

Karl Lagerfeld Unseen: The Chanel Years

£60.00

A glamorous tribute to Karl Lagerfeld’s highly influential creations for Chanel captured behind the scenes by US Vogue photographer Robert Fairer in beautiful, never-before-seen images.

Casting a new light on one of the best-loved chapters in fashion history, Karl Lagerfeld Unseen: The Chanel Years illuminates key Chanel collections and creations from behind the scenes.

From discreet client fittings in rue Cambon’s immaculate black-and-beige salons to previously unseen backstage moments that show models, hairdressers, stylists, make-up artists and Karl Lagerfeld himself at work, Robert Fairer’s stunning and high-energy photographs capture the elegance, glamour and spirit that defined Karl Lagerfeld’s shows for Chanel.

Texts by Karl Lagerfeld’s collaborators and friends provide a fresh perspective on his creative process and reveal the stories behind the now iconic designs. A treasure trove of inspiration, this publication will be a must-have reference for fashion and photography lovers alike, and for dedicated Chanel fans the world over.

Kierkegaard’s Cupboard

£9.99

The life of the influential Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has inspired this book of poems by Marianne Burton. Burton, whose debut collection, She Inserts The Key, was nominated for the Forward Prize, has delved closely into the extensive writings both by and about Kierkegaard. She has distilled this knowledge into a sharp, lively and intriguing series of poems, all variations of the 14-line sonnet, written in the first person, so that we seem to hear the voice of the philosopher in all of the moods which characterize the various periods of his life.

Killing the Horses

£14.00

In the woods the earth made myths. Angry myths. Savage myths. Myths that could kill… 

 

Set on the outskirts of Bradford over the course of a single day, Killing The Horses follows Ryan and Liam, teenagers skiving off school in the woods at the edge of the city. But the woods hold secrets. Dark secrets. And the landscape aches with the violence of all that has been done there.  
 
There is blood on the ground and a sickness in the earth. As the memory of what has happened there climbs back out of the hillside, the boys learn that they are too entangled in the savagery of the land around them to be able to separate themselves from it. 
 
Killing The Horses is rooted in the landscape and dialect of West Yorkshire and fuses realism with the mythical. It brings the macabre and darkly-religious world of the American Southern Gothic to the north of England. 

Kingdom

£10.00

A stranger appears out of nowhere in a prison library and assaults a guard. Locked in solitary confinement, he relates his story to a listener over the course of one night.

 

Kingdom, the third novel from Russ Litten, spins together magical realism and hard-boiled psychodrama into a heartbreaking urban fable of human awakening. Ghosts may not exist – but sometimes they are real. Do you believe in life before death?

Kitch

£10.99

Combining life-writing with poetic prose, Anthony Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener.

 

The poet and musician Anthony Joseph met and spoke to Lord Kitchener just once, in 1984, when he found the calypso icon standing alone for a moment in the heat of Port of Spain s Queen’s Park Savannah, one Carnival Monday afternoon. It was a pivotal meeting in which the great calypsonian, outlined his musical vision, an event which forms a moving epilogue to Kitch, Joseph’s unique biography of the Grandmaster.

 

Lord Kitchener (1922 – 2000) was one of the most iconic and prolific calypso artists of the 20th century. He was one of calypso’s most loved exponents, an always elegantly dressed troubadour with old time male charisma and the ability to tap into the musical and cultural consciousness of the Caribbean experience. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post War Britain. In the process Kitch, as he was affectionally called, single handedly popularised the calypso in Britain.

Land of Marvels

£7.99

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. Yet forces beyond his control threaten his work.

 

The Great War is looming, and various interest groups are vying for control over the land and its manyprizes. And Somerville, whose intention is purely to discover and preserve the land’s ancient treasures finds his idealism sorely tested. Naked ambition, treachery and greed are at play, in a thrilling adventure from the master of the historical novel.

Lapvona: The unmissable Sunday Times Bestseller

£14.99

Discover the new novel from the author of TikTok sensation My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

In a village in a medieval fiefdom, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot in a power struggle that puts faith to a savage test.

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.

Lark & Termite

£8.50

Set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, Lark and Termite is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.

 

At its centre are: Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance; their mother, Lola; their aunt, Nonie, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the early chaotic months of the Korean War.

 

Told with enormous imagination and deep feeling, the novel invites us into the hearts and thoughts of each of the leading characters; even into Termite’s intricate, shuttered consciousness. We are with Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire. We see Lark’s hopes for herself and Termite, and how she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed for ever. This is the first novel for nine years by one of America’s greatest writers, Lark and Termite is rich, rewarding and unforgettable.

Last Chance Texaco

£20.00

This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.

 

Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner Rickie Lee Jones, in her own words. It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music.

 

With candour and lyricism, the ‘Duchess of Coolsville’ (Time) takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, to her years as a teenage runaway, through her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs – ‘Chuck E’s in Love,’ ‘Weasel and the White Boys Cool,’ ‘Danny’s All-Star Joint’ and ‘Easy Money’ – but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors.

Learwife

£14.99

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2021
‘Seductive . . . Gorgeous’ The Times
‘A fresh perspective on an age-old tale’ Irish Times

 

I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here.’

 

Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear’s queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story.

 

Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice – one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.

 

Giving unforgettable voice to a woman whose absence has been a tantalising mystery, Learwife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal and how history bleeds into the present.

Leasungspell

£8.99

657AD. Northumbria, one of the seven warring Anglo Saxon kingdoms, where Celtic Christianity, Roman Christianity, old pagan beliefs and magic clash. Oswin, a monk from the monastery of Herutea travels to Streonshalh bearing secret letters from the Abbess Hild. This means treading a path across a volatile wilderness where faith, history, myth and folklore intertwine to form the threads of the Wyrd. Written in a powerful mix of Old English, modern English and northern dialect forms, Leasungspell is a narrative epic poem about a pre-Modern world. It is a tale of twisting digressions, dreamscapes and stories within stories. It is also an anti-epic, a fool s yarn, the small tale of a nobody wandering alone through the Dark Ages.

Leaving Fingerprints

£12.00

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and now divides her time between Bombay and London. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings. Leaving Fingerprints is her fourth book of poems and drawings from Bloodaxe.

In these poems, the only thing that is never lost is the Bombay tiffin-box. All the other things which are missing or about to go missing speak to each other – a person, a place, a recipe, a language, a talisman. Whether or not they want to be identified or found, they still send each other messages, scattering a trail of clues, leaving fingerprints.

Lessons

£19.00

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling new novel from Ian McEwan.

Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers .

While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.

Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland’s wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means – literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.

Roland’s story asks can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?

‘Superb… A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel’ Independent

Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the “commonplace and wondrous” intertwining of global history and everyday life’ Daily Telegraph

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