Books of the Year 2024 🎄

It's our favourite time of the year, when we get to play Santa and stack up bookish goodies under your tree! The Burley Fisher elves – Cat, Emma, Enya, Forest, Lu, Oliver, Sam & So – have been in the workshop crafting our reviews for your delectation. Click on any link to order online, or sleigh by the shop to pick up & get them wrapped up!

Fiction, Short Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Younger Readers, and Zines all blurbed passionately below, or hit the collection and get stuck in. As ever, we're celebrating indie presses, writing in translation & our collective bookish curiosity to bring you some books you may already love – and some that may surprise you (and your family, your friends, your co-workers & anyone you need to Secret Santa…).

Our overall Book of the Year is ADAM BY GBOYEGA ODUBANJO! Get your crackers and paper crowns ready to celebrate it in-store on 18 December 2024, with readings and presence (if not presents). As Emz says,

Most of my favourite books of this year have been from events that have been held in the shop. Sometimes the best way to be introduced to a book is hearing the author speak about it!

Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with our events & find out 2025's best books direct from their authors in-store…

Fiction 

Shushan Avagyan, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, A Book, Untitled (Tilted Axis)

So says: This book came out on the cusp of 2023 and 2024 or else it would have been on mine – and, frankly, everyone’s – 2023 Book of the Year lists. It’s an immediately-absorbing conversation heard in scintillating fragments between two Armenian women writers in the present about two Armenian women writers in the past, who wrote on either side of the genocide. It’s about archives and erasures, both colonial and patriarchal, and it’s about translation (Avagyan is a translator herself, and Cachoian-Schanz’s endnotes set a new standard in contextual information and reflection, bringing the reader into the conversation). It’s about longing, letters, friendship, fragments, and the deeply-felt proposition that what we write and dream is ongoing through others in ways we cannot imagine, but this book allows us to hope.

Marouane Bahkti, How to Leave the World (Divided)

Forest says: A story of geographical, social and cultural migration that integrates the importance of holding on to your faith as you move forward. There were observations in this writing which I found truly uncanny. It did what the best writing does in how it showed me as the reader things I didn't know I already knew.

Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches, Mammoth (And Other Stories)

Oliver says: The third installment in Eva Baltasar’s triptych, each (independent) novel following the life of a compellingly stoic queer woman, Mammoth is by far the most unhinged (but just as good!) The protagonist is a young woman disenchanted with everyday existence but determined to become a mother. She decides to take matters into her own hands by having as much unprotected sex with random men as she can. Her quest takes her to an isolated farmhouse, where her life, rather than calming down, becomes increasingly raw and desperate. Brilliantly translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, Baltasar’s prose is unique in its power to absorb into the hyper-intense psyche of her heroines. Although seemingly detached from life and people, all three protagonists experience true passion, rendered visceral on every page. The publisher describes this slim book as a “small bomb of a novel,” and I can’t express it better myself.

Camille Bordas, The Material (Serpent’s Tail)

Sam says: It’s a bold thing to write a novel about the inner lives of comedians. Even bolder for a writer who has previously written two novels in French, and who is writing their first novel in English. The Material is truly impressive! It follows students and teachers on a fictional stand-up comedy MFA in Chicago over the course of a day as they prepare for a show at a comedy club. We flit between these variously neurotic perspectives to probe at what lies behind the desire to make people laugh, the result is as profoundly sad as it is funny!

Mark Bowles, All My Precious Madness (Galley Beggar)

Emz says: Mark Bowles’ All My Precious Madness prompts questions such as: what (or who) is the sequel to the ‘Angry Young Man’? The answer, judging from this book, is the ‘Angrier Old Man’. Bowles’ narrator sits in a cafe trying to write a memoir about his father. Instead, he is relentlessly distracted by a regular who takes loud phone calls about ‘value propositions’ and other infuriating business jargon. The narrator meanwhile looks back on his life as a working-class northerner who made it to Oxford, the illness that left a void in his life and his complicated relationship with his father. Just like Thomas Bernhard’s narrators have a deep hatred for Austria, Bowles’ seething monologue is a rejection of English culture in favour of the continent. Bonus rec also read this year: Concrete by Thomas Bernhard - anger, despair, hilarity, a genius with form.

