Picador Autumn 2019

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PICADOR

Exhalation

The

Ted Chiang

Naom From an award-winning science fiction writer (whose short story ‘The Story of Your Life’ was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated movie Arrival), the long-awaited new collection of stunningly original, humane, and already celebrated short stories.

This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’, a portal through time forces a fabricseller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary ‘Exhalation’, an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’, a woman cares for an artificial intelligence over twenty years, elevating a faddish digital pet into what might be a true living being. Also included are two brand-new stories: ‘Omphalos’ and ‘Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom’.

‘Ted Chiang has gained a rapturous following within the genre and beyond.

One of the most influential sciencefiction writers of his generation, his stories are unusually moving’ New Yorker ‘Chiang’s writing shines with a brutal, minimalist elegance. Every sentence is the perfect incision in the dissection of the idea at hand’ Guardian ‘The best science-fiction writer of his generation’ The Economist

In Exhalation, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth – What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human? – and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.

Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards, and he is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives near Seattle, Washington.

11/07/2019 • £16.99 • 9781529014488 • Fiction • Hardback Royal • 368pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 16/05/2019 • £13.99 • 9781529014518 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 400pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Hiding Game Naomi Wood The gripping third novel by Naomi Wood, author of the award-winning Mrs. Hemingway, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick.

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In 1922, Paul Beckermann arrives at the Bauhaus art school and is immediately seduced by both the charismatic teaching and his fellow students. Eccentric and alluring, the more time Paul spends with his new friends the closer they become, and the deeper he falls in love with the mesmerising Charlotte. But Paul is not the only one vying for her affections, and soon an insidious rivalry takes root.

As political tensions escalate in Germany, the Bauhaus finds itself under threat, and the group begins to disintegrate under the pressure of its own betrayals and love affairs.

Decades later, in the wake of an unthinkable tragedy, Paul is haunted by a secret. When an old friend from the Bauhaus resurfaces, he must finally break his silence.

Beautifully written, powerful and suspenseful, Naomi Wood’s The Hiding Game is a novel about the dangerously fine line between love and obsession, set against the most turbulent era of our recent past.

Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys and the award-winning Mrs. Hemingway, which won the British Library Writer’s Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award. It was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Award and was selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club.

Her work is available in sixteen languages. She teaches at the University of East Anglia and lives in Norwich with her family.

The Hiding Game is her third novel.

11/07/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509892785 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US 11/07/2019 • £13.99 • 9781509892792 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US

57

Coders

The

Who They Are, What They Think and How They Are Changing Our World Clive Thompson

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From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson, a brilliant and immersive anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers – where they come from, how they think, what makes for greatness in their world, and what should give us pause.

You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer.

Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they’re the architects. The decisions they make guide our behaviour. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard to do something, we do less of it.

‘Clive Thompson is more than a gifted reporter and writer. He is a brilliant social anthropologist. And, in this masterful book, he illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live’ David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z ‘With his trademark clarity and insight, Clive Thompson gives us an unparalleled vista into the mind-set and culture of programmers, the ofteninvisible architects and legislators of the digital age’ Steven Johnson, author of How We Got to Now

If we want to understand how today’s world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people building today’s world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software?

And perhaps most interestingly – what does it do to them?

More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders.

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

11/07/2019 • £20.00 • 9781529018981 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 448pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 04/04/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529018998 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 448pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

58

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The Catholic School Edoardo Albinati

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A novel that takes the reader into a closed world of privilege and tradition: a study of class, religion, and how a worldview which sees violence as an integral part of masculinity, and any empowerment of women as a threat to men’s dominance, can only end in tragedy.

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Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School creates a world: a world of power, sex, violence and the threat of masculinity, of the power wielded and misused by men in groups.

In 1975, three young well-off men, former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno, brutally torture, rape, and murder two young women. The event, which comes to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocks and captivates all of Italy, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion are under threat.

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‘Not only is this an important, at times magnificent book, and not only does it need all of its pages, but because of the time it takes, and of the space it takes up, it is a pivotal moment in contemporary literature’ Corriere della Sera

Edoardo Albinati sets his novel in the halls and corridors of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, exploring the intersection between the world of teenage boys and the structures of power in modern Italy. Along with indelible portraits of teachers and pupils – the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max – Albinati’s novel also reflects on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.

