Picador Spring 2019 Catalogue

PICADOR

Kafka’s Last Trial The Strange Case of a Literary Legacy Benjamin Balint The gripping story of the legal battle over the work of perhaps the most iconic writer of the twentieth century: a priceless cache of papers, an unprecedented international custody battle, and the unlikely journey of a trove of manuscripts from Prague to Palestine.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil his friend’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to editing, publishing and canonizing Kafka’s work. By betraying his friend’s last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy – first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle: as a writer in German, should Kafka’s papers come to rest in Germany, where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as a Jewish writer, should his work be considered as a cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924?

‘Thrilling and profound, Kafka’s Last Trial shines new light not only on the greatest writer of the twentieth century and the fate of his work, but also on the larger question of who owns art or has a right to claim guardianship of it . . . Benjamin Balint’s research and lively intelligence deliver insights on every page.’

Nicole Krauss

Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka, Benjamin Balint also traces the journey of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939 and offers a gripping account of the Israeli court case that determined their fate. He tells of a wrenching escape from the Nazi invaders of Czechoslovakia; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with the past eventually faced off in the courts. Benjamin Balint invites us to consider Kafka’s remarkable legacy and to question whether that legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth, or that of his cultural affinities – but also whether any nation state can lay claim to ownership of a writer’s work at all.

Benjamin Balint taught literature, including Kafka, at the Bard College humanities programme at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. His first book, Running Commentary, was published by PublicAffairs in 2010. His second book, Jerusalem: City of the Book, is co-authored with Merav Mack. His reviews and essays regularly appear in the Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Haaretz, the Weekly Standard, and the Claremont Review of Books. His translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in the New Yorker and in Poetry International.

10/01/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509836710 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Order of the Day Éric Vuillard A gripping and compelling fictional account of the key meetings and events which led up to the outbreak of World War Two: how egos flourished, diplomacy failed, and a few powerful men brought Europe to the brink of disaster. For fans of HHhH and To Die in Spring.

Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt Éric Vuillard’s gripping novel The Order of the Day tells the story of the pivotal meetings which took place between the European powers in the run-up to World War Two. What emerges is a fascinating and incredibly moving account of failed diplomacy, broken relationships, and the catastrophic momentum which led to conflict.

‘A book whose staggering power lies in its simplicity.’

Le Monde ‘A powerful story you read in one go, with astonishment and dread.’

La Presse ‘Brief and striking . . . history behind the scenes.’

L’Express

The titans of German industry – set to prosper under the Nazi government – gather to lend their support to Adolf Hitler. The Austrian Chancellor realizes too late that he has wandered into a trap, as Hitler delivers the ultimatum that will lay the groundwork for Germany’s annexation of Austria.

Winston Churchill joins Neville Chamberlain for a farewell luncheon held in honour of Joachim von Ribbentrop: German Ambassador to England, soon to be Foreign Minister in the Nazi government, and future defendant at the Nuremberg trials.

We know that these meetings took place, but what was the mood in the room? What words were exchanged?

What egos were in play? Vuillard makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the world was brought to the brink of war because of the actions of, and decisions made by, those in power. The sense of failure and tragedy is cumulative: there was nothing inevitable about these disastrous events.

Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 who has written nine award-winning books, including Conquistadors (winner of the 2010 Prix Ignatius J. Reilly), and La bataille d’Occident and Congo (both of which received the 2012 Prix Franz-Hessel and the 2013 Prix Valery-Larbaud). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for L’ordre du jour.

10/01/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509889969 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 160pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Distance Home Paula Saunders The Distance Home is the story of a family – its secrets, betrayals, cruelties and kindnesses – and how our childhoods dictate the adults we become.

In 1960s rural America two siblings grow up in a place of love and turmoil. Rene is the apple of her father’s eye: an over-achiever, athletic, clever, the best brain in class, and the best dancer in school. Her older brother Leon, doted on by his mother, is shy, a stutterer, but also a brilliant dancer.

Rene and Leon share a talent, but it is a gift their father adores in his daughter, and loathes in his son, and that could make all the difference. These two children may be best friends, but life promises to take them down very different paths . . .

‘A deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family: its promises and disruptions . . . surrounded by a rich, shimmering, sensuous landscape’

The Distance Home is the story of two children growing up side by side – the one given opportunities the other just misses – and the fall-out in their adult lives. Funny and tragic, both intimate and universal, Paula Saunders’ debut is about how our parents shape the adults we become. It is a hugely moving story of devotion and neglect, impossible to put down – these are characters you will forever hold close to your heart.

Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad ‘Set in a landscape at once stark and beautiful, here is a luminous novel about the intricacies of family life and family love. The pulls, the twists, the demons, the miracles. Heartbreaking, full of compassion, and prose that feels it has always been there, not even forged from nothing, but essentially true. I haven’t read anything this good in a long time.’

Paula Saunders grew up in South Dakota. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer Chair, Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.

Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

24/01/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509895328 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 256pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Age of Light Whitney Scharer A sweeping debut about a love affair amidst the smoky cabarets, opium dens and Surrealist parties of 1930s Paris.

Model. Muse. Lover. Artist.

One cool day in 1929, Lee Miller arrives in bohemian Paris to pursue her dream of being an artist, having left behind a successful modelling career at Vogue.

Gorgeous and talented, she catches the eye of renowned Surrealist artist Man Ray and convinces him to hire her as his assistant. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force, and soon their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined.

As Lee begins to assert herself, and moves from being a muse to an artist, Man’s jealousy spirals out of control, and their mutual betrayals threaten to destroy them both . . .

‘In incandescent prose, Whitney Scharer has created an unforgettable heroine discovering her passion, her independence, and her art – and what she must sacrifice to have them. Sweeping from the glamour of 1920s Paris through the battlefields of World War II and into the war’s long shadow, The Age of Light is a startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s selftransformation from muse into artist.’

Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere ‘Whitney Scharer’s storytelling is utterly immersive and gorgeous in its details, transporting you into Lee Miller’s life, and her struggles to be taken seriously in a man’s world. This is a powerful, sensual and gripping portrait of the forging of an artist’s soul.’

The Age of Light is a powerfully sensuous tale of ambition, love, and the personal price of making art. In this immersive debut novel, Whitney Scharer has brought a brilliant and pioneering artist out of the shadow of a man’s story and into the light.

Whitney Scharer earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her short fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, and other journals. She’s received an Emerging Artist Award in Literature from the St Botolph Club Foundation and a Somerville Arts Council Artists grant, and been awarded a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

The Age of Light is her first novel.

Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe 07/02/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509889129 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 07/02/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509889136 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Spirit of Science Fiction Roberto Bolaño A newly discovered novel from the master author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives: a story about becoming a writer, and coming of age in the realms of sex and love.

A tale of bohemian youth on the make in Mexico City from a master of contemporary fiction, and a sublime precursor to The Savage Detectives.

Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world – or sacrifice themselves to it. Roberto Bolaño’s The Spirit of Science Fiction is a story of youth hungry for revolution, notoriety, and sexual adventure, as they work to construct a reality out of the fragments of their dreams.

‘As well as being a novel about becoming a writer, it’s also about initiation into the world of sex and love. The Spirit of Science Fiction shows, like few other novels written in the Spanish language, the pain, the difficulty, the angst of the young man faced with what Henry Miller called aptly ‘‘the world of sex’’. May the archive of Roberto Bolaño’s work never close.’

Christopher Domínguez Michael

But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction, and dreams of cosmonauts and Nazis. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city’s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses.

The Spirit of Science Fiction is a kaleidoscopic work of strange and tender beauty, and a fitting introduction for readers uninitiated into the thrills of Roberto Bolaño’s fiction. It is an indispensable addition to an ecstatic and transgressive body of work.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

07/02/2019 • £8.99 • 9781509851928 • Fiction • Hardback B Format • 176pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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It’s Not About the Burqa Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race Mariam Khan It’s Not About the Burqa is an anthology of essays by Muslim women about the contemporary Muslim female experience.

When was the last time you heard a Muslim woman speak for herself without a filter?

It’s Not About the Burqa started life when Mariam Khan read about the conversation in which David Cameron linked the radicalization of Muslim men to the ‘traditional submissiveness’ of Muslim women. Mariam felt pretty sure she didn’t know a single Muslim woman who would describe herself that way. Why was she hearing about Muslim women from people who were demonstrably neither Muslim nor female?

Taking one of the most politicized and misused words associated with Muslim women and Islamophobia, It’s Not About the Burqa has something to say: seventeen Muslim women speaking up for themselves. Here are essays about the hijab and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about queer identity, about sex, about the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country, and about how Islam and feminism go hand in hand.

Funny, warm, sometimes sad, and often angry, each of these essays is a passionate declaration, and each essay is calling time on the oppression, the lazy stereotyping, the misogyny and the Islamophobia.

It’s Not About the Burqa doesn’t claim to speak for a faith or a group of people, because it’s time the world realized that Muslim women are not a monolith. It’s time the world listened to them.

Mariam Khan is a twenty-four-year-old activist.

21/02/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509886401 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 272pp • Rights: WEL 21/02/2019 • £13.99 • 9781509886388 • Non-Fiction • Trade paperback • 272pp • Rights: WEL

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Insomnia John Kinsella Featuring poems in praise of the natural world and passionately arguing for our duty both to it and each other, this may be Australian poet John Kinsella’s most powerful collection to date.

The Australian poet John Kinsella’s vivid and urgent new collection addresses the crisis of being that currently afflicts us: Kinsella addresses a situation where the creations of the human imagination, the very means by which we extend our empathies into the world – art, music and philosophy – suddenly find themselves in a world that not only denies their importance, but can sometimes seem to have no use for them at all. In an attempt to find a still point from which we might reconfigure our perspective and address the paradoxes of our contemporary experience, Kinsella has written poems of self-accusation and angry protest, meditations on the nature of loss and trauma, and full-throated celebrations of the natural world. Ranging from Jam Tree Gully, Western Australia to the coast of West Cork, Ireland, haunted by historical and literary figures from Dante to Emily Brontë (whom Kinsella has obsessed over since he was a child, and who intervenes in the poet’s attempts to come to grips with ideas of colonization and identity), Insomnia may be Kinsella’s most various and powerful collection to date.

John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. In 2007 he received the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.

21/02/2019 • £10.99 • 9781529009767 • Fiction • Trade Paperback S format • 80pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN AU NZ Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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War Doctor Surgery on the Front Line David Nott The gripping true story of a front-line trauma surgeon in the world’s most dangerous war zones.

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital.

The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.

Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time went on, David Nott began to realize that flying into a catastrophe – whether war or natural disaster – was not enough.

Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets.

War Doctor is his extraordinary story.

David Nott is a Welsh consultant surgeon, specializing in general and vascular surgery. He works mainly in London hospitals, but for more than twenty-five years he has also volunteered to work in disaster and war zones. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 Birthday Honours and in 2016 he received the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award and the Pride of Britain Award. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

21/02/2019 • £18.99 • 9781509837021 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 21/02/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509837038 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Map of Knowledge How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities Violet Moller A vibrant and evocative account of how the great scientific ideas of the ancient world were lost and found.

In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno’s medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily’s vibrant mix of cultures, and – finally – to Venice, where that great merchant city’s printing presses would enable Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s system of the stars and Galen’s vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely.

‘An epic treasure hunt into the highways and byways of stored knowledge across faiths and continents.’

John Agard, poet and playwright ‘An exceptionally bold and important book.’

Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics

In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge from century to century, from east to west and north to south, Moller also reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve and transform astronomy, mathematics and medicine from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Vividly told and with a dazzling cast of characters, The Map of Knowledge is an evocative, nuanced and vibrant account of our common intellectual heritage.

Violet Moller is a historian and writer, living in Oxford. The Map of Knowledge received a prestigious RSL Jerwood Award in 2016.

21/02/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509829606 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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I Want To Show You More Jamie Quatro Jamie Quatro’s powerful and prizewinning short-story collection, I Want To Show You More.

Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family.

‘Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O’Connor.’

James Wood, New Yorker ‘Subtle, sexy, and reflective . . . Quatro’s stories [have] led some to compare her work to that of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. I also picked up metal-detector traces of Jayne Anne Phillips . . . and of Lorrie Moore’s pulverizing wit. . . . In order to be good at big things, writers must be good at small ones. Quatro’s details resonate. . . . There’s so much in these stories that’s shocking. Yet there’s so much solace.’

Dwight Garner, New York Times

Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.

Jamie Quatro is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays.

Her debut story collection, I Want To Show You More, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is a recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

21/02/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509858989 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 208pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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Gingerbread Helen Oyeyemi Helen Oyeyemi, the prize-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, returns with a bewitching and inventive novel about motherhood, family legacy and . . . gingerbread.

