April Spritz: Pre-orders
Sun's out, puns out: get set for the Bank Holiday weekends with the finest of new titles – playful and serious, radical and restorative – to pair with your beverage/sandwich of choice. 10% off all month!
Astrid Alben, illustrated by Zigmuns Lapsa, Little Dead Rabbit
Form meets content in this story of a dead rabbit illustrated with die-cut pictures in a lockdown collaboration between two international artists.
Jessica Campbell, Rave
First makeover, first sleepover, first love: Lauren finds everything with Mariah, but will her evangelical family hold her back? Intense experience translates to intense visual storytelling.
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy
Buchenwald offers an idyllic new life to Frau Hahn. Except for the work camp, which she could ignore – if only her husband wasn't running it. When she meets a prisoner, Dr Weber, she has to question her oblivion.
Maggie Gee, The Red Children
A haunting Ramsgate-set parable about migration and climate change, exploring how communities come together and fall apart around ideas of otherness.
Signe Gjessing, translated by Denise Newman, Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus
Clear, sparkling, concentrated, gorgeous: everything you don't associate with Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, Signe Gjessing has brought forth and polished with joy.
Lavinia Greenlaw, The Built Moment
How do you hold things together when everything is always falling apart? How do you make something as everything unravels? Lavinia Greenlaw's new collection undertakes this making at the edge.
Ashley Hickson-Lovence, Your Show
Ashley Hickson-Lovence draws on the propulsive second-person poetry of You Are the Ref to shape the story of the UK's first Black senior referee as he blows his whistle on his highest-profile match.
Liam Konemann, The Arena of the Unwell
A headrush of a novel: for everyone who has ever (not) made it to work hungover, or stared longingly at the hottest couple in the bar, or loved a band so hard that your world ended when they broke up. So many feels.
So Mayer and Corinn Columpar, eds. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor
Super-timely essay collection that takes a look at parenting and caring through the lens of film, and vice versa – expect Agnès Varda, Prevenge and Jane the Virgin, along with conversations with filmmakers and artists making (it) work.
Lucy Mercer, Emblem
What does it mean to stand for something? Motherhood sends Lucy Mercer to look at the unique art of the emblem, conjuring layered meaning and irreducible strangeness in these striking poems.
Janelle Monáe, The Memory Librarian, And Other Stories of Dirty Computer
Jane 57821 is back – this time in codex form, but always breaking boundaries. Multi-talent Janelle Monáe expands and explores the world of Dirty Computer in these compelling and liberating tales.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler, there are more things
Melissa and Catarina are friends of many dimensions: sisters in the struggle who share Brazilian heritage and London life, although different histories. Caught up in national and international struggles from 2016, they offer radical possibility.
Edward Shawcross, The Last Emperor of Mexico
A butterfly-obsessed Austrian archduke gets embroiled in a guerrilla war in Mexico, a country he's supposed to be ruling but knows nothing about. What happened next will (not) shock you… A great history of the folly of colonialism.
Ali Smith, Companion piece
With a swift's grace, Ali Smith returns with this story of birds and girls, locks and lockdown, "curlew or curfew," and the strange, necessary friendships between two – well, three; no, four – women in need of stories.
Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston, Bolla
Crossing was a BF fave, and Bolla does not disappoint: an intense love story between a young married Albanian and a Serbian man who meet in Kosovo. No borders can stop passions – or secrets.
Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo
Hold on to your tear ducts, it's Douglas Stuart's follow-up to Shuggie Bain and it's everything: swooningly romantic, tensely threatening. Stuart takes so beautifully seriously the radical power of love to change us & the world.
Preti Taneja, Aftermath
How do you survive the unsurvivable? Preti Taneja's short, stunning book renews the power of language and narration even as she viscerally unpacks their inadequacy in the face of trauma and its systemic causes.
Max Tobias, Rebecca Oliver and Daisy Terry, The Dusty Knuckle
Our local bakery (and social enterprise) want you to have better bread, and special sarnies. Two words: potato sourdough. Get the book, bake yourself happy.
Alice Walker, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker
Wisdom from one of the great writers, with the stories behind the stories, of how her education, activism, intimate life, travels, research and chance encounters shaped her essential novels.
Jessica Yun, The Unofficial Studio Ghibli Cookbook
Yes, it includes Ponyo-style ramen with ham. Plus red bean bao and a ton of other adorable and easy-to-make treats for the full Ghibli-lifestyling experience. Bring some cuteness to your kitchen.