Edoardo Albinati is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter who lives in Rome. His novel Svenimenti won the 2004 Viareggio Literary Award. The Catholic School won the Strega Prize in 2016.

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08/08/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509856275 • Fiction • Hardback Royal • 1280pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 08/08/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509856282 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 1280pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

59

Mountain Road, Late at Night

The

Alan Rossi

The R and th Biny When a couple are killed on an isolated road in North Carolina they leave behind an orphaned son and grieving relatives who must decide between them who will be his caretaker. Alan Rossi’s debut is an unforgettable exploration of a clash of family values.

Nicholas and his wife April live alone with their four-yearold son Jack in a remote cabin just outside a quiet town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They have chosen a different kind of life, keeping their families at a distance and rejecting what the rest of the world thinks is ‘normal’. Driving home from a party in the early hours of a Wednesday morning, their car crashes and they are killed. This is the story of what happens after the tragedy.

The couple’s grieving relatives must decide who will care for the child they left behind. Nicholas’s brother, Nathaniel, and his wife Stefanie are the least experienced but his mother and father have issues of their own. And April’s mother, Tammy, is driving across the country to claim Jack. Nathaniel and Stefanie have just three days to decide if they are the ‘right’ guardians after all.

Experiencing a few traumatic days in the minds of each family member, Alan Rossi’s debut novel is a taut, nuanced and breathtaking look at what we do when everything goes wrong, and the frightening fact that life carries on, regardless. Mountain Road, Late at Night is a striking and compulsive examination of the universality of family life, the differences which drive us apart and the selflessness that will hopefully win out.

Alan Rossi was born in 1980 in Columbus, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, Missouri Review, Conjunctions, Agni, and Ninth Letter, among others. He lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter. Mountain Road, Late at Night is his first novel.

22/08/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529002355 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 256pp • Rights: World 22/08/2019 • £13.99 • 9781529002331 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Demy • 256pp • Rights: World

60

05/09/ 05/09/20

The Economists’ Hour The Rise of a Discipline, the Failures of Globalization, and the Road to Nationalism Binyamin Appelbaum

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After decades of pervasive influence over government policy, economists have done much to create the world in which we live. And yet, how well do they actually understand human behaviour? As the Western world turns against ‘experts’, has their time come to an end?

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The Economists’ Hour tells the story of a revolution: how economists who believed in the power and the glory of free markets transformed the business of government, the conduct of business and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life. In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, these economists played a leading role in reshaping taxation and public spending and clearing the way for globalization.

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The United States was the epicentre of the intellectual ferment, but the embrace of markets was a global phenomenon, seizing the imagination of politicians in countries including the United Kingdom, Chile and New Zealand.

The revolution failed to deliver on its central promise of increased prosperity. In the United States, growth has slowed in every successive decade since the 1960s.

Policymakers traded well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics; the loss of work weakened the fabric of society and of democracy. Soaring inequality extends far beyond incomes: life expectancy for less affluent Americans has declined in recent years. And the focus on efficiency has come at the expense of the future: lower taxes instead of education and infrastructure; limited environmental regulation as oceans rise and California burns.

This book is a reckoning: the economists’ hour is coming to an end, and the world they have left us with feels less predictable than when it began.

on has ons, rolina his Binyamin Appelbaum is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, where he covers the Federal Reserve and other aspects of economic policy.

05/09/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509879137 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 05/09/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509879144 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

61

The Confession

The

Jessie Burton

AJC The sensational new novel from the million-copy bestselling author of The Miniaturist and The Muse Jessie Burton’s latest novel tells the story of three women and the complex connections they have shared across decades and continents. This is a novel about love, sex, work, motherhood, how we construct our pasts and dream our futures, and the wildly divergent paths our lives can take.

Jessie Burton is the author of the Sunday Times number one and New York Times bestsellers The Miniaturist and The Muse, and the children’s book The Restless Girls. In its year of publication The Miniaturist sold over a million copies, and in 2017 it was adapted into a major TV series for BBC One. Her novels have been translated into thirty-eight languages, and she is a regular essay writer for newspapers and magazines. She lives in London.