‘A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam’ Ali Smith Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children’s stories – equal parts wholesome and uncanny; from the tantalizing witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel to the man-shaped confection who one day decides to run as fast as he can – beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Praise for What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours ‘A truly exceptional work of fiction, by a writer we should be delirious to have as a contemporary’ Independent ‘Wild, luscious and startling . . . Oyeyemi glides seamlessly across time, space and genre’ Financial Times

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox and the short-story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Perdita Lee may appear your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventhfloor flat with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there’s the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it’s very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (and, according to Wikipedia, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee’s early youth. In fact, the world’s truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread is Harriet’s charismatic childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval – a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother’s long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet’s story, as well as a reunion or two. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi’s inimitable style and imagination, Gingerbread is a true feast for the reader.

07/03/2019 • £16.99 • 9781447299417 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 07/03/2019 • £13.99 • 9781447299431 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 304pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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Lotharingia A Personal History of Europe’s Western Borderlands Simon Winder Following on from Danubia and the bestselling Germania, Lotharingia is the final instalment in Simon Winder’s hilarious and informative personal exploration of European history.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.

Lotharingia is a history of in-between Europe; the story of a place between places. In this beguiling and compelling book, Simon Winder retraces the various powers that have tried to overtake the land that stretches from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps and the might of the peoples who have lived there for centuries.

Simon Winder is the author of the highly praised The Man Who Saved Britain and the Sunday Times top-ten bestseller Germania.

He works in publishing and lives in Wandsworth Town.

07/03/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509803255 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 576pp • Rights: WEL Excluding USA Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 07/03/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509803286 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 576pp • Rights: WEL Excluding USA Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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Daughters of Chivalry The Forgotten Children of Edward I Kelcey Wilson-Lee The first full biography of the five remarkable daughters of Edward I. Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealized – and largely mythical – notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this vibrant account of the five daughters of the great English king, Edward I. The lives of these sisters – Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth – ran the full gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages. Living as they did in a courtly culture founded on romantic longing and brilliant pageantry, they knew that a princess was to be chaste yet a mother to many children, preferably sons, meek yet able to influence a recalcitrant husband or even command a host of men-at-arms. Edward’s daughters were of course expected to cement alliances and secure lands and territory by making great dynastic marriages, or endow religious houses with royal favour. But they also skilfully managed enormous households, navigated choppy diplomatic waters and promoted their family’s cause throughout Europe – and had the courage to defy their royal father. They might never have won the crown in their own right, but they were utterly confident of their crucial role in the spectacle of medieval kingship.

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, Daughters of Chivalry offers a rich portrait of these spirited Plantagenet women. With their libraries of beautifully illustrated psalters and tales of romance, their rich silks and gleaming jewels, we follow these formidable women throughout their lives and see them – at long last – shine from out of the shadows, revealing what it was to be a princess in the Age of Chivalry.

Kelcey Wilson-Lee is a historian of Britain, its art and its architecture. Educated in New York, Oxford and London, she has published widely on her academic speciality of medieval material culture. Kelcey has taught courses at Cambridge, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has written articles for English Heritage and for Country Life magazine. She lives with her husband and two sons, and manages the Regional Philanthropy programme at the University of Cambridge.

21/03/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509847891 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Braid Laetitia Colombani The huge international bestseller: three women forced by circumstances to rebel against their fate – a story spanning three different continents.

Smita, Giulia, Sarah: three lives, three continents, three women with nothing in common, but nevertheless bound by a rare expression of courage . . . like three strands in a braid. Through the story of one woman’s hair, three women’s destinies are drawn together.

India. Smita is an untouchable, married to a ‘rat hunter’, her job to clean with her bare hands the village latrines, just like her mother before her. Her dream is to see her daughter escape this same fate, and learn to read. When this hope is shattered, she decides to run away with the child, despite her husband’s warnings, sacrificing what is most precious to her: her hair.

Sicily. Giulia is a worker in her father’s wig workshop, the last of its kind in Palermo. She classifies, washes, bleaches, and dyes the hair provided by the city’s hairdressers. When her father is the victim of a serious accident, she quickly discovers the family company is bankrupt.

Canada. Sarah is a reputed lawyer. As a twice-divorced mother of three children, she ploughs through cases at breakneck speed. Just as she is about to be promoted, she learns she has breast cancer. Her seemingly perfect existence begins to show its cracks . . . But this is only if one ignores the incredible lust for life that keeps her going.

Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid is the powerfully moving story of three women’s courage in the face of adversity.

Laetitia Colombani comes from the world of film, where she worked as a screenwriter, director, and as an actress. She also writes for the stage. The Braid is her first novel.

21/03/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509881086 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 224pp • Rights: WEL 21/03/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509881093 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 224pp • Rights: WEL

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Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me Kate Clanchy A candid, revelatory and deeply moving insight into life in British schools.

Kate Clanchy has taught in state schools for nearly thirty years. Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me is a book about a life’s work in a profession and in a national institution. By telling the stories of some of the kids she’s taught, some of the teachers she’s worked with, and some of the lessons she’s learned, Clanchy offers a revelatory picture of school life, and a fascinating look at the role education plays in our society today.

This is not a work of moaning pessimism or dry sociology, lamenting the actions of successive governments when it comes to policy decisions. While Some Kids acknowledges the undoubtedly difficult situation in many schools, Clanchy writes beautifully about her students as people, whose diversity, humour and sheer brains she aims to celebrate; she writes about the uplifting power of teaching when practised well, about the success she’s seen and encouraged in some of the most challenged and challenging pupils she knows, and about the effect all of this had on her, as a teacher, mother and citizen.

As well as her real-world experience in schools, Clanchy is a prize-winning author of fiction and poetry. This unique combination of talents – her decades in the classroom, her fearlessness and wit, her poet’s eye and inimitable voice – allow her to explore serious questions by telling human stories that are sometimes funny sometimes sad, but always moving and deeply sympathetic. Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me is a relevant, affecting and agenda-setting book that will really get people talking.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize.

21/03/2019 • £16.99 • 9781509840298 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 288pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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Search Party Richard Meier Richard Meier’s second collection, Search Party, looks at our experiences of being lost to others, as well as lost from ourselves.

Richard Meier’s first collection of poetry won many admirers for its wry, wise and sharp-eyed insight into the minutiae of daily life, and for the poet’s remarkable ability to uncover the little abysses that lurk just below the domestic familiar. As the title indicates, his second, Search Party, casts its net more widely – and looks at our experiences of being lost to others, as well as lost from ourselves. Many of the poems in this collection explore attempts to repair severed connections, or to forge links never properly established: from a father’s desperate search for his son missing at sea, to a child’s reaction to being denied a responsive gaze, and a footballer’s sublime (if optimistic) pass to a teammate – these poems address the nature of the distances between us. Most importantly, they also show the lengths to which we will go to ensure that these distances are closed, and that the most basic of our needs are met: to be seen, to be recognized – and ultimately, sought out and found by one another.