Rachel Cusk, Parade (Faber)

Forest says: In Parade, Cusk uses the form of the artist's biography as a vehicle to explore gender, violence and fate.  It is a departure that shows her enjoying a bit more freedom in her work from the previous formal experiments of the outline trilogy and second place.  Nonetheless it retains a treatment of the novel that is born of a deep understanding of the tradition and the origins of personal narrative and language contained within us all. Truly brilliant work. 

Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer, You Dreamed of Empires (Harvill Secker)

Sam says: This novel, which reimagines the arrival of Cortes and his stinking band of maniacs into Tenoxtitlan at the heart of the Aztec empire, is a fantastically fun experiment in alterity. Told from the perspective of the Aztecs, including emperor Moctezuma, it attempts to reconstitute the subjectivity, and motives of these people on the cusp of great and terrible change. The result is a hallucinatory, sometimes visionary, account of the beginning of an alternate future. 

Rebecca Gisler, About Uncle (Peirene)

Emz says: Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle uses a Kafka short story as a springboard to an absurd, animalistic and addictively visceral tale about a dysfunctional family. At the centre of it all is Uncle - a solitary, idiosyncratic, gross but endearing character.

Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost (Vintage)

Enya says: Enter Ghost is a deeply intelligent novel that follows 48 year old Sonia, an actress escaping an affair in London by visiting her homeland for the first time in 15 years. While in Haifa, she becomes involved in the performance of an Arabic version of Hamlet. The cast is diverse, varying from residents of a refugee camp to a pop star, highlighting the complex relationships amongst Palestine’s ‘48ers’ and how these differences are exploited by the Israeli army. Sonia navigates the struggle of making art, or doing anything, under occupation, her own personal ghosts and harrowing childhood memories growing up in Palestine. Hamlet is smartly woven throughout as the cast rehearse, offering a clear mirroring regarding the power of performance and art making in the face of the oppressor.

Miranda July, All Fours (Canongate)

Oliver says: There’s no writer like Miranda July. Quirky in the most sincere way, strange beyond comprehension, and wholesome in the most messed up way, her stories always seem to take detours you never expect, no matter how hard you might try to anticipate them. All Fours follows a perimenopausal queer artist who, instead of driving to New York for a work engagement, decides to begin a new art project in her first pit stop: she’ll renovate the cheap hotel room she’s staying in. She also becomes infatuated with a hot young dancer, a relationship doomed not just because of their age difference, but because they are both married. Day after day, they meet and chat and do. not. kiss. in spite of the mounting sexual tension between them. This thwarted affair does not occupy even half the book, however, and it’s only the beginning of a much larger journey for our strange but strangely compelling and endearing protagonist. Unapologetically sexual (sometimes, though not too often, even sexy), hilarious, and really off-beat, July’s latest is an exploration of artmaking and middle age like no other (and one of those rare but necessary  novels that is not about queerness but it’s effortlessly queer from start to finish). Give it a go!

Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel, The Singularity (Fitzcarraldo)

Forest says: The three-part structure and beguiling prose behave like an incantation, imparting on the reader a somatic effect. Like the experience of loss itself - there is the lead up, frantic, repetitive, relentless. The loss, shocking and detached. And the immediate aftermath, a rumination on the intricacies of cruelty and displacement.