‘A. J. C success probab J. B. Pr Review ‘Immen Specta ‘One of English Times ‘A gran balance done’ K ‘Cronin Heral

19/09/2019 • £16.99 • 9781509886142 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 464pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 19/09/2019 • £13.99 • 9781509886159 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 464pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Citadel A J Cronin

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From the author of The Stars Look Down and Dr Finlay’s Casebook comes the gripping medical drama which influenced the foundation of the NHS.

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The Citadel is a moving story of tragedy, triumph and redemption. With a foreword by Adam Kay, the bestselling author of This is Going to Hurt.

When newly qualified doctor Andrew Manson takes up his first post in a Welsh mining community, the young Scot brings with him a bagful of idealism and enthusiasm. Both are soon strained to the limit as Andrew discovers the reality of performing operations on a kitchen table and washing in a scullery, of unspeakable sanitation, of common infantile cholera and systemic corruption. There are no X-rays, no ambulances – nothing to combat the disease and poverty.

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‘A. J. Cronin was perhaps the most successful novelist of the 1930s . . . probably as significant a figure as J. B. Priestley’ English Historical Review ‘Immensely successful, utterly ruthless’ Spectator ‘One of the most popular authors in the English speaking world’ New York Times ‘A grand story, well told, and better balanced than anything else he has done’ Kirkus ‘Cronin was a master of melodrama’ Herald

It isn’t long before Andrew’s outspoken manner wins him both friends and enemies, but he risks losing his idealism when the fashionable, greedy world of London medicine claims him, with its private clinics, wealthy, spoilt patients and huge rewards.

A classic saga by A. J. Cronin, one of the great masters of the genre.

A. J. Cronin was born in Cardross, Scotland, in 1896 and studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1916 he served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, and at the war’s end he completed his medical studies and practised in South Wales. He was later appointed to the Ministry of Mines, studying the medical problems of the mining industry. He later moved to London and built up a successful practice in the West End. In 1931 he published his first book, Hatter’s Castle, which was compared with the work of Dickens, Hardy and Balzac, winning him critical acclaim. Six years later he published The Citadel, which brought attention to the incompetence of medical practice and helped incite the establishment of the NHS. Cronin died in 1981.

19/09/2019 • £9.99 • 9781529015386 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 432pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

63

Time Lived Without Its Flow

The

The A Denise Riley

John A beautiful, short philosophical memoir of parental loss and grief, for fans of Max Porter and Helen MacDonald.

Denise Riley’s Time Lived Without Its Flow is an essay on the nature of grief, partly filtered through a philosophical lens.

Denise lost her adult son and from that horrific experience wrote her poetry collection Say Something Back. This essay is a companion piece to that work, looking at the way time stops in the wake of loss. The first half is formed of journallike entries in intervals moving away from the news of her son’s death, painting a live picture of her grieving over time, and the second half is a ruminative essay looking at the experience philosophically and the relationship of time to one’s experience of grief. A modern-day counterpart to C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. With a specially commissioned introduction by Max Porter, author of Grief is A Thing With Feathers.

‘Her writing is perfectly weighted, justifies its existence . . . Her voice is strong and beautiful – an imperative in itself . . . remarkable’ Guardian

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her visiting positions have included A. D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. She is the author of Say Something Back and lives in London.

19/09/2019 • £9.99 • 9781529017106 • Non-Fiction • Hardback A Format • 96pp • Rights: WEL

64

‘One of His ana thrilled no-non and life many p many y ‘A poet and de human man wh for thir John C Claire ‘John C Chuck melody in equa really f velvet v ‘. . . not Turne

The Most Interesting Man in the World The Autobiography John Cooper Clarke The first ever autobiography of John Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford, punk poet, rock star, fashion icon, national treasure and acerbic wit.

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His first ever no holds barred account of his rock and roll life. This is a memoir as wry, funny, moving and vivid as only John Cooper Clarke could deliver. Inimitable and iconic, this book will be a complete joy for lifelong fans and a whole new generation.

John Cooper Clarke is a phenomenon: Poet Laureate of Punk, rock star, fashion icon, TV and radio presenter, social and cultural commentator, reluctant national treasure. At 5 feet 11 inches (116lb, 32in chest, 27in waist), in trademark suit jacket, skin-tight drainpipes and dark glasses, with jet-black back-combed hair and mouth full of gold teeth, he is instantly recognizable. As a writer his voice is equally unmistakable and his inimitable dry Salford drawl shines through the prose.