Richard Meier was born in Surrey in 1970. He holds both a music degree and an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, and now works in mental health policy. He lives in north London with his wife and daughter.

21/03/2019 • £10.99 • 9781509851980 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 64pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

17

Constellations Sinéad Gleeson An extraordinarily intimate memoir in a series of bodily encounters that have made Sinéad Gleeson the woman and the writer she is today, for readers of The Last Act of Love and I Am, I Am, I Am. ‘I think of all the metal in my body as stars, glistening beneath the skin. Constellations are a map, a collection of stars in one frame, a guide to looking at things from different angles.

While each star is its own, a mass of light and gas, they all connect, into one big constellation.’

How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing?

How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In this powerful and daring memoir in essays Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. In doing so she delves into a range of subjects: art, illness, ghosts, grief and our very ways of seeing. In writing that is in tradition of some of our finest writers such as Olivia Laing, Maggie O’Farrell, Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson, and yet still in her own spirited, warm voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both personal and yet universal in its resonance.

Sinéad Gleeson’s essays have appeared in Granta, Winter Papers, Gorse, Autumn: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons, Banshee and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Her short story ‘Counting Bridges’ was longlisted at the 2016 Irish Book Awards and another story, ‘Infinite For Now’, was published in an Irish anthology in spring 2018. She is the editor of three short anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic since 2000, appearing as a reporter on RTÉ’s ‘The Works’ and reviewing for the Irish Times, the Guardian and others. She regularly chairs and moderates panels with writers at arts festivals all over Ireland. Since 2013, she has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1.

04/04/2019 • £16.99 • 9781509892730 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 304pp • Rights: CL UK & Comm Eng Lang non-exclusive 04/04/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509892754 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 304pp • Rights: CL UK & Comm Eng Lang non-exclusive

18

The Ditch Herman Koch A darkly gripping novel, from the author of the internationally bestselling The Dinner – about how your imagination can run away with you, about what we fear to lose, and how even the most stable people can be undone by jealousy.

When Robert Walter, popular Mayor of Amsterdam, sees his wife toss her head back in laughter while chatting to one of his aldermen at a New Year’s reception, he immediately suspects the worst.

Despite their long and happy marriage, Robert is convinced that Sylvia is cheating on him – and with the straitlaced alderman, no less, who is committed to the environment and wants to spoil the capital’s skyline with wind turbines.

‘A riveting but disturbing literary thriller from the richly talented Dutch author who sprang to prominence with his gripping The Dinner . . . Delicately told, in spare, haunting prose, there are echoes of Stephen King’s Misery, but this is even more subtle, with a denouement to send shivers down the spine.’

Daily Mail on Dear Mr M

Soon afterwards, a journalist produces a photograph of a police officer being beaten up by three protesters during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. She claims that the mayor is one of the protesters. Then, out of the blue, Robert’s ninety-four-year-old father turns up on the steps of the city hall, desperate to speak to him. He and his wife want to die together. They do not want to burden their son with their deteriorating health, so why not end their own lives when the time is right?

Herman Koch’s The Ditch shows how a seemingly stable man can quickly become increasingly entangled in his own fears and suspicions. Or is everything not what it seems – is Robert Walter actually seeing things clearly for the very first time?

Herman Koch was born in 1953. He is the author of a number of novels, including The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool, and short stories, has acted for radio, television, and film, and was a co-creator of the long-running Dutch TV comedy series Jiskefet (1990–2005). The Dinner has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide and spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Laura Linney, and Chloë Sevigny starred in the film adaptation.

04/04/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509883431 • Fiction • Hardback A5 • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN AU NZ Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 04/04/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509883455 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN AU NZ Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

19

Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl Andrea Lawlor Transposing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to ’90s San Francisco, this novel of transgender metamorphosis is a wild, sexy, funny and moving story of living on the edge.

‘I love this book, in all its ecstasy, wit, and hilarity. I laughed out loud in recognition and appreciation of Lawlor’s spot-on portrait of an era, scene, and soundtrack, the novel’s particular sluice of pleasures, fluids, and feelings. The liberatory rush of Lawlor’s writing is as rare as it is contagious, not to mention HOT. Paul is on fire, and an antihero for the ages.’

Maggie Nelson ‘Fast-paced and cheeky, full of intellectual riffs, of observations so sharp they feel like gossip, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a touchingly sweet-hearted and deeply cool book. Andrea Lawlor has written a magic story, showing us the real magic of our world in the process. If you like your humor supersmart and your theory full of camp and irony and heart, you won’t be able to put this book down.’

Michelle Tea

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying.

He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco – a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

Andrea Lawlor’s debut novel offers a speculative history of early ’90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ ine wends his way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

Andrea Lawlor lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College. Lawlor is a fiction editor for Fence and the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016).

18/04/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529007664 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA 18/04/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529009996 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

20

Nature’s Mutiny How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present Philipp Blom A groundbreaking work of environmental history tracing the great climate change of the seventeenth century: the ‘Little Ice Age’.

‘Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.’

Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe.

While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and ‘frost fairs’ were erected on a frozen Thames – with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city.

Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this ‘Little Ice Age’, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment.

A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature’s Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Phillipp Blom was born in Hamburg in 1970. After studying in Vienna and Oxford, he worked in publishing as a journalist and translator in London and Paris, where he now lives.

18/04/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509890415 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 416pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

21

From the Wreck Jane Rawson The first novel to be nominated for both Australia’s leading SF Prize (the Aurealis, which it won) and for its leading literary award (the Miles Franklin), From the Wreck is a novel of strange and wonderful imagination, imbued with beauty and feeling, existential loneliness and a deep awareness of the interdependence of all life.

‘It’s hard to find the right words to praise this novel. I think we need a whole new critical vocabulary to be invented. Rawson recreates a vanished historical world with utterly convincing characters as well as inhabits the mind of a cephalopod alien and make us feel, in both cases, yes, that’s exactly how it is. Jane Rawson’s writing is mysterious, chilling and tender. The book is a sort of miracle.’

Lian Hearn ‘What Rawson has ingeniously forged with From the Wreck is something approaching an old-fashioned historical yarn spliced with Cronenbergian body horror . . . The commonplace rubbing shoulders with the supernatural adds to the book’s considerations of mourning and absence a vivid hue . . . a genuine tension and sense of dread.’

Sydney Morning Herald

On 6 August 1859, the steamship Admella foundered on Carpenters Reef, not far from the South Australian shore. George Hills miraculously survives the wreck. But he is not alone.