Lu says: In the midst of global crises and war today, this is a particularly charged and resonant study of displacement, of refugees and questions of motherhood. I was drawn to the story’s setting - set everywhere and nowhere with the vast changing entities of desert and sea - repeatedly encountered as a mother searches for her lost daughter and the narrative focuses increasingly on the children she neglects, and a third woman with a link to the missing daughter and her own pregnancy trauma. Grief resides between past and present, written tenderly and meandering, from chaotic cacophony to one’s simple pure voice. What chilled me and remained was that the pain of one mother is the pain of another, the indelible imprint of a child felt, generation to generation. Written and read in the second person, one joins the act of such witnessing.

Hannah Levene, Greasepaint (Nightboat)

Enya says: Greasepaint follows a cast of butch lesbians, gender queer Jazz musicians and Yiddish anarchists through the 1950s New York queer scene. They forge an underground community of lost souls trying to navigate their dreams, politics and desires out in the big city. It reads like a play or a boozy and choppy set of nights out that flash back in murky vignettes. What I love the most about the book is occupies an imperfect and embodied anarchist politics outside mainstream understandings of an anarchist politics (the bros!!). It’s choppy, hazy and uncertain with the characters constantly feeling out things as they go, act and speak. This commitment to feeling things and figuring them as they go is boughed by their love for one another, for a better world, and fierce attachments to each other. Ultimately, it’s fun: full of jazz, dancing, eating late out together at Marg’s deli, fucking and drinking. 

Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends (4th Estate)

Forest says: With scenes so familiar ie. the street of our very shop, the descriptive prose needs to be bang on, which McKenna delivers with aplomb. At certain points the names and players of this novel seem to merge and overwhelm. A mutable, amorphous sea of bodies and desire.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Little Brown)

Cat says: Sigrid Nunez is one of my favourite writers. She could be described as writing autofiction, but her writing is much too clever to fit into any category very easily. The Vulnerables is about an older woman in New York during the covid lockdown who ends up sharing her friend’s fancy Manhattan apartment with an irresponsible younger man and a parrot they’ve both been assigned to look after. The Vulnerables, like all of Nunez’s books, is funny and moving, she writes like nobody else. This book is particularly interesting for writers as it poses questions about what it means to writer and draws on many authors, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, and not so favourably, Joan Didion. I also like the way the character reflects on being an older woman who used to be very attractive, musing that if she had been the same age as her new Gen Z housemate, they would have definitely had sex.

Holly Pester, The Lodgers (Granta)

Sam says: The Lodgers is the debut novel by the poet Holly Pester and it’s a true poet’s novel. It traces the slippery relationships between a single mother, her daughter, and their Lodgers. In all of Pester’s work there is an interest in form and humour (her debut collection, also published by Granta, was called Comic Timing), and this novel unearths the absurdity of some of the traps of relationality that language places us in. There's so much written about Family and Home, but so rarely do people write about the people that squirm around at the edge of these ideas, the ones who draw the chalk outlines. The prose is such a joy, all the way through. So attentive to what is hidden in reflexive, idiomatic language and what is revealed in our interactions with kids. It's all so tender and exact. Anyone who wants to be a writer should read this!

Phoebe Stuckes, Dead Animals (Hodder & Stoughton)

Cat says: This dark, queer novel is for fans of Otessa Moshfegh's novels and Michaela Cole's I May Destroy You. A woman is assaulted at a party but can't remember what happened. As the memories come back to her, the trauma seems to seep into the rest of her environment, the bedsit she lives in, the restaurant where she works. This leaking is sometimes supernatural, but often just manifests in day-to-day social injustices we may find familiar - black mould in her rented flat, not being able to get a doctor's appointment. When she meets wealthy and attractive Helene, she is drawn to her not least because Helene knows the man that has assaulted her and is just as angry as her. Her relationship with Helene asks questions about the limits of women's solidarity with each other, taking into account class positions and disparity of wealth. This is poet Phoebe Stuckes’ first novel and she is a major talent, keep an eye on what she does next.

Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo)

Short Stories

Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady (Peninsula)

A set of essays written in 1960s New York by Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan. Brennan is both so chic and so melancholy, writing on her feet as she meanders throughout a gentrifying New York City and observes those around her in the street, in hotels and in bars. Reading Brennan’s snippets really helped to feel simultaneously lighter and more real. Making me to feel present as I walk around the city and observe things unfolding, while being able to have a slight distance that is afforded to you in the city. I must also note that this is a wonderful addition to Peninsula Press’ archival reprints, such as Love Leda.

Joel Lane, Lost District (Influx)

Emz says: Joel Lane’s The Lost District is a collection of short stories set amongst the industrial wastelands and grim council estates of Birmingham. They each offer striking moments of the uncanny, drifting through scenes of masochistic horror, nauseating erotica, shocking trauma and existential dread. What I found most uncanny were his descriptions of the weather which perfectly match my memory of growing up in Birmingham - too hot, too cold, raining, sleeting, overcast; miserable. But now I realise that it wasn’t the sky’s fault, it was what was underneath it. These stories made me tragically nostalgic for the depressing and, at the same time, exciting landscape of abandoned warehouses and empty carparks. It made me wonder whether Birmingham was still like that? But perhaps what I saw wasn’t as important as how I saw it.

Eileen Myles, Bread and Water (Hanuman Editions)

Lu says: As a long-time Eileen fan, I loved this debut short story collection. What felt initially like a departure from their more familiar poetry format, became a compact and rich continuation of Myles’ starkly honest autobiographical voice, effusing stories of being queer, working class and always in flux - with both people and place. I read this in one sitting on the train to Glasgow - thinking of Oisín who had just moved there and recommended it to me - and felt a warm recognition of Myles’ confrontation with pain and love, of coming close to another. Bread and Water sounds a truthful tone, with a wink of knowing mischiefness.

Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell, Childish Literature (Fitzcarraldo)

Sam says: This eclectic selection collection, written just after his first child was born, captures the luminous plasticity, limpid exhaustion and dissolution of self that comes with early fatherhood, all with his trademark slantwise playfulness. Might wait until Dylan is a little older before taking a heroic dose of mushrooms after reading the second story, though! 

Non-Fiction

Bianca Bosker, Get the Picture (Atlantic)

Oliver says: Bianca Bosker is a journalist like no other. After years of a successful career in tech journalism, she quit to dive into the world of wine enthusiasts. Her efforts to understand what the fuss is all about took her to the fanciest New York restaurants, an MRI scan, and to become a certified sommelier. She chronicles this journey in her first book Cork Dork, to which Get the Picture, can be seen as a loose sequel. This time around, Bianca wants to understand Art and the art world: is there really such a thing as Good Taste? Are some people really moved to tears by this, or are they all just full of it? And what is up with contemporary art?

In her quest to develop her Eye as an art aficionado, she attends the busiest art fairs, works as a gallery assistant, artist studio manager, and museum guard, and seeks out increasingly strange contemporary art. Acknowledging the greed and cliquiness of the artworld while also exploring the enriching qualities of art and artmaking, Get the Picture is an informative and entertaining book full of unforgettable personalities and crazy anecdotes. I highly recommend this book to art lovers, art sceptics, and art haters. I recommend Bianca Bosker. Her books are tangible arguments for engaging with life with open hearts and minds, and simply fun un-put-down-able non-fiction reads that can be hard to come by.

Chris Dorley Brown, A History of the East End (Nouveau Palais)

Emz says: Chris Dorley Brown’s A History of the East End contains photography from 1984 to the present of London’s East End. He captures the lifespans of tower blocks, from construction to demolition, and Hackney wastelands unimaginable to the post-Olympics spectator. One of the most striking compositions in the book is a 1988 photograph from inside The German Hospital in Dalston, where Marx had his appendix removed, above a photograph from the same angle of the same room which has been renovated into a luxury studio apartment. 