Photo: Paul Wolfgang Webster

‘One of Britain’s outstanding poets.

His anarchic punk poetry has thrilled people for decades and his no-nonsense approach to his work and life in general has appealed to many people including myself for many years’ Sir Paul McCartney ‘A poet who writes about darkness and decay but makes people laugh, a human cartoon, a gentleman punk, a man who has stayed exactly the same for thirty years but never grown stale.

John Cooper Clarke is an original’ Claire Smith, Scotsman ‘John Cooper Clarke uses words like Chuck Berry uses guitar riffs with melody and anger, humour and disdain in equal measure. He’s the real deal, really funny and really caustic, the velvet voice of discontent’ Kate Moss ‘. . . nothing short of dazzling’ Alex Turner

This autobiography covers an extraordinary life, filled with remarkable personalities: from Nico to Chuck Berry, from all the great punks to Bernard Manning, and on to more recent fans and collaborators Alex Turner and Plan B – who have championed his work. Interspersed with stories of his rock and roll and performing career, John also reveals his boggling encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth-century popular culture, and his private passions and guilty pleasures: from Baudelaire, Pam Ayres and Rimbaud to football to Coronation Street, comprising horse racing and gambling, politics and jokes – and much more.

John Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original ‘people’s poet’. Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents. Today, JCC is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence just as visible on today’s pop culture. Aside from his trademark ‘look’ continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on the national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern music is huge.

03/10/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509896103 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 320pp • Rights: World 03/10/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509896110 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 320pp • Rights: World

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Emma Donoghue A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes a young great-nephew to the French Riviera in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

Noah Selvaggio is a retired professor and widower living in New York, but born in the South of France. He is days away from his long-awaited first trip back to Nice, prompted by a handful of puzzling photos he’s discovered from his mother’s wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: he is the closest available relative of his eleven-year-old great-nephew Michael, a stranger to him. Michael’s mother is in prison and his father is dead of an apparent overdose: he urgently needs someone to take him in.

Plagued by guilt and a feeling of duty to his dead sister, Noah agrees to foster the kid ‘just for couple of weeks’ and takes him along on his visit to Nice. This unlikely duo, both feeling adrift in their lives and suffering from culture shock, argue about everything from steak frites to Snapchat.

Praise for Room: ‘Emma Donoghue’s writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness’ Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife ‘One of the most profoundly affecting books I’ve read in a long time’ John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ‘Sophisticated in outlook and execution . . . Utterly plausible, vividly described’ New York Times

As Noah tries to make sense of his family’s involvement in Nice under Nazi occupation, he also comes to rely on Michael’s street-smart wit and ease with technology as shocking stories and secrets are uncovered.

Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room a huge bestseller, Akin is a heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their family’s painful story and start to write a new one together.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue now lives in Canada with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (most recently Frog Music and The Wonder) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes.

03/10/2019 • £16.99 • 9781529019964 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 03/10/2019 • £13.99 • 9781529019971 • Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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Kremlin Winter Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin Robert Service A riveting account of Vladimir Putin’s second presidency.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin.

When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release. The Soviet order collapsed in 1991, and Boris Yeltsin initiated a summer of transformation as Russia acquired a market economy and aspired to a new place in the world community. It was a season of achievement but also of disappointment, leading Yeltsin to relinquish the Russian presidency at the end of the century in favour of Putin, his young prime minister.

Putin’s rule has been full of surprises and there has never been a moment when politics in Russia have been entirely stable. At the same time there has been a steady progression in the direction of repression, control and international assertiveness. However, shoots of liberal growth have been appearing in the icy ground of public affairs, and Putin has been unable to take his supremacy for granted as he strives to impose his will on both the ruling team, its institutions and society at large. He has made the weather at home and abroad, and yet he is also facing a snow blizzard of difficulties in the economy and international relations.

In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future.

Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Russia: Experiment with a People, Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia’s past and present. Trotsky: A Biography was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize. Married with four children, he lives in London.

03/10/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509883035 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 400pp • Rights: World 03/10/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509882991 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback Royal • 400pp • Rights: World

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Eight Days at Yalta

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How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World Diana Preston

Adam

A riveting minute-by-minute chronicle of the February 1945 conference that shaped the outcome of one war – and gave birth to another.

