Falling for Stories: October pre-orders
Fall hard for these essential new titles – buy them all & build a book-fort to keep the cold out but hold the world in. 10% off all month.
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Josh Cohen, Losers (signed)
A small word that's come a long way between Beck's 1993 single and Donald Trump's obsessive use. Josh Cohen thinks about why we should be more Beck.
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat (signed)
Only Sarah Hall could pull off a lockdown novel: her books always shimmer with things bursting out of containment, and Burntcoat, an artist’s passionate story, is no different.
Frankie Miren, The Service (signed)
Stunning debut fiction that tells it how it is, as sex workers face a legal crackdown that risk their livelihoods and lives. Powerful, subtle and necessary.
Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood (signed)
Serving sure-footed, deeply unsettling surrealness, Vanessa Onwuemezi revitalises the short story as a source of sensory and super-smart surprise.
Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless (signed)
The House screams DANGER, but the girls dare. The House has a history, and so do the friends. Will they have a future? The House always wins.
Ruby Tandoh, Cook As You Are (signed)
A gorgeous cookbook for everyone & every kitchen, with delicious and easy recipes for everything up to ice cream, plus those nights when mashed potato is all you are. I mean, want to eat.
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Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker
Perfect Hallowe’en reading for us postmodern queer feminists. If you love Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus, you are going to adore Dodie Bellamy and her 1998 take on/take-down of Big Daddy Dracula, in a wicked new edition.
Dominic Bradbury, Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses
Sick of your own four walls? Vicarious architectural tourism to die for in this lavish and global survey of the movement that made Mad Men look amazing.
Pauline Campbell, Rice & Peas and Fish & Chips
Crucial and searing memoir taking on racism and inequality, as Pauline Campbell offers observations from a lifetime seeing immigrants live their lives even as they’re used for political gain in Britain.
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen
Richly deserved Modern Classics edition of this crucial novel by the “godmother of Black British writing,” which sees the fearless Adah fighting to keep her dreams and power alive after moving to London, where injustices keep coming.
Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up
Writer, teacher, professor, mentor, editor, activist, Booker Prize winner: Bernardine Evaristo has changed British literature and publishing, and in Manifesto she blesses us by telling us how and why.
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Another metaphysical blast on masculinity, memory, the body & the imagination, as an ageing father writes the novel he imagines his son might write – or is the son imagining what his father might write?
Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
Franzen goes Ice Storm x East of Eden x Ken Kesey in this truly epic family story of the 1970s and their winds of change. Hold on to your berets/love beads, you’re about to be blown away.
Alan Garner, Treacle Walker
MORE ALAN GARNER, garnering alanly. What more do you need to know? Myth-fiction fusion, stunning writing and a story of healing among what others discard. Treasure it.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
No-one but the late David Graeber could have pulled off this visionary intellectual feat, overturning dominant EuroWestern theories of agriculture and capital to reconceptualise human history.
Siya Kolisi, Rise
The phenomenal story of and by the first Black man to captain the Springboks. Whether you love rugby or know nothing about it, this is an epic tale of South African history and individual excellence.
Kwon Yeo-Sun, Lemon, translated by Janet Hong
Crime writing of the highest order as a cold case – the murder of a beautiful teenage girl – gets reopened, reopening old wounds both personal and social in the process.
Jade LB, Keisha the Sket
Whether you have every original post saved to bookmarks, or you’re coming fresh to Keisha, you’ll want to snap up this definitive print edition with essays from Candice Carty-Williams, Caleb Femi, Aniefiok Ekpoudom and Enny.
John le Carré, Silverview
The one we’ve all been waiting for: John Le Carré’s last completed novel, and it’s only about an independent bookstore. Or is it? Espionage and treason among the shelves is very much our jam.
Graham Macrae Burnett, Case Study
Fiction? Non-fiction? What is character? That’s the subject of this brilliant meta-thriller that takes up a young woman’s investigative quest to prove a charismatic psychiatrist pushed her sister to suicide.
Lucie McKnight Hardy, Dead Relatives and Other Stories
Perfect for chilly nights drawing in, definitely one to read under the covers… if you want to be awake, haunted, all night. Lucy McKnight Hardy’s intimate uncanny stories get under your skin.
Courttia Newland, Cosmogramma
Courttia Newland is *on fire*, following up the brilliant A River Called Time with this stunning collection of speculative fiction short stories that imagine alternate futures as lived by the African diaspora.
Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City, translated by Anton Hur
Go Tinder dating in Seoul with Young, a student caring for his sick mother, knocking back soju with his friend Jaehee, and facing the ultimate choice: super-hot-but-super-cold guy vs. potential love of his life.
Gianni Rodari, Telling Stories Wrong, illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna
Yes, it's another fabulous title in translation from everyone's fave Italian Marxist children's author, with gorgeous new illustrations by Beatrice Alemagna. What happens when Grandpa changes the story?
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses
One great leftist remembers another – via his gardening. George Orwell's roses lead Solnit across continents and biographies, from Stalin to Tina Modotti, to understand how his writing and politics were rooted in growing.
Ursula Scavenius, The Dolls, translated by Jennifer Russell
Four stories, four weird worlds in which siblings predominate, and those closest to us are unknowable; the fourth story takes on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as siblings, each with their own story, carry their late mother to Hungary.
Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life Through Food
Everyone’s secret treat this month is going to be reading this memoir by actor, food traveller and internet Negroni maven Stanley Tucci. Like a perfect Negroni, it's stylish, rich, and sweet with a kick.
Birgit Weyhe, Madgermanes, translated by Katy Derbyshire
Stunning use of the hybrid and plural format of the graphic novel to tell the stories (based on interviews) of Mozambican workers in the GDR who were abandoned when the wall fell. History in every line.
Sammy Wright, Fit
Winner of the Northern Book Prize, Sammy Wright’s debut is an essential read for the contemporary moment, and also reminiscent of the great Andrea Dunbar and Shelagh Delany, a story of class, fashion, hope & what shapes us.
Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
What was it like growing up in Albania as Communism fell? This book answers all your questions and more, in a mesmerising essay on generational change and swimming the tides of history.
