Summer at Mount Asama by Masashi Matsuie Translated by Margaret Mitsutani 10th July (£12.99). The Japanese novel comes of age in this gripping story of love, art and life as a group of architects competes to design the new National Library of Modern Literature in Tokyo. In 1980s Japan, newly-graduated Toru Sakanishi joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. From honouring ancestors to illustrating the complexities of the living, Summer at Mount Asama is a prize-winning novel offering a moving and elegant portrait of the clash of modernity and tradition.
The Absence by Budgie 17th July (£25.00). Before he was Budgie, Peter Clarke was a boy growing up in working class St Helens in the 1960s and the loss of his mum at a young age created the absence that haunts the pages of this book. As a teenager disenchanted with art school in Liverpool, Peter became Budgie and befriended the likes of Jayne Casey and Pete Burns before taking off for London and the big city heat of punk. A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop 1980s, Budgie's life is both fabulously glamorous and a cautionary tale. For the first time the story of the era's most exalted and mysterious bands has been told by one who survived inside the belly of the beast.
Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood 3rd July (£16.99). An ambitious young journalist, Sara is sent to cover a war from the Beach Hotel in Gaza. Driven by the demons of her entitled yet damaging childhood, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself in this war, even if it means bringing disaster upon those around her. Greenwood’s debut novel brings readers into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with audacity and humour depicts the media’s complicity in this ongoing tragedy. Catch-22 on speed, Vulture is a fast-paced satire of the war news industry and its moral blind spots, and a tragi-comic coming-of-age novel.
Human Rites by Juno Dawson 17th July (£18.99). The Coven is reunited but broken. Niamh is back from the dead but she hasn’t come back alone. Elle mourns a son she never had. Ciara languishes in a prison for witches. And Leonie reels from a very unexpected surprise. Five very different witches with one thing in common: they were unwittingly chosen by the dangerously charming Lucifer, the demon king of desire, to fulfil a dark prophecy. The final confrontation between good and evil is about to commence in the spectacular conclusion to the insatiable Her Majesty’s Royal Coven.
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret 3rd July (£14.99). Imagine a world in which you could take back the stupid thing you just said, unspill the coffee, avoid the accident, roll life back thirty seconds and do it over again - this time the right way. In Etgar Keret's universe, all things are possible. Ranging from sci-fi scenarios to fictional thought-experiments and short vignettes, the stories here all deliver irreverence, surprise, existential unease, hope and humanity.
Moderation by Elaine Castillo 3rd July (£17.99). Girlie Delmundo is a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it too, so it's no surprise to anyone when she's offered a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company.
Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno 10th July (£16.99). Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party attended by their pretentious circle. As the guests sip at their drinks the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself - and us - with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.
I'll Be Right There by Amy Bloom 3rd July (£16.99). Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl Gazala befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala's beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family. The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Compassionate and full of warmth and humour, I'll Be Right Here embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the mysterious ways we evolve as we love - and the ways we hope to be loved in return.
My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud 3rd July (£16.99). For as long as Lucy can remember, she’s been caught between loyalty to her rootless, idealistic mother and devotion to her fierce and exacting sister, Bea. From her unsettled childhood to her turbulent teenage years, she’s been forced to make a choice. But as the sisters come of age and embark on their own experiments they find their lives, and their relationships, increasingly in turmoil. Can the love they have for each other transcend the damage of the past? Or is the past too dangerous to examine?
Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland 10th July (£25.00). In this astonishing memoir, Kevin takes us from the early days of the New Romantic scene in the late ’70s, to his huge chart successes with Dexys Midnight Runners in the early 1980s, to inner turmoil in the 1990s. Vividly detailed, and with a truly rare degree of self-insight, this is Kevin's own, deeply personal account of an extraordinary life, raw and unvarnished.
Men in Love by Irvine Welsh 24th July (£20.00). It is the late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin. Leaving heroin behind and separated after a drug deal gone wrong, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie each want to feel alive. Sick Boy starts an intense relationship with Amanda, his ‘princess’ – rich, connected, everything that he is not. When the pair set a date for their wedding, Sick Boy sees a chance for his generation to take control at last. But as the 1990s dawn, will finding love be the answer to the group’s dreams or just another doomed quest?
plus the books you've been waiting to come out in paperback!
