***READ BY THE AUTHOR*** THE TOP FIVE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A BOOK OF THE YEAR ROUGH TRADE, THE TIMES, ROLLING STONE, CLASH,MOJO, UNCUT The memoir of international music icon Richard Thompson, co-founder of the legendary folk rock group Fairport Convention. 'I encourage everyone to read this wonderful book.' ELVIS COSTELLO 'Thompson could be said to be an English Dylan - only in some ways he's even better than that.' GUARDIAN Richard Thompson came of age during an extraordinary moment in 1960s Britain - as music began to reflect a great cultural awakening, the guitarist and songwriter co-founded Fairport Convention, ushering in the era of folk rock. An intimate memoir of personal discovery and creative intensity, Beeswing vividly captures the life of an international music icon in a world on the cusp of change 'Gripping . . . A quiet joy of a memoir.' GUARDIAN 'Thompson writes exceptionally well . . . If you love music in all its myriad forms, you'll love this book.' NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS 'An intimate, revealing tome, Beeswing is the voice of a figure at the heart of the British counter-culture.' CLASH 'Perceptive, lyrical, amiable and seemingly effortless . . . required reading.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER

From the acclaimed author of Art Sex Music comes a vital meditation on womanhood, creativity and self-expression, and a revelatory exploration into the lives of three visionary artists. 'A fascinating tale of the interlinking lives of three legendary trailblazers.' SALENA GODDEN 'Re-sisters emanates an enthralling power.' JUDE ROGERS, MOJO 'Cosey Fanni Tutti has lived the life and has the stories to tell: not just hers, but those of two other still unheralded female pioneers.' JON SAVAGE Myself , Delia and Margery - a trinity of the sacred and profane , sinners and saints of a kind. Three defiant women with our individual, unconventional attitude to life. Untameable spirits, progressive thinkers living within the inherent societal constraints of our times. In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. While researching Delia's life, Cosey became immersed in Derbyshire's story and uncovered some fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time Cosey began reading about Margery Kempe, the 15th century mystic visionary who wrote the first English language autobiography. Re-sisters is the story of three women consumed by their passion for life, a passion they expressed through music, art and lifestyle; they were undaunted by the consequences they faced in pursuit of enriching their lives, and fiercely challenged the societal and cultural norms of their time. 'An impeccably researched meditation on womanhood as viewed through the lives of three firebrands.' FIONA STURGES, GUARDIAN 'Awe-inspiring. Read these revelatory portraits: this book is for anybody who wants to discover the work of three women who, without fanfare, have enriched our world.' ROBERT WYATT 'Passionate, original and fiercely defiant.' RUPERT THOMSON

Arriving in California as a young boy in the early 1960s, Edward Van Halen and his brother Alex were ripe for the coming musical revolution. The sons of a Dutch, saxophone-playing father, the brothers discovered the Beatles, Cream and others. From the moment their hugely influential 1978 debut landed, Van Halen set a high bar for the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, creating an entirely new style of post-'60s hard rock and becoming the quintessential Californian band of the 1980s. But there was also an undercurrent of tragedy to their story, as Eddie's struggles played out in public, from his difficult relationship with the band's original singer, Dave Lee Roth, to substance abuse, divorce and his long-running battle with cancer. With unique insights, Paul Brannigan's Eruption reaches beyond the headlines to explore the cultural and social contexts that shaped this iconic guitarist, while also turning up the dial on a life lived at volume eleven.

'An immensely engaging writer: wry and witty, and insightful.' Sunday Times 'A vivid and meticulous writer.' Observer From the widely renowned author Andrew O'Hagan, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship. Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news. Mayflies is a memorial to youth's euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.

'Essential . . . An urgent reckoning with institutional violence, curatorial practice and the meaning of freedom.' Dan Hicks 'Daisy Dixon is the guide you need in encountering the disturbing side of human expression.' Helen Carr What makes an artwork immoral? Why do these troubling creations have such a hold on us? And how should we deal with them? We live in a moment when the dangers of art seem more prevalent than ever: artists are 'cancelled' for their misdeeds, public statues are toppled, images of violence and obscenity await us at the touch of a button. But as this provocative new history demonstrates, we humans have always used art to make sense of the less innocent aspects of ourselves and the world around us. In Depraved, philosopher of art Daisy Dixon takes the reader on a journey through some of the most volatile and contentious works ever produced - from prehistoric sculpture to extreme metal music, Renaissance paintings to videogames. She reveals how beautiful art can sometimes be the most insidious, and why the greatest threat might lie in our own judgements about the art we censor or condemn. Above all, Dixon builds a powerful case for returning the terrible gaze of our disturbing creations, showing how we can confront them head-on and tame their toxic effects.

