Books either anticipated or surprising - just out of the carton. Follow the links for more information, to purchase these books or to have them put aside for you.
Undergoing a breakdown, an artist moves to her grandmother's cottage in rural Ireland, where she confronts her memories and nature's ineluctable cycles of life and death, pattern and disintegration. An excellent new novel from the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither.
"Immensely sensitive, carefully calibrated, original and affecting." - Guardian
>> Hear Baume on A Line Made by Walking.
"I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down." - Miranda July
Cortázar's novels and short stories ignited a whole generation of Latin American writers, and had an enthusiastic following through the Americas and Europe. In this series of masterclasses he discusses his approach to the problems and mechanisms of fiction writing: the short story form, fantasy and realism, musicality, the ludic, time and the problem of literary "fate".
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed." —Pablo Neruda
Wilkins' writing is both light and deft as he brings us inside the head and world of Amy, a store detective at Cutty's (for which read Kirkaldie and Stains) in the weeks leading up to the department store's closure. Why is Amy being interviewed by the police? What will change in her unremarkable life?
In this book, Solnit continues the sharp important work she began in Men Explain Things to Me with this collection of commentary essays on feminism, misogyny, gendered binaries, masculine literary insecurity and related topics.
"No writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance." - Maria Popova
>> Which other Solnit books have you read?
Adichie received a request from a childhood friend for advice on how to raise her baby girl as a feminist, and has responded with this considered approach to both the broad issues and the minutiae of raising a child free from sexist conditioning. Much of the advice is pertinent to adults as well, with warnings against Feminism Lite, the dangers of likeability and the conflation of appearances with morality. A follow-up to We Should All Be Feminists.
>> Adichie discusses this book.
Kingsnorth's novels have been intimately concerned with the relationship of a person, and of peoples, to the land. In this very individual book, the former green activist argues that the concept of 'sustainability' is a sop that enables humanity to continue living and consuming without guilt rather than decivilise themselves in a way that would make a difference for the planet. By turns provocative, frustrating, inspiring and visionary; always urgent.
>> Read a sample.
>> The Four Degrees.
An English governess in Moscow gets caught up in various ways in the Revolution of 1917 and the tangle of idealism and ideology that surrounds it.
A novel exploring the psychological and humanitarian crises that face the "guest workers" who enable Dubai to grow and function but who have no citizenship or welfare rights in the UAE.
Painter and author Leonora Carrington's fascinating account of being taken "over the border" into Spain, into insanity and being held in an abusive lunatic asylum in Spain after her partner Max Ernst was imprisoned by the Germans.
>> "The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope."
Drawing inspiration from fairy tales and folklore, Little Nothing is the story of a peasant couple who long for a child, who, when he comes, turns out to be no ordinary child.
"Marisa Silver delivers a tale as mysterious as anything the Grimm Brothers might have collected. Little Nothing celebrates not only the unruly and lost parts of all our lives but also the possibility of their reordering and comprehension." - Los Angeles Times
"'Little Nothing is the key to its own box, which opens and opens, transcending the limits of the very tale one thought one was reading. This book is a beautifully realised riddle." - Rachel Kushner
Eric Ravilious's wood engravings and watercolours captured the spirit of mid-century England. The group of artists that gathered about him formed an artistic node between their influences and those they inspired. Beautifully produced and profusely illustrated.
Two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks, one tracing a 1970 road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; the other a contemplation of California following the 1976 Patty Hearst trial.
Poets disimprove with age and should die young./Should resemble shooting stars./Should trace short arcs of fizz and fire/and then disappear.
"The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work." — John Ashbery
"The experience of reading Works and Days is exhilarating; it’s like encountering a new, never-before-seen contemporary artwork you know will stand the test of time. It reaches back to the beginning of art by way of its political economy of the everyday, its honest humor about the ridiculousness of the writer’s experience in 21st century life, its emphasis on solidarity with the exploited. There is no other book from this year I’d more like to read again." - Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire
Corballis argues with both God and Chomsky to persuade us that language is indeed the product of evolution and has its precursors throughout the animal kingdom.
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects. Now it paperback.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." - Owen Jones
The concept of number arose from our attempts to divide and grapple with the 'real' world, but numbers also exist in a world of their own, independent of the 'real' world. What are the relationships between the two?
England is in a state of environmental and economic crisis. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. A woman known as 'Sister' leaves her oppressive marriage to join an isolated group of women in a remote northern farm at Carhullan, where she intends to become a rebel fighter. But can she follow their notion of freedom and what it means to fight for it? Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Detective Gordon has retired, and Buffy is the sole detective at the small police station in the forest. It is not easy for a police officer to be alone. Especially when there are strange noises outside the station at night. Buffy decides to seek out Gordon to help solve the mystery. After all, two police think twice as well as one. Two police are twice as brave!
This enjoyable series began, logically, with The First Case, followed, complicatedly, by A Complicated Case.
Whether he is tracking great yellow bumblebees in the Hebrides or orchid bees through the Ecuadorian jungle, Goulson's wit, humour and deep love of nature make him the ideal travelling companion.
We work against it every day but it holds our lives together. How on earth did we explain its effects before we had the theory?
"The finest cosmology writer of our day." - Matt Ridley
>> Newton's theory has a musical application.
Sometimes things happen (storms, babies, magic, hairdressers, practical jokes) and things just aren't the same afterwards, and sometimes these changes make us laugh. A very silly before-and-after book.
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