Haunted by his memories and the disappearance of his fellow survivor, George delves back into the past, seeking answers for what happened – how his fractured life became intertwined with that of a woman, the other survivor of the wreck, and a creature not entirely of this world . . .

Blending genres, perspectives and worlds, Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck is a fascinating exploration of the stories we tell about the past.

Jane Rawson is a writer and a bureaucrat who lives outside Melbourne. She is the author of three novels – From the Wreck, Formaldehyde and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists – and a work of non-fiction, The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change, co-authored with James Whitmore. In Australia, her work won the 2015 Viva la Novella Prize and the 2014 Most Underrated Book Award, while From the Wreck won the 2018 Aurealis Award for Best SF Novel and was longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award. Her short fiction has been published in Sleepers Almanac, Overland, Tincture, Seizure, the Review of Australian Fiction and on janebryonyrawson.wordpress.com.

18/04/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529006544 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 272pp • Rights: World excluding AU NZ 18/04/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529006551 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 272pp • Rights: World excluding AU NZ

22

Whereas Layli Long Soldier The sublimely beautiful and heartbreaking debut collection from a major new voice in contemporary Native American literature.

‘In what is clearly a golden age for American poetry, Layli Long Soldier has to be out in front – one of the best collections of the century.’

Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.

Andrew McMillan ‘Elegant, innovative, and necessary.’

Buzzfeed ‘Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.’

New York Times Book Review

Layli Long Soldier is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

18/04/2019 • £10.99 • 9781529012804 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 128pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

23

The Doll Factory Elizabeth Macneal The Doll Factory is the story of a young woman who aspires to be an artist, and the man whose obsession may destroy her world for ever.

The Doll Factory is an intoxicating story of art, obsession and possession.

London. 1850. The Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and among the crowd watching the spectacle two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist, it is the encounter of a moment – forgotten seconds later, but for Silas, a collector entranced by the strange and beautiful, that meeting marks a new beginning.

When Iris is asked to model for pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly her world begins to expand, to become a place of art and love.

Proof cover - final image to come ‘Astonishingly good. The Doll Factory reminded me of The Crimson Petal and the White, Fingersmith and Vanity Fair but had a richness of tone that was uniquely its own . . . I couldn’t put it down. You won’t be able to either’ Elizabeth Day, author of The Party ‘Engrossing and atmospheric . . . fascinating’ Adele Geras, author of The Ballet Class ‘A stunning novel that twines together power, art, and obsession. At every turn expectations are confounded – it’s a historical novel and yet feels incredibly relevant and timely . . . it had me totally gripped’

But Silas has only thought of one thing since their meeting, and his obsession is darkening . . .

Elizabeth Macneal was born in Scotland and now lives in East London. She is a writer and potter and works from a small studio at the bottom of her garden. She read English Literature at Oxford University, before working in the City for several years. In 2017, she completed the Creative Writing MA at UEA where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury scholarship. The Doll Factory, Elizabeth’s debut novel, won the Caledonia Novel Award 2018. www.elizabethmacneal.com

Sophie Mackintosh, Man Booker Prize longlisted author of The Water Cure 02/05/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529002393 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 336pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 02/05/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529002416 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 336pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

24

The Bells of Old Tokyo Travels in Tokyo time Anna Sherman A hauntingly original book about Tokyo, seen through the eyes of an outsider, searching for the past that underlies the arrestingly visible present.

In The Bells of Old Tokyo, Anna Sherman explores Japan and revels in all its wonderful particularity. As a foreigner living in Tokyo, Sherman’s account takes pleasure and fascination in the history and culture of a country that can seem startlingly strange to a foreigner.

‘A tour-de-force mapping, in four dimensions, of the amazing place we call ‘‘Tokyo.’’ I realized I barely know the city . . . So much is dealt with so beautifully – Mishima, the 1945 firebombs, the tangle that is Shinjuku . . . Wonderful . . .’

Liza Dalby ‘If a more soulful and original book on Japan has been published in the past few years, I haven’t seen it. Anna Sherman ventures deep into the land and its silences with an attention to the spaces between words, a lightly worn erudition and a poetic grace – a feel for all that she doesn’t have to say – that any of the rest of us might envy. This is the rare book that looks past the zany and clashing surfaces of Japan to excavate its heart, and everything we’ll never be able to explain about the place, even as we bow before it.’

From her search for the lost bells of the city – the bells by which its inhabitants kept time before the Dutch introduced clocks – to her personal friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, here is Tokyo in its bewildering variety: from the love hotels of Shinjuku to the appalling fire-storms of 1945 (in which many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki), from the death of Mishima to the impact of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.

For fans of The Lonely City, and Lost in Translation, The Bells of Old Tokyo is a beautiful and original portrait of Tokyo told through time.

Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford before moving to Tokyo in 2001.

Pico Iyer

02/05/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529000450 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 240pp • Rights: World 02/05/2019 • £13.99 • 9781529000467 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 240pp • Rights: World

25

Homeland Fernando Aramburu The European phenomenon: over 750,000 copies sold in Spain, a bestseller in Italy and Germany, the story of two women, two friends, whose families are divided by the conflicting loyalties of terrorism.

Miren and Bittori have been best friends all their lives, growing up in the same small town in the north of Spain.

With limited interest in politics, the terrorist threat posed by ETA seems to affect them little. When Bittori’s husband starts receiving threatening letters from the violent group, however – demanding money, accusing him of being a police informant – she turns to her friend for help. But Miren’s loyalties are torn: her son Joxe Mari has just been recruited to the group as a terrorist and to denounce them as evil would be to condemn her own flesh and blood. Tensions rise, relationships fracture, and events race towards a violent, tragic conclusion . . .

‘It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that was so persuasive and moving, so intelligently conceived.’

Fernando Aramburu’s Homeland is a gripping story and devastating exploration of the meaning of family, friendship, what it’s like to live in the shadow of terrorism, and how countries and their people can possibly come to terms with their violent pasts.

Mario Vargas Llosa ‘A magnificent novel which is becoming a publishing, political and literary phenomenon. A story imbued with a spine-tingling sense of realism.’

Fernando Aramburu was born in San Sebastián in 1959. The author of three volumes of short stories and several novels, he lives in Germany where he works as a lecturer in the Spanish language.

La Vanguardia

16/05/2019 • £16.99 • 9781509858026 • Fiction • Hardback Royal • 640pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 21/03/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509858033 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 640pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

26

My House Is Falling Down Mary Loudon This vivid and compelling novel about a modern love triangle asks one devastating question: what does infidelity mean when everyone tells the truth?