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Prototype)

Cat says: This collection of writing really inspired me and made me feel like writing. The stories are really short and refreshingly ambiguous, are they life writing, are they fiction? Who cares? They’re really cool. My favourite section was ‘Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read,’ where Dutton lists descriptions from literature of important dresses. Then she lists where they come from. If you’re a big reader it’s fun trying to work out if you recognise the quotes, from various sources, e.g Jane Eyre, The God of Small Things and The Book Of Frank by CA Conrad.

Lu says: Meandering glimpses of life and its wildness threaded together with considerations of the pictorial, time, the many dresses worn/encountered/posited as bodies, landscape and feeling. Questions of what it means to write collaboratively and to resist writing altogether. She makes her sensibility explicit, expressing in one essay, ‘how might fiction be conceived as a space within which we attend to the world… of opening spaces - prairies, paragraphs, rooms - in which the world can occur… can embody a specific way of looking?’ By looking Dutton means seeing and being, and being seen, a politics of attention. Spaces conjured feel both fresh and familiar due to how she attends to those spaces, drawing the eye to what we might have previously missed.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Sex & Selling Art (Verso)

Enya says: I’ve been a fan of Sophia Giovannitti’s work for a long time, her essays, interviews and performances range across numerous topics from selling sex, selling art, having sex, making art, capitalism, freedom, love, work, and incarceration. Her work combines theory, and the personal seamlessly. Working Girl orbits around the comparative acts of  selling sex and selling art, exploring what it means to sell these two things marked as ‘sacred’, when capitalism has corrupted everything we do and sell anyway, often monopolising and commodifying such sacred things. This isn’t to say that we should give into capitalism, but, more radically, examine how it operates in every element of our lives in order to attempt to live more freely: to spend less of our waking hours at the whim of our bosses, to ensure safety of sex workers and migrants and all suffering at the hands of capitalism, racism and the state, and to revel in beauty and desire. And this is what Sophia tries to do: work as little as possible for as much money as possible so she can make art, support her community and love in heaps.

Giovannitti is extremely generous throughout the book, at the beginning she writes that both art and sex act as ‘conduit[s] to a feeling’, something vital in comparison to much sterile discourse on both art and sex, and invites the reader to feel deeply throughout the book by giving insights into her own feelings and experiences throughout her life. She shares snippets of poetry from Frank O’Hara, lyrics from Leonard Cohen, joyous memories of hosting a huge party for her friends and details of a bloodletting performance between her and her boyfriend, all between the much harsher realities of the state, the law, death and the tapped psyches of a lot of men. 
I think this generosity and onus on feeling is vital in how we conduct our lives, how we think about contemporary discourse, which can often be usurped by liberalism, and how we make sure to break away from constraints, and to ensure freedom for all. So beautiful and full of life!

Jake Hall, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos (Trapeze)

So says: This book title had me at ‘solidarity’ and owned me at ‘chaos’: it’s a tribute to the brilliant, unresolved messiness of both activism and history, bringing formidable oral history to the fore in interviews and storytelling that put you in the centre of the action. Jake Hall has reported for half a decade on contemporary queer issues and activism for many important outlets, and that thrum of urgency is felt in their connected and informed narration here as they dive into the archive to find out how we got here, and what we can learn. If you want more to queer history than bad films about Stonewall, or a how-to on organising for sex worker solidarity or trans rights, or just some great gossip that will get you going (and get you through normie Xmas), Shoulder to Shoulder is a great read.

Isabella Hammad, Recognising The Stranger (Fern)

Cat says: Recognising the Stranger was originally a speech Isabella Hammad delivered as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, 9 days before the 7th October 2023. There is also an afterword written at the start of this year. Drawing upon Said, about whom she says, ‘The novel was the principal lens through which he viewed the world,’ Hammad discusses the device of recognition in narratives, how in order to recognise something, a character has to have already known it but for it to have been obscured in some way. This thread of recognition or what Aristotle called ‘anagorisis’, she then applies to the Palestinian's struggle and in particular how the rest of the world views Palestine, ‘Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.’ She packs so much into this astonishing little book and I’m now really looking forward to reading her novels.

