The Decadence by Leon Craig 25th September (£18.99) At the height of lockdown, a group of flailing twenty-something friends makes an illicit break for freedom. A grand country house stands empty. Once the home of Theo's great uncle, it seems like the perfect place to get high and hang out in the spring sunshine, as they eschew adult responsibilities. Since meeting as teenagers, rifts have grown amongst the group. Even as they are determined to enjoy themselves, tensions cast shadows between them - politics, sex and lies. The house, too, has its own dark history and exudes a palpable sense of menace.
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan 18th September (£22.00) 2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost including Tom Metcalfe, who pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
New Cemetery by Simon Armitage 25th September (£14.99) The Poet Laureate makes peace with the dead in this highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection. The conversion of a local natural-beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. Encompassing lyrical revelations and everyday vignettes alongside apocalyptic visions and imagined conversations with the deceased, these pages draw us into a parallel neighbourhood of remembrance and celebration.
Indignity by Lea Ypi 4th September (£22.00) An imaginative investigation into historical injustice, dignity and truth - told through the story of a family from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the dawn of Communism in the Balkans. By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us?
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk 11th September (£14.99) A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.
Tender by Lauren Du Plessis 25th September (£11.99) Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: a successful career in archaeobotany, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and an uncompromising manicure routine. She’s convinced that her veneer of perfection will mask the parts of her she’d rather not think about. When two ‘bog bodies’ are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell seizes the opportunity to excavate their secrets. But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged earth, the more she uncovers memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister… and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can’t ignore. Blending folkloric horror with explorations of womanhood against a backdrop of eco-anxiety, Tender burrows into the quiet violence of overcoming and accepting our darkest sides.
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite 25th September (£18.99) No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace. So goes the family curse, handed down from generation to generation, ruining families and breaking hearts as it goes. And now it's calm, rational Eniiyi's turn - who, due to her uncanny resemblance to her dead aunt, Monife, and her family's insistence that she must be a reincarnation, has long been used to some strange familial beliefs. Still, when she falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family's history. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak, or can she escape the family curse and the mysterious fate that befell her aunt?
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood 23rd September (£16.99) The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she’s afraid of her own floorboards, and the lyrics of ‘What Is Love’ play over and over in her ears. Tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.
Venetian Vespers by John Banville 25th September (£16.99) Winter 1899, and strange things are afoot. As the new century approaches, English hack writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans for a substantial inheritance look to be dashed. Arriving in Venice for their belated honeymoon at Palazzo Dioscuri - the ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo - the couple are met by a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences, which exacerbate Evelyn's already frayed nerves. Is it just the sea mist blanketing the floating city, or is he really losing his mind?
A Long Winter by Colm Toibin 4th September (£12.99) One snowy morning, after arguing with her husband, Miquel’s mother walks out from their home high up in the Pyrenees and does not return. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father cast out by the people of the town, Miquel and his father are left to fend for themselves. Together they will be forced to battle the elements, and their resentment of each other, through the long winter. Miquel’s desperate searching for his mother is only interrupted when Manolo, an orphaned servant boy from the next village, arrives to help out in the house. As Miquel is forced to confront the reality of his mother's absence, Manolo, with his silences and longing gaze, offers the promise of new love, and another kind of life.
The Predicament by William Boyd 4th September (£20.00) Gabriel Dax, travel writer and accidental spy, is back in the shadows. Unable to resist the allure of his MI6 handler, Faith Green, he has returned to a life of secrets and subterfuge. Dax is sent to Guatemala under the guise of covering a tinderbox presidential election, where the ruthless decisions of the Mafia provoke pitch-black warfare in collusion with the CIA. As political turmoil erupts, Gabriel's reluctant involvement deepens. His escape plan leads him to West Berlin, where he uncovers a chilling realisation: there is a plot to assassinate magnetic young President John F. Kennedy. In a race against time, Gabriel must navigate deceit and danger, knowing that the stakes have never been higher.
The Two Roberts by Damian Barr 4th September (£18.99) Scotland, 1933. Bobby MacBryde is on his way. After years grafting at Lees Boot Factory, he's off to the Glasgow School of Art, to his future. On his first day he will meet another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls - and never leave his side. Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.
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