For Lucy, marriage to Mark provides an anchor after several years of drifting casually across continents, into relationships, and away from firm decisions.

Now forty-two, restless and subversive, her anchor is working loose. Bewildered by the demands of motherhood, she is resentful of Mark’s drive and success.

Mark is profoundly deaf, and though his determination and self-sufficiency have kept him sane, they have alienated his wife.

‘A truthful, exciting, agonising adult love triangle. An emotional labyrinth, with monsters, great risks – and survival.’

Laline Paull, author of The Bees ‘A novel of great tenderness and intelligence . . . A grown-up love tangle with interesting, grown-up men and women.’

Elizabeth Buchan, author of The Good Wife and The New Mrs Clifton

When Lucy meets Angus, a pianist in his sixties, they fall passionately in love. It’s a first for both of them: Angus feels moored; Lucy, cast free. The shock is seismic but Lucy is bent on the truth at all costs. However, Mark’s reaction to her candour is startlingly unorthodox – and as their marriage deteriorates, and Angus demands commitment, Lucy must make decisions with lifelong consequences.

Vivid, compelling and erotically highly charged, My House is Falling Down is the gripping story of a woman stretching love to its limits. Broken vows jostle with the joy of mid-life love as Lucy discovers the price of admitting to a socially unacceptable relationship; what infidelity means when no one is lying; and ultimately, how brutal honesty with yourself, as well as others, is one of our last great taboos.

Mary Loudon is the bestselling author of four non-fiction books. She has been published in twelve countries, won four writer’s prizes and been short- and long-listed for the MIND Book of the Year and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year awards. She is a Fellow of the British American project and a former Whitbread Prize judge.

16/05/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529005271 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 224pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

27

Queer Intentions A (personal) journey through LGBTQ+ culture Amelia Abraham An immersive and exciting journey – from New York to Turkey, LA to Belgrade – exploring the pros, cons and myths around so-called LGBTQ+ equality.

In 2016 Amelia decided to quit everything and move to Iceland for love, but came home with her tail between her legs when the relationship ended after just ten days.

Thinking about her crushed hopes – marriage, kids; things that she never saw as possible for queer people when she was growing up – the breakup becomes a moment to reflect on the idea that for LGBTQ+ people living in the West today, the options are greater than ever before.

Yet, before we can take up these rights, Queer Intentions argues that we must ask ourselves a few questions. What were LGBTQ+ people before us fighting for – our right to be the same, or to be different? At what cost does our assimilation come? And which parts of the LGBTQ+ community are getting left behind? Embarking on a journey across the West – where the tensions that come with so called ‘equality’ are most acute – she searches for the answer to these problems, as well as the broader question of what it means to be queer in 2019.

Starting with the first same-sex marriage in Britain, on to a giant drag convention in LA, travelling across Pride parades in Europe, to a transgender model agency in New York, onwards via Turkey’s underground LGBT scene, and arriving in progressive Stockholm, Queer Intentions – and the characters in it – provides the ultimate exploration of the joys and pains of being LGBTQ+ in the West at a time when queer culture has never been so mainstream.

Amelia Abraham (b. 1991) is a journalist from London. Her main interest is LGBTQ identity politics, and she has written on or around this topic for the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, ES Magazine, VICE, i-D magazine and Dazed & Confused. She also writes about feminist issues, human-rights issues, health policy, arts and culture, and sex.

30/05/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509866168 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Demy • 296pp • Rights: World 30/05/2019 • £13.99 • 9781509866182 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 296pp • Rights: World

28

Why We Dream The New Science Behind Dreams and Why They Matter Alice Robb The new science behind dreams, why they are good for us and why they matter.

We all dream, and 98 per cent of us can recall our dreams the next morning. Even in today’s modern age, it is human nature to wonder what they mean.

Now, groundbreaking science is putting dreams at the forefront of new research into sleep, memory, the concept of self and human socialization. Once a subject of the New Age and spiritualism, the science of dreams is revealed to have a crucial role in the biology and neuroscience of our waking lives.

In Why We Dream, Alice Robb, a leading American science journalist, will take readers on a journey to uncover why we dream, why dreaming matters and how we can improve our dream life – and why we should.

Through her encounters with scientists at the cutting edge of dream research, she reveals how:

Alice Robb is a contributing writer for Women in the World, the website recently launched by Tina Brown in partnership with the New York Times. From 2013 until early 2015 she was a staff writer at New Republic. Since then she has been writing regularly for New Statesman and New York’s Science of Us site, and has also contributed to Foreign Policy, Elle, Vice, Bustle, Fusion, New York’s Vulture and The Cut.

- Dreams can be powerful tools to help us process the pain of a relationship break-up, the grief of losing a loved one and the trauma after a dramatic event - Nightmares may be our body’s warning system for physical and mental illness (including cancer, depression and Alzheimer’s) - Athletes can improve their performance by dreaming about competing - Drug addicts who dream about drug-taking can dramatically speed up their recovery from addiction.

Robb also uncovers the fascinating science behind lucid dreaming – when we enter a dream state with control over our actions, creating a limitless playground for our fantasies. And as one of only 10 per cent of people with the ability to lucid-dream, she is uniquely placed to teach us how to do it ourselves.

With incredible new discoveries and stunning science, Why We Dream will give you dramatic insight into yourself and your body. You’ll never think of dreams in the same way again.

30/05/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509836246 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 272pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

29

The Song of Simon de Montfort England’s First Revolutionary and the Death of Chivalry Sophie Thérèse Ambler A riveting account of the warrior knight who overthrew his king and seized the reins of power in medieval England.

It was around half-past eight in the morning, with summer rainclouds weighing heavy in the sky, that Simon de Montfort decided to die. It was 4 August 1265 and he was about to face the royal army in the final battle of a quarrel that had raged between them for years.

Outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and certain to lose, Simon chose to fight, knowing that he could not possibly win the day.

‘Sophie Thérèse Ambler is a dazzlingly talented historian and in her debut biography offers a bold and brilliantly written reassessment of one of (British) history’s most misunderstood figures – the reformer, rebel and scourge of the Plantagenets, Simon de Montfort. Alive with human detail and acute political judgement, this book marks the arrival of a formidably gifted historian.’

Dan Jones

Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler is a historian of medieval Europe and the Crusades.

She is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Lancaster University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has appeared on radio and TV for BBC and Channel 4, and written for BBC History Magazine and The Historian. She divides her time between Lancaster and London.