Lewis Hancox, Escape from St Hell (Scholastic)

Graphic novels are having a big mainstream moment. Trans writing is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Introducing: Lewis Hancox’s work. 

In his first memoir Welcome to St Hell, Hancox explores growing up in a small town, coming to terms with his transness, and coming out to family and friends, with humour, honesty, and a rounded monochromatic graphic style that is both very modern yet reminiscent of cartoon classics. This year’s sequel, Escape from St Hell, is even better. In-text Lewis, now off to college and dealing with all the changes this entails, uses the framework of “video game levels” to process both the challenges and rewards of transitioning. I found it profoundly moving and relatable; it’s one of my favorite depictions of early transition I have ever read. Lewis’ neuroses, fears, but also joys and friendships, are all depicted so charmingly it is impossible not to root for him even at his lowest. One of those books I wish to put in everyone’s hands, as I know it’ll win over even the most staunch opposers to the comics medium, and a worthy addition to the ever growing canon of trans memoir.

Estelle Hoy, saké blue. Selected Writings (After 8 Books)

Lu says: saké blue is a moving collection of writings on and around visual art, addressing notable figures from Francesca Woodman to Marlene Dumas. Beautiful, lyrical and cut-throat, Hoy offers a gathering of critical essays, art reviews and poetic fiction. Passages reflect on the economies of activist practices and discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queerness, desire, boredom and melancholy. Within is a sharp attentiveness to life’s shifting values and the masquerade of knowledge-as-power, embracing non-understanding, of not-knowing. Hoy’s work - often genre discerning - proposes an ‘art writing’ distinct from’ art criticism,’ that artists are pulled towards ‘multiple plots’ and art may be the place for subjectivities to take shape.

Fanny Howe, London-rose: Beauty Will Save the World (Divided)

Lu says: London-rose dwells on, and thrives with, uncertainty. It’s a work of wandering, driven by the potentialities opened through identitary, geographic and spiritual restlessness - dualities of self/other, moral/theological, earthly/celestial explored throughout. Put simply, the protagonist - unnamed - begins discontentedly working as an error-corrector for institutional grading systems, before finally choosing to leave her job, embarking on a journey from Wales to Paris, to Dublin, Scotland, Birmingham and beyond. Here invoked is an amorphous revolution, one that is emotive, abolitionist, resistant. Fragmented and penned with the gauzy imagism of dreams, Howe’s writing is replete with historical apocrypha, lists, monastic citations and ephemera, in communication with an anti-capitalist and anti-individualist political mode. She expresses, ‘don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.’ It left me assessing the meaning of work, what constitutes the ‘self’ and the place, and need for, dreaming.

Pedro Lemebel, translated by Gwendolyn Harper, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays (Pushkin)

Oliver says: Queer, gender non-conforming, staunch communist (but always critical of the Left’s queerphobia), and just utterly iconic, Pedro Lemebel was one of the best Chilean writers, period. They rose to prominence as half of the performance art duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse–seriously, search them up!), then moved to prose later on. Lemebel’s daring crónicas (a very idiosyncratic Latin American genre of non-fiction that blends  storytelling, reportage, and personal essayism) discussing homosexuality, queer culture, politics, intimacy, colonialism, social unrest, and class, were read on radio and published in prominent newspapers at a time when this had seemed unthinkable. Lemebel’s literary recognition came way too late even in Chile, and so it is unfortunate but expected that it should come late to the English speaking world as well.

Pushkin Press’ A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays finally addresses this wrong with the flair Lemebel’s work deserves. Gwendolyn Harper’s inventive translation takes in all the schmaltzy, camp, grimy yet punny brilliance of Lemebel’s prose and renders it in fresh English that captures the heart. Arranged beautifully and highlighting the most inviting of Lemebel’s work, Harper and editor Rory Williamson have created a wonderful and informative introduction to Lemebel’s life and work, which absolutely every reader needs to experience.