In the last winter of the Second World War, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin arrived in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast and intermittent bonhomie they decided on the conduct of the final stages of the war against Germany, on how a defeated and occupied Germany should be governed, on the constitution of the nascent United Nations and on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greece.

Only three months later, less than a week after the German surrender, Roosevelt was dead and Churchill was writing to the new president, Harry S. Truman, of ‘an iron curtain’ that was now ‘drawn down upon [the Soviets’] front’.

Diana Preston chronicles eight days that created the postwar world, revealing Roosevelt’s determination to bring about the dissolution of the British Empire and Churchill’s conviction that he and the dying president would run rings round the Soviet premier. But Stalin monitored everything they said and made only paper concessions, while his territorial ambitions would soon result in the imposition of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. Meticulously researched and vividly written, this is a remarkable work of intense historical drama.

Diana Preston is an acclaimed historian and author of the definitive Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology), The Boxer Rebellion and The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838–1842, among other works of narrative history. She and her husband, Michael, live in London.

17/10/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509868742 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 368pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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’Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas Adam Kay From the award-winning and million-copy bestselling author of This is Going to Hurt comes ’Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas, a humorous illustrated gift book and a love letter to those who spend the festive season on the front line of the hospital ward.

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Join Adam Kay in a countdown to the festive season, as he shares further stories from his junior doctor diaries and shines a light on the unsung heroes of the NHS front line.

Here are twenty-five hilarious, poignant and eye-opening tales of life on the hospital ward at the most wonderful – and challenging – time of the year.

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Photo: Idil Sukan

Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film and the million-copy bestselling author of This is Going to Hurt. He previously worked as a junior doctor, although you’ve probably worked that bit out already. He lives in west London.

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17/10/2019 • £10.00 • 9781529018585 • Non-Fiction • Hardback A Format • 144pp • Rights: World

69

The Great Flood

The

Travels Through a Sodden Landscape

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Edward Platt A journey that explores floods and flooding in all its forms: Platt investigates the ways in which water has shaped our landscape, our literature and our sense of ourselves.

The citizens of the rainy, wind-swept islands of the United Kingdom have always lived with the threat of water, fearing its force while recognizing it as part of life. Yet meteorologists concur that flooding is becoming more frequent, and more severe. The floods of 2007 constituted the worst civil disaster in the UK’s history, and widespread flooding has continued to affect the country in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Over several years, Ed Platt undertook a journey in which he explored floods and flooding in all its forms: travelling extensively, from the south-east, up the East Coast to Northumberland via Yorkshire and across the country to Cumbria; from north Wales, through the Somerset Levels and back to London. In seeking out flooded places and those who live in them, The Great Flood is an attempt to understand both the physical and psychological landscapes of an island that is constantly being shaped and reshaped by rivers, sea and rain.

Using a mixture of travel writing, reportage and interviews, Platt moves beyond geography, exploring the life and culture of Britain, representations of the flood in literature and mythology, and our attitudes to the idea of this powerful phenomenon in order to illuminate the reality behind the statistics and news headlines that we all too often dismiss.

Edward Platt was born in 1968 and lives in London. His first book, Leadville, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; his second, The City of Abraham, was published by Picador in 2012.

31/10/2019 • £16.99 • 9781447298199 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 192pp • Rights: WEL

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14/11/

The Russian Job The Forgotten Story of How America Saved Russia from Famine Douglas Smith

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A gripping and revelatory account of how an American charity fought famine in Russia and saved Lenin’s revolutionary government from chaos.

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In 1921, after six years of unrelenting war and revolution, Russia was in ruins. The economy had collapsed, the country was ravaged by disease and starvation claimed the lives of millions. People were so desperate for food that there were reports of cannibalism, reports that were revealed to be horribly accurate.

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Remarkably, it was a young American aid worker who uncovered the truth and, even more remarkably, it was the US-backed charity that had sent him to Russia that would save Lenin’s fledgling government by feeding his people.

In The Russian Job, acclaimed historian Douglas Smith tells the gripping story of how an American charity fought the Russian famine. Backed by $20 million from the US government, and founded by Herbert Hoover, US Secretary of Commerce, the American Relief Administration recruited more than three hundred young Americans, many of them war veterans. They would oversee the distribution of food, clothing and medical supplies to people, throughout Russia’s vast landmass, saving millions of lives.

