New Releases

Professor Hakim Adi draws on a variety of published works in Black Voices on Britain, all of which describe powerful experiences: James Gronniosaw and his family endure poverty, illness and unemployment; Mary Prince is driven out by her cruel owners and turns to London charities for help; Frederick Douglass, on a lecture tour around Britain, reveals how the Christian clergy built churches with slave-owners’ money and William Wells Brown gives his impressions of England as he travels around a country which welcomes him more readily than America.

Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

Acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey turns to poetry in emphatically striking style via a true crime podcast with this, her debut collection. Isdal is comprised of three parts, the first a very funny poetic stalking of the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about a long-unsolved murder mystery, as they ruminate over meagre evidence and reach, well, very few conclusions. It is crafted in Dickey’s intellectually agile and witty rhyming style. At the centre of the book is a prose philosophical enquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, ‘sexiness’, and death.

A new poetry collection from Britain's foremost truth-teller, in Divisible by Itself and One Kae Tempest masterfully steers a path between their more public-facing performance and dramatic work and the contemplative voice that came to the fore in Running Upon the Wires. Questions of integrity – hence the prime number of the title – are addressed in direct, affecting terms: how can we be true to ourselves while under constant pressure to conform? Throughout the poems, ideas of form – of the body, gender, and in nature – resurface and resolve.

It’s that time of year again. With his signature wit, Brian Bilston returns with And So This is Christmas, fifty-one poems in celebration of the festive season: from bizarre family traditions to the office Christmas party; from voting day for turkeys to the impossible art of gift-giving. So hang your stockings, grab your mistletoe and curl up with this heart-warming collection of Christmas crackers.

Witty, candid, furious, and always compelling, Them! negotiates the fraught and fruitful space between the worlds of ‘online’ and the ‘outside’, and how they fuse and diverge in the imagination. Giles’ visual poetics create an unusually dynamic listening experience as she finds new ways ‘to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what’s possible’. At a time when trans rights are to the fore in public discourse, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets.

Jackie Kay’s new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road, the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland birth-parents; but it is also a moving book in its own right, and a deep enquiry into all forms of human friendship. Fiere – Scots for ‘companion, friend, equal’ – is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and of how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the road: lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors – as well as all the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made.

After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond’s legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered.

May Day is the long-awaited collection from one of our best-loved poets and former Makar of Scotland, Jackie Kay. As the title suggests, these poems cast an eye over several decades of political activism, from the international solidarity of the Glasgow of Kay’s childhood, accompanying her parents’ Socialist campaigns, through the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 80s and 90s, up to the present day when a global pandemic intersects with the urgency of Black Lives Matter.

Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.

What if an amateur sleuth possessed an enchanted amulet? In the bustling kitchens of Longfellow Hall, young Maggie Malone works hard to stay out of trouble with the grumpy head cook. But when a house guest dies during dinner, the death shakes the whole household and Maggie’s simple world is upended. Armed with nothing but her wits and an ancient, enchanted amulet, Maggie discovers she has a hidden talent for solving crimes—and a magical ability to escape danger in the nick of time. As Maggie is drawn deeper into the web of secrets and lies that entangle the guests, she must use her ...