(PS. After you’ve devoured this book, make sure to check out Lemebel’s brilliant (and only) novel My Tender Matador, releasing officially in the UK on January 30th, 2025, also by Pushkin Press.)

Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 (the87Press)

So says: A great publication from the ever-ambitious and urgent 87Press, a lively conversation between two remarkable poets and thinkers about and entwining desire, politics, gossip, philosophy, creativity and their experience of illness. Lorde is now well-known in the UK with her backlist published by Penguin since the revelatory force of Silver Press’s collection Your Silence Will Not Protect You, but utterly shockingly none of Pat Parker’s equally incendiary poetry is currently in print here, so it’s doubly important that 87Press are giving us a chance to hear her voice. It’s a privilege to be party to their extraordinary conversations – and also a companionable push to get organising as well as writing, and sharing our thoughts with each other. Letters may be becoming a lost form, but collections such as this are both revealing and inspiring of what an art they were in the hands of such dazzling writers.

Carmel McMahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History (Duckworth)

Forest says: This book addresses our mutable relationship with time. Deftly using this lens to examine personal narratives of trauma, addiction and loss.  McMahon poses the question of why her life and lives like hers have been touched by such grief.  A remarkable book.

Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture (Saqi)

So says: An epic woven of many voices, Daybreak in Gaza offers nearly 100 interviews and non-fiction narrative pieces by Gazan residents and long-term workers. It’s co-edited by Mahmoud Muna, writer, publisher and manager of the Educational Bookshop, Israel’s only Arabic-language bookstore, with three internationally-experienced journalists and communications workers, bringing a sensibility that blends urgency and literary style. From ancient bathhouses and 4th century churches lovingly remembered as they now lie in ruins to the under-acknowledged Armenian and Roma communities of Gaza, this is a dazzlingly encyclopaedic work whose very plurality and force of presence underline its lyrical resistance to genocide and epistemicide.

Nicholas Royle, Shadow Lines (Salt)

Emz says: Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines is a book about books: conversations overheard in bookshops, quests to collect books and trace their history, stories about publishing, stories about stories. A delight! 

Poetry

Hasib Hourani, rock flight (Prototype)

So says: The tension between a rock and its flight, between ground and air, between the resistance of the Intifada in the gesture of the thrown rock, and the devastation of genocidal Israeli occupation in the unending fall of rubble, is the motive force of this stunning debut poetry collection, an epic that is, geologically, both compressed and constantly shifting. Written in seven chapters, it brings the reader into the page as both an unstable landscape and confined space, finding both flux and moments of dazzling focus. Like Layli Long Soldier in Whereas, Hourani uses repetition to embody the structuring relentlessness of the occupation, as he cites its operations of surveillance and policing, and to refigure it through his unforgettable language.

Gboyega Odubanjo, Adam (Faber)

So says: Gboyega Odubanjo’s epic, Bible-rewriting, East London-representing poetry collection ends ‘in the name of my man and my man somebody say amen’. It’s impossible not to reply a heartfelt Amen to this extraordinary prayer / protest / play / phone video of a collection that sings with the voices we hear around us on Kingsland Road every day running, jumping and shouting through for joy, recognition and grieving. This is a quintessential writing of contemporary London and its global connects, and a book dear to Burley Fisher’s heart that we heard in progress through many of Gboyega’s readings at the shop.

You can listen via our podcast to him chatting to Tice Cin and Frankie Miren, with Will Harris in the chair, about writing real Londons from our 2021 festival: a recording can’t bring him back to us, but it keeps him with us as witness to his brilliance. Like a nine night, Adam comes to remember in tears and laughter and above all family: claiming deep kinship with a Black boy found heinously murdered in the Thames in 2001 and named “Adam” by police, Odubanjo sounds out possible lives and relations through deep spirit and topspin to give life that itself gives, with the giving big generosity that shone from Gboyega as a writer, editor and being.