Vividly written, with a rich cast of characters and a deep understanding of the period, The Russian Job shines a bright light on this strange and shadowy moment in history.

Douglas Smith is an internationally recognized expert in Russian history and critically acclaimed author of several books, including the award-winning bestseller Former People and the highly acclaimed Rasputin. Before becoming a historian, Douglas Smith worked with the US State Department in the Soviet Union and as a Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty in Munich. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

14/11/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509882892 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 464pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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PICADOR POETRY

& EFTA

The Tradition

Sele

Jericho Brown

Deni The powerful second UK collection from awardwinning poet Jericho Brown.

Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?

Where does freedom truly lie? Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex – a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues – testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.

‘His poems reveal an unwavering belief in the power of language to redeem us from the wreckage of history and contemporary conflict, one that is contagious and might even give us all a reason for hope’ Guardian ‘To read Jericho Brown’s poems is to encounter devastating genius’ Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen and Macarthur Genius Award winner ‘Some folks write poems, Jericho Brown writes gospel’ Danez Smif, author of Don’t Call Us Dead

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award. The New Testament was winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, 2015. He teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

08/08/2019 • £10.99 • 9781529020472 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 96pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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‘She’s o Andre ‘Denise Someth heart-p “A Part contem Rober

Selected Poems Denise Riley

ard-

A selection of poems across the career of one of our most critically acclaimed British poets, Denise Riley.

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‘Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking.’ Guardian

‘She’s one of the best poets around’ Andrew Motion, Guardian ‘Denise Riley’s collection Say Something Back . . . includes her heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’ Robert Macfarlane

Selected Poems brings together poems of Denise Riley from across her career and includes a selection from her acclaimed collection Say Something Back, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Giller Prize and the Forward Prize for best collection and the Costa, plus some new previously uncollected poems. It is the most complete collection of her poetry, including everything she currently wishes to preserve. As a book it serves as testimony to her status as one of our most beloved and critically acclaimed poets, and argument for her to be more widely read.

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her visiting positions have included A.D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. She is the author of Say Something Back and lives in London.

19/09/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529017120 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 160pp • Rights: WEL

75

Selfie with Sea Creature

Chr

Paul Farley

Caro A new collection from one of the leading English poets writing today, Paul Farley.

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual this collection is impossible to summarize in terms of theme, as his interests are too various: there’s an air of ‘the innocence of childhood’ being viewed through the corrective lens of worldly middle age, its creeping self-consciousness and decrepitude, and the distortions of perception that attend it; confusing encounters with tech, modernity and its accelerated rate of change; satirical excursions critiquing the way business and digital communications have debased language. Farley is also interested as ever in the peripheral and marginal and no-man’s-lands – the lives of others, and their strange occupations; the birds and unsung-by-the-pocket-guides for fauna and flora you miss. Selfie with Sea Creature encapsulates one of poetry’s most capacious and eclectic imaginations.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published four collections of poetry with Picador, most recently The Dark Film (2012). His other books include Edgelands (with Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011), and he has also edited a selection of John Clare’s poetry.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent broadcaster, he has received numerous awards including Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

17/10/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529009798 • Poetry • Hardback S format • 80pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 17/10/2019 • £10.99 • 9781529009804 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 80pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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‘Duffy’s witty, w a magic childho Intelli

Christmas Book 10 Carol Ann Duffy

lish

The tenth and final Christmas book, set in the frost fairs on London’s Thames in the sixteenth century.

ding Beautifully illustrated and produced in a gorgeous small format, this is an irresistible festive gift and Christmas stocking must-have for all book lovers.

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Photo: © Jemimah Kuhfeld

‘Duffy’s spellbinding verse, spiced with witty, wintry illustrations, recaptures a magic most of us left behind in childhood’ Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. Her other beautifully illustrated Christmas poems include Another Night Before Christmas, Mrs Scrooge, Wenceslas, Bethlehem, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday and The Wren-Boys. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include Sincerity, The World’s Wife, Love Poems, Rapture and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award.

31/10/2019 • £6.99 • 9781509848171 • Poetry • Hardback 137x128mm • 48pp • Rights: WEL

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