The Song of Simon de Montfort is the story of this extraordinary man: heir to a great warrior, devoted husband and father, fearless crusader knight and charismatic leader. It is the story of a man whose passion for good governance was so fierce that, in 1258, frustrated by the King’s refusal to take the advice of his nobles and the increasing injustice meted out to his subjects, he marched on Henry III’s hall at Westminster and seized the reins of power.

Montfort established a council to rule in the King’s name, overturning the social order in a way that would not be seen again until the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century. Montfort and his revolutionary council ruled England for some fifteen months, until the quarrel with the King exploded into civil war. It was a war that would rage until that August day in 1265, when Montfort and a host of his followers were cut down on the battlefield, in an outpouring of noble blood that marked the end of chivalry in England as it had existed since the Norman Conquest.

Drawing on an abundance of sources that allow us to trace Montfort’s actions and personality in a depth not possible for earlier periods in medieval history, Sophie Thérèse Ambler tells his story with a clarity that reveals all of the excitement, chaos and human tragedy of England’s first revolution.

30/05/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509837571 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 368pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

30

You Started It! Confessions of a Bad Mother – The Teenage Years Stephanie Calman The original Bad Mother is back, with the inside track on how to survive your kids turning from sweet little cherubs to troublesome teenagers.

When you’re pregnant you think: ‘I’m having a baby’, not a person who will eventually catch trains by themselves, share a fridge with ten strangers, go to a festival in Croatia without succumbing to a drug overdose, and one day, bring you a gin and tonic when your mother is dying.

We imagine the teenage years as a sort of domestic meteor strike, when our dear, sweet child, hitherto so trusting and mild, is suddenly replaced by a sarcastic know-all who isn’t interested in the wisdom we have to pass on. But with great honesty and refreshingly bracing wit, Stephanie Calman shows that adolescence in fact begins much earlier, around the age of seven.

And having nurtured them through every stage of development, from walking to school by themselves to their first all-night party, you find yourself alone – bereaved even – as they skip off to university without a second glance.

Candid, touching and very, very funny, You Started It! offers hope to despairing and exhausted parents everywhere. Read it and discover that your teenager is not the enemy after all.

Stephanie Calman is the founder of the seminal and hugely successful www.badmothersclub.com, the author of the bestselling Confessions of a Bad Mother and Confessions of a Failed Grown-Up and is married with two children.

She created the hit Channel 4 sitcom Dressing For Breakfast and has appeared on many TV shows including Have I Got News For You and The Wright Stuff. She has also written for most British newspapers and magazines including Daily Telegraph, Observer, Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Harpers & Queen, and has been a contributor to a wide variety of radio shows, including Start the Week, Woman’s Hour, Quote Unquote and The Fred MacAulay Show. She is the author of two novels, Dressing For Breakfast and Gentlemen Prefer My Sister.

30/05/2019 • £12.99 • 9781509882106 • Non-Fiction • Hardback B Format • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

31

The Caiplie Caves Karen Solie Karen Solie’s fifth poetry collection, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis.

‘Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray [. . .] – she is the one by whom the language lives’.

– Michael Hofmann, LRB

‘A poet of the modern, cross-country journey’ Guardian ‘One by whom the language lives’ Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

The Canadian Karen Solie is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most important poets at work today. Her fifth book of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis: at its heart is the figure of St Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary to Scotland who retreated to the caves of the Fife coast in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island or pursue a life of solitude. His decision would have been informed by realities of war, misinformation and power; Solie imagines this crisis also complicated by grief, confusion – and a faith placed under extreme duress.

Woven through Ethernan’s story are poems that orbit the caves’ geographical location, and range through the recurring violences of history and myth, of personal and public record. In poems of the utmost lyric subtlety and argumentative strength, Solie addresses how we might distinguish self-delusion from belief, belief from knowledge – and how, in the frailty of our responses, we can find the courage to move forward.

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She is the author of three collections of poems including Pigeon, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, and is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program. Her poems have been published in the US, the UK, and Europe, and have been translated into French, German, Korean, and Dutch. Her first UK collection, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published in 2013. She lives in Toronto.

30/05/2019 • £10.99 • 9781529005325 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 80pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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salt slow Julia Armfield From the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2018, salt slow is an extraordinary collection of short stories of the lives of women, the bodily and the monstrous in all of us.

This collection of stories is about women and their experiences in society, about bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of its characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession and love.

Throughout the collection, women become insects, men turn to stone, a city becomes insomniac and bodies are picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of cinemas, schools and university towns are invaded and transformed by the physical, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to the bodies of its inhabitants. Blending the mythic and the fantastic, the collection considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new.

From the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2018, salt slow is an extraordinary collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock.

Julia Armfield lives and works in London. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and the Stockholm Review. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, is the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2018.

30/05/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529012569 • Poetry • Hardback Demy • 160pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 30/05/2019 • £11.99 • 9781529012576 • Poetry • Trade Paperback • 160pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Hiding Game Naomi Wood The beguiling third novel by Naomi Wood, author of the critically lauded Mrs. Hemingway, a 2015 Richard & Judy Book Club pick.

This is the story of Paul Brickman, an exiled artist in 1970s England, haunted by his memories of the decade he spent at the Bauhaus art school and the life-changing consequences that have reverberated through the years, especially with regard to the love of his life, Loti, and his best friend, Walter.

The story begins in Weimar in 1923 where Paul and his tight-knit group of fellow students are seduced by the charismatic teachings of the Bauhaus. The group quickly becomes a hotbed of unrequited love and burgeoning sexuality. Supposedly friends, it doesn’t stop rivalries and betrayals developing between them, which follow them as the school relocates after being closed down by the far-right government, first to Dessau and then to Berlin.

As the group disintegrates under the pressure of their own secrets, lies and love affairs, the novel builds to a powerful tragedy exacerbated by Hitler’s seizing power in 1933.

Think Donna Tartt’s The Secret History set in pre-war Germany. For fans of Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic and Jessie Burton’s The Muse, it has a similarly atmospheric and fascinating depiction of real-life historical detail as Mrs. Hemingway.

Naomi Wood is the author of The Godless Boys and Mrs. Hemingway, which has been published in more than ten countries around the world. Naomi studied at Cambridge and has a Masters degree and Doctorate from the University of East Anglia. She now teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, having previously taught at Goldsmiths College, where she was one of the 2017 judges of the Goldsmiths Prize.

13/06/2019 • £16.99 • 9781509892785 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 352ppp • Rights: WEL Excluding US 13/06/2019 • £13.99 • 9781509892792 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 352pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US

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Mountain Road, Late at Night Alan Rossi 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.