'Beautifully textured ... Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney.' New York Times 'A coming-of-age story inextricably bound with a love story.' MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD 'Smart, funny, exhilarating.' LILY KING Eager to clean up his act after his troubled early twenties, Owen has returned to Kentucky to take a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, one which allows him to enrol on their writing course. It's there that he meets Alma, a Writer-in-Residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn't - a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, and published success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma, from a supportive, liberal family of Bosnian immigrants, struggles to understand Owen's fraught relationship with his own family and home. Exploring the boundaries between life and art, and how our upbringings affect the people we can become, Groundskeeping is at heart a love story - a novel about two very different people navigating the turbulence of an all-consuming relationship, and the complications which can ruin it.

Utterly gripping . . . a triumph.' Will Dean, award-winning author of Adrift 'Sharp, assured . . . steeped in authenticity.' Sean Watkin, author of McDermid Award-shortlisted Black Water Rising Your baby is perfect. She sleeps through the night, even in this heat. You'll keep her cool. Open the window. Anything she needs. Anything. But when you wake up in the morning, Bella is gone. Recently-promoted DI Martha Allen is furious. Her career hinges on this missing baby case, and her boss and the circling media both want a quick solve - but her key witness is lying. Allen needs the truth. She's not going to stop until she gets it. No matter how long it takes. That detective is watching you. What have youdone? What happened to your baby? 'Missing grips from start to finish, with a shocking finale you'll never see coming.' Margot Douaihy, author of Scorched Grace 'Had me hooked immediately.' Georgina Clarke, author of The Corpse Played Dead AUDIENCES LOVE MISSING: 'Stunning.' 'Up there with the likes of Freida McFadden and John Marrs.' 'I really really loved this! . . . The way the story evolved, the mystery surrounding that missing baby, the truth behind it, and then that closure, it was so well done.' 'The tension builds right from the start, pulling you into a story full of secrets buried for thirty years.

THE LOUDER THAN WAR #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR A ROUGH TRADE, THE TIMES, MOJO, UNCUT, THE HERALD BOOK OF THE YEAR This is not a book about a rock band. This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group - or more precisely, their world. 'To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired ### inspiring, profound ### provocative, beautiful ### bonkers Book of Revelations.' DAVID PEACE 'Mind blowing . . . there is so much to enjoy in this brilliant book.' TIM BURGESS 'A container sized treasure trove . . . I strongly advise you to buy it.' MAXINE PEAKE 'The most wonderful, unashamedly intellectual, pretentious, ridiculous, exciting hymn to this incredible group.' ANDY MILLER, BACKLISTED Over a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation. Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding### the Fall's worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldn't want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work. Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall's wonderful and frightening world.

Frances is bright, young and single, enjoying life and her burgeoning career in the big city. But after attracting the attentions of a stranger, her life begins to unravel from the inside out. A seductive novel of power and complicity, Consent shows us just how vulnerable we are to the will of others - people we may not even know . . .

FROM THE GLOBAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR '[Kingsolver] reminds us that a novel can be wildly entertaining and still have a social conscience' NEW YORK TIMES, '100 Best Books of the 21st Century' (on Demon Copperhead) You've taken Demon to your hearts, prepare for another 'emotionally raw, riotously entertaining' read as you meet Livia. Here's my question: How does a person step in front of a train and leave everything right there? Livia Bohusz misses her big brother, Cyrus. But since the day he took his own life, a day that changed everything, eleven-year-old Livia has also known she has no choice but to survive. Her solace is music. A gifted pianist, Livia's only escape is the quiet rapture it brings as she practises, so when Livia starts college as a music major and scholarship prodigy, it feels as if a new life might begin. Immersing herself in her passions in a world where she excels, even as she struggles to fit in with more urbane classmates, she glimpses the possibilities of a life beyond the farm and her parents. Then one springtime, as the smell of reviving grass and crocuses, and the sounds of songbirds fill the air, Livia catches a glimpse of shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, muscles you wouldn't miss in the rear view: 'Who is that man?' It is a question Livia may come to wish she had never asked. Readers love Barbara Kingsolver: 'Barbara Kingsolver's way with words is beyond description!' 'That's the magic of Barbara Kingsolver I guess - to make you laugh in one line and then absolutely wreck you in the next. What a genius' 'I love Kingsolver because I never know where she will go next but it will always be somewhere that I've never been before' 'Barbara Kingsolver has an understanding of the human condition and the abuses inflicted by an unjust society upon those who do not deserve that' 'A trademark ability to tell a story with empathy' 'One of those writers who somehow can produce writing that sounds as natural as talking and yet that somehow comes out as poetry' 'Kingsolver is a magician with words'

