Frozen February: Pre-orders
There's one book to rule them all this month: Wivenhoe, the second novel by our fearless leader Samuel Fisher, is a future Essex Scandi-noir as written by Virginia Woolf. Wivenhoe, like the rest of the UK, is under snow, and a fragmenting family have to think their way out while investigating a murder that calls up lots of memories in the small community. Get your signed copy from us!
Monica Ali, Love Marriage
Exactly what February needs: a gloriously contemporary romantic nail-biter as two junior doctors race toward their wedding day only for their two families to collide.
Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, this is an elliptical and peripatetic conversation that takes in one day, one city, one mother-daughter relationship & the whole world.
Mona Awad, All's Well
A Shakespearean tragicomedy in which the inner voice of a theatre director's chronic pain becomes a strange charismatic power as she directs a new production of the play in which she was injured.
Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race
In her second novel Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan wrote across jazz and Nazism; in her third, Washington Black, across science and slavery, visual art and empire. All those investigations come together in these five unfolding essays.
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Short stories don't come much smokier than this high goth collection. "When you’re writing fiction that wants to disturb and unsettle its readers, breaking the rules can be just as productive as following them." Chris Power, The Guardian
Emma Harding, Friedrichstrasse 19
One building in Berlin, six inhabitants, a century of experience on the frontlines of cultural change, war, division and reunification.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
Another genre-defying feat from Sheila Heti, this one deep-diving into first love and middle-aged grief, and the portal that connects these overwhelming experiences.
Mark Hodkinson, No-one Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader
From one prized book on top of the wardrobe in a family that didn't read to 3,500-title "book cave," Mark Hodkinson narrates a life in reading, and the changes to reading and writing in working-class Britain across his lifetime.
Junji Ito, tr. Jocelyne Allen, Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection
Love horror manga? You'll know Junji Ito, the master of the form. His earlier stories, collected here, find their unusual haunts and scares in relationships, whether familial, romantic or at work.
Grace Lavery, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
Gleefully and gloriously spraying parody, pastiche and Adorno like silly string, this fourth wall-licking memoir-cum-everything else does many, many things but this miss never misses.
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Women: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Equal parts cerebral and emotional, this is a group biography of four young women students and friends, including Iris Murdoch, faced with developing a philosophy that could encompass the horrors of WWII.
Leonie Rushforth, Deltas
Moving across moving landscapes, Leonie Rushforth's poems illuminate and irrigate fleeting emotional terrains and shifting sands of thought.
Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
It would be hard to claim a light history for eugenics, especially seeing it in action right now through racist and ableist pandemic policies – so this is a timely and serious book with a wide sweep.
Defne Suman, tr. Betsy Göksel, The Silence of Scheherazade
Welcome to Smyrna, multicultural, polyglot, multilayered Ottoman trading port. But the Empire is ending, and the city is a battlefield. Four women's lives and stories are caught in the fray: these are their stories.
Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century
What if fossil fuels were behind the political shocks of this century? Cambridge Professor of Political Economy Helen Thompson makes a devastating argument about our fuel addiction, its ramifications, and the need for change.
Christos Tsiolkas, 7 1/2
The provocateur is back with a reflexive novel about a writer both on and in retreat, seeking to pursue a Ruskinian novel of Beauty – except his narrator is a former porn actor, a working class Australian, and beauty is never extricable from its contexts.
Elvia Wilk, Oval
Would you take the blue pill? In Oval's future Berlin, where the climate is collapsing but rent is still out of control, it's a pill that makes you more altruistic. Anja, whose boyfriend Louis is developing it, isn't so sure.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
So incendiary it's taken more than 80 years to find a UK publisher: Eric Williams' brilliant and influential study evidences slavery as the rotten heart of British economic progress, remaining a compelling must-read.