Nathaniel and his wife April live alone with their fouryear-old 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. Nathaniel’s brother 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 wins 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. His novella Did You Really Just Say That To Me? was awarded the third annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and he was the New England Review/ Bread Loaf Scholar for 2017. He is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his story ‘Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled’, and an O. Henry Prize for ‘The Buddhist’ (Granta). He lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter. Mountain Road, Late at Night is his first novel.

13/06/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529002355 • Fiction • Hardback Demy • 256pp • Rights: World 13/06/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529002331 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 256pp • Rights: World

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Rock, Paper, Scissors Richard Osmond Richard Osmond’s follow-up collection to his prizewinning debut Useful Verses presents an extraordinary, collaged response to the poet’s direct experience of the terrorist attack in London on June 3rd, 2017.

Osmond has written a compelling and challenging collection of poems representing the complex, fragmentary nature of traumatic experience – interleaved with translated excerpts from the Quran, sowing them in a new and unsuspected context. Some still see the Quran as a monolithic text, full of law and proscription, but Osmond reminds us of its vivid lyricism, and the often surprisingly riddling nature of its philosophy.

Rock, Paper, Scissors takes a bold look at the problems of interpretation, whether of text or event: in taking every opportunity to keep the complexity of its difficult subject intact, and in his refusal to simplify some of the most urgent questions of the age, Osmond has written a book of compelling importance.

Richard Osmond was born in 1987. He works as a wild-food forager, searching for plants, fruits and fungi among the forests and hedgerows of Hertfordshire. He received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2017.

13/06/2019 • £10.99 • 9781509894581 • Poetry • Trade Paperback S format • 72pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime Susannah Stapleton The enthralling true story of the curious life and career of Maud West, one of Britain’s first and best-known female detectives.

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having started sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.

Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?

Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.

With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.

Susannah Stapleton, a former bookseller at Wenlock Books in Shropshire, studied archaeology at the University of Birmingham and has worked as a freelance historical researcher for over twenty years.

13/06/2019 • £20.00 • 9781509867295 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 13/06/2019 • £14.99 • 9781509867301 • Non-Fiction • Trade Paperback • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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Diary of a Somebody Brian Bilston A unique mix of poetry and diary by the unofficial Poet Laureate of Twitter, the enigmatic Brian Bilston, this suburban murder mystery will appeal to fans of Adrian Mole and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

‘Brian Bilston is a laureate for our fractured times, a wordsmith who cares deeply about the impact his language makes as it dances before our eyes’ Ian McMillan ‘If you like a) laughing or b) words which rhyme with each other, you will love Brian Bilston.’

Richard Osman

Brian Bilston has decided to write a poem every day for a year while he tries to repair his ever-desperate life.

His ex-wife has taken up with a new man, a marketing guru and motivational speaker who seems to be disturbingly influencing his son, Dylan. Meanwhile Dylan’s football team keeps being beaten 0–11, as he stands disconsolately on the wing waiting vainly to receive the ball. At work Brian is drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and is becoming increasingly confused by the complexities of modern communication and management jargon. So poetry will be his salvation. But can Brian’s poetry save him from Toby Salt, his arch nemesis in the Poetry Group and potential rival suitor to Brian’s new poetic inspiration, Liz? Worst of all Toby has announced that boutique artisan publishing house Shooting from the Hip will be publishing his first collection, titled This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleft, in the autumn. And when he goes missing Brian is inevitably the number one suspect. Part tender love story, part murder mystery, part coruscating description of a wasted life, and interspersed with some of the funniest poems about the mundane and the profound, Diary of a Somebody is the most original novel you will read this year.

Brian Bilston is clouded in the pipe smoke of mystery.

He has been described as the Banksy of poetry and Twitter’s unofficial Poet Laureate. With over 50,000 followers, numbering J. K. Rowling, Roger McGough and Frank Cottrell Boyce amongst many, many other luminaries, Brian has become truly beloved by the Twitter community. His first collection, You Took the Last Bus Home, was published by Unbound.

He won the Great British Write Off competition in 2015 – and was the Poet in Residence for the World Economic Forum in 2016. In recent times, there have been features on him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the BBC news website, the Irish Times, the Independent and the Smithsonian Magazine. Most of these features seem to have largely centred around his pipe.

13/06/2019 • £14.99 • 9781529005547 • Fiction • Hardback Royal • 288pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN 13/06/2019 • £12.99 • 9781529005554 • Fiction • Trade Paperback • 288pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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1939

The War Nobody Wanted Frederick Taylor A vivid people’s history of the twelve months leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, perfect for fans of Antony Beevor, Max Hastings, Christopher Clark and Margaret Macmillan.

In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. Still reeling from the ravages of the Great War, its people were desperate to rebuild their lives in a newly safe and stable era. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had again led Europe to war, a war that would have a profound and lasting impact on millions of innocent people.

‘Taylor . . . does an excellent job of telling the story of the Coventry raid . . . Taylor’s thorough, authoritative account elegantly explains the horrors of that night, as well as the wider story of the raid’s significance in the air war’s collective descent into barbarism.’

Review of Coventry, Financial Times ‘Riveting . . . vivid . . . Taylor’s account of flame and ruin in the Midlands in November 1940, superbly researched, shows how terror could come to anyone, anywhere, any time. It still can.’

Review of Dresden, The Times

From the bestselling historian Frederick Taylor, 1939: The War No One Wanted draws on original British and German sources, including recorded interviews, as well as contemporary diaries, memoirs and newspapers.

Its narrative focuses on the day-to-day experiences of the men and women in both countries trapped in this disastrous chain of events and not, as is so often the case, the elite. Their voices, concerns and experiences lend a uniquely intimate flavour to this often surprising account, revealing a marked disconnect between government and people; few ordinary citizens in either Britain or Germany wanted war.

1939: The War No One Wanted is, precisely for that reason, also an interrogation of our capacity to go to war again. In today’s Europe, an onset of uncertainty, a looming fear of radical populism and a revelatory schism are dangerously reminiscent of the perils of the autumn of 1938. 1939: The War No One Wanted is both a vivid and richly peopled narrative of Europe’s slide into the horrors of war and, in many ways, a warning; an opportunity for us to learn from our history and a reminder that we must never take peace for granted.

Frederick Taylor was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, and read History and Modern Languages at Oxford, before postgraduate work at Sussex University. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries 1939–41 and is the author of several acclaimed works of history, including Dresden, The Berlin Wall and Coventry. He lives in Cornwall.

27/06/2019 • £25.00 • 9781509858743 • Non-Fiction • Hardback Royal • 368pp • Rights: WEL

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