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss. Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. 'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss. Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. 'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian

Milan Kundera's brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterises his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.

From the critically acclaimed author of Pet and The Death of Vivek Oji, Bitter, a companion novel to Pet, takes a timely and riveting look at the power of youth, protest and art. Bitter is thrilled to have been chosen to attend Eucalyptus, a special school where she can focus on her painting surrounded by other creative teens. But outside this haven, the streets are filled with protests against the deep injustices that grip the town of Lucille. Bitter's instinct is to stay safe within the walls of Eucalyptus . . . but her friends aren't willing to settle for a world that the adults say is "just the way things are." Pulled between old friendships, her creative passion, and a new a romance, Bitter isn't sure where she belongs - in the art studio or in the streets. And if she does find a way to help the revolution while being true to who she is, she must also ask: at what cost?

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.

Maggie Millner's seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation. Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships - the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments. Playful, clever, lovestruck, griefstruck, its narrator dances a tightrope of her own invention with captivating passion and skill.

From the opening story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind - to sleep with another man - Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal and fragile relationships. In 'House Calls', Cordelia wakes on the last day ofthe twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. In 'The Singing Cashier', a local postman visits two sisters bearing fishy gifts in the hope that his favour will be returned in kind. One of the most moving and disturbing stories in the collection, 'Passport Soup', features Frank Corso, who sits alone eating green tomatoes and bacon, mourning the disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter: 'At one point in that late evening, she was there, and then she wasn't.' Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Compassionate, witty and unsettling, Antarctica is a collection to be savoured.

THE GLOBAL NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD 'I read it in a state of rapture.' SUNDAY TIMES 'A tender, funny page-turner.'OBSERVER 'Come for the romance, stay for the meaning of life.' IRISH TIMES 'A breathtakingly intimate look at love and desire in its many different forms.' RED From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking. Readers love Intermezzo: 'An intimate and emotional read . I put the book down feeling that I am richer for having read it.' Megan 'A beautifully written book with characters that capture the heart of the reader.' Sinead 'I'm envious of anyone yet to read this, you're in for a treat.' Anon 'The characters are brilliant; complex, heartful, raw and impactful.' S. Payne 'Shows dazzling skill but also heart-wrenching compassion and humanity.' Tom Sally Rooney's book Intermezzo was a bestseller w/c 30/09/2024

lift the lapis lazuli tablet and read of Gilgamesh - his adventures and all he endured. King above kings, most formidable presence. Gilgamesh originated in Ancient Mesopotamia nearly 4,000 years ago, yet its themes of power, loyalty, love and loss resound with contemporary relevance. The eponymous demigod tyrannically rules the kingdom of Uruk. To establish peace, the gods create his counterpart, the wild man Enkidu, and the two embark on a series of extraordinary adventures. But after tragedy strikes, Gilgamesh sets out alone on a desperate quest for immortality leading him to the very edge of the world . . . Simon Armitage's fresh and propulsive version brings Gilgamesh alive as a poem. He harnesses the rhythm of its orchestrated language and conjures a sense of poetic wholeness while honouring its inherent fragmentation. Enhanced by illuminating commentary, this accomplished translation transports us right back to the origins of civilisation and storytelling.

** Pre-order Life of M, the new novel from Rachel Cusk, now ** #14 in the New York Times '100 Best Books of the 21st Century' ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' '25 BEST NOVELS OF THE 21ST CENTURY' SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE AND THE FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC PRIZE 'A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.' Monica Ali, New York Times 'One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read.' Observer 'A perfect synthesis of form and content.' Deborah Levy 'Full of baking light and quiet melancholy and bodies brushing past one another in the heat.' Leslie Jamison Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.