Kathy Pimlott, After the Rites and Sandwiches (Emma Press)

Cat says: This poetry pamphlet by Kathy Pimlott published by Emma Press deals with the grief after the sudden death of her partner. I decided I wanted this to be one of my books of the year after reading the second poem ‘No Shock Advised.’ The title here is a command a defibrillator displays when somebody’s heart beat isn’t shockable, this poem locates us in the surreal moment when someone has just died or when we realise that someone has died.  

because there’s nothing to be done
And it’s done.

The repetition of ‘done' is simple and powerful, the task of trying to save the person is done, the heart is done, the life, without warning, is done. Reading this I felt a shock myself, one of recognition from my own life after this year  experiencing the sudden death of a close member of my family. 

Pimlott’s poem also mimics a certain feeling of incomprehension people seem to get when dealing with death, especially unexpected death. It’s as if some part of consciousness tries to trick us into thinking it isn’t true, it isn’t possible that they were there once and then not there ever again. The last line,

but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists 
it will be ok ok ok

I think the immediacy of poetry lends itself well to exploring what it feels like to be left behind after a death and this pamphlet is an excellent example of this. Not a very festive recommendation, but hopefully helpful to whoever needs it.

Cecilia Vicuña, SABORAMI (Bookworks)

So says: This is really three books in one, an unfolding jack-in-the-box magic that conveys the impish spirit and three-dimensional practice of multimedia artist Cecilia Vicuña. Turn it one way, and SABORAMI is a fascinating insight into a 1970s UK counterculture of kitchen-table publishing, radical exhibition spaces and internationalist protests, of which Vicuña became a key part when she found herself in exile from Chile after the Western-backed 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, whose youth cultural corps Vicuña had been part of. Turn it another way, and it’s a mature artist and writer reflecting back on her early work and its continuities through her subsequent practice as an unraveller of colonial and patriarchal language. Turn it another, and it’s a testament to a thriving contemporary artbook publishing scene that celebrates its political and artistic communities, legacies of radical protest, and creation of beautiful, beautiful, significant books.  

Younger Readers

Ashley Hickson-Lovence, Wild East (Penguin)

Hiba Noor Khan, Safiyyah’s War (Andersen)

Safiyyah is a schoolgirl in Paris in 1940, as rumours of war are swirling – but this is not like any WWII novel you’ve read before. Safiyyah is French-Algerian, and she lives with her family in the Grand Mosquee, where her father is the administrator and her grandmother tends the garden. Based on the almost-unknown true story of how the imam and administrator of the Grand Mosquee smuggled hundreds of Jews and other hunted people out of Paris via the catacombs, this is an unbelievably gripping and beautifully written debut from a writer of fantastic observational powers. Every powerful emotion Safiyyah feels and every courageous plan she concocts is immediately felt, along with her love for cats, oranges, Paris, and her family and friends. One for all readers from 10 to 110, crying out for a lavish BBC adaptation… 

Zines (selected by zinemaster Emz, available in-store!)

Poetry:

A Promenade by Samuel Fairbrother (Pariah)

Autolingo Didactica by Jordan/Martin Hell (Monitor)

Blowfly by Jane Hartshorn

Folklore:

Frogs Teeth Fieldguides (Frogs Teeth)

SUCK IT: Land Based Stage Performance (OT) 

Twenty Indonesian Ghosts (Ferry Gouw)

Illustration:

The Moor is Ours (Luci Pina) 

Northern Groans (Noah Skirk) 

fly swatter is bitter sweet Musings of a Young Overthinker (Adam Lazarus)

Anthologies:

Milk: on consumption, materialism and taste (Carrion)

Die Quieter Please

Away With Words (Toothgrinder)