From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home comes this Christmas's must-gift graphic novel.
All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret...
The secret to superhuman strength.
She has looked for it in her favourite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, therapy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong passion for exercise. Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weightlifting - you name it, she's tried it. "Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!"
But as she gets older, her body isn't getting any stronger. And in a changing, sometimes overwhelming world, are "cantaloupe-sized guns" all a person needs? Maybe the all-important secret is not where she expected to find it . . .
'The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour' Daily Telegraph
In this, her third graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel has written a deeply layered, personal story about selfhood, self-sabotage, mortality, addiction, bliss, wonder, and the concerns of a generation. This is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud chronicle of the conundrums we all grapple with as we seek our true place in the world. Truly, a must-gift book this Christmas.
Andrew Holleran's unique literary voice is on full display in this poignant story of lust, dread, and desire - the first novel in sixteen years from one of the most acclaimed gay authors of our time.
'Affecting and engaging' COLM TÓIBÍN
One of BuzzFeed's Hot LGBTQ+ Books From The First Half Of 2022
Out in the drought-struck backwaters of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand's nameless narrator lives a life of semi-solitude, enjoying the odd, fleeting sexual encounter and the friendship of a few.
His world is ageing, and the memories of another time flash, then fade - visions of parties filled with handsome young men, the parents whom he chose to spend his life besides, the generation he once knew, struck down by AIDS. But, when forced to watch the slow demise of a close neighbour, he is drawn back to the here and now, and his own borrowed time in this kingdom of sand.
An elegy to sex and the body, but also a tragically honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, The Kingdom of Sand marks the much-anticipated return of Andrew Holleran.
From the author of the acclaimed comic-strip autobiography Persepolis comes this comic book for grown-ups, a gloriously entertaining and revealing look into the sex lives of Iranian women.
From the bestselling author of Persepolis comes this humorous and enlightening look at the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane's tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbours for an afternoon of tea-drinking and talk. Naturally, the subject turns to loves, sex and vagaries of men...
From the bestselling author of Spoon-Fed and The Diet Myth, a comprehensive guide to the new science of nutrition, drawing on Tim Spector's cutting-edge research.
Food for health
Food for your microbes
Food as medicine
Food for mental health
Food for immunity
Food for the planet
Food for life
Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. Tim Spector has pioneered a science-based approach to nutrition, encouraging us to forget misleading notions of calorie counts or nutritional breakdowns. In Food for Life he draws on over a decade of cutting-edge scientific research, along with his own personal insights, to deliver a new and comprehensive guide to what we should all know about food today. Taking a wide-angle lens on everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector also shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand.
Empowering, practical, wide-ranging and filled with intriguing insights, Food for Life is nothing less than a new approach to how to eat - for our health and the health of the planet.
The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources.
In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale.
This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.
From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces.
He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets.
Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.
This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.
January 2015. High on literary success and familial bliss, Emmanuel Carr?re embarks on a rigorous ten-day meditative retreat in rural France in search of clarity and material for his next book, which he thinks will be a subtle, upbeat introduction to yoga. But his trip is cut short, and he is brought down to earth with a thud as he returns to a Paris in turmoil in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.
From then on, Carr?re's life begins to unravel, along with his novel-in-progress. He is diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder and is sectioned to a psychiatric hospital for a four-month stint, where he is subject to electroshock therapy. His marriage crumbles, he is struck by grief at the death of a close friend and is haunted by a love affair with a mysterious woman who disappeared from his life. Pushed to the edge of sanity and forced to reckon with his identity as a man and a writer, Carr?re sets out on a life of action instead of meditation.
This is a book that embraces the Yin and Yang of life: the pull between life and death, desire and despair, presence and absence, fight and flight. It is a book about a world and a man in tumult, and about how surprisingly far practising meditation - and writing about it - can take us in life. With raw honesty and humour, YOGA gives us the self-portrait of a man struggling to live with himself and others, by one of our greatest and most surprising international writers.
A new book in Bryan Talbot's award-winning science fiction graphic novels series, starring the legendary character Luther Arkwright
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, first serialised in 1978, is considered by many to be the first British graphic novel. Praised by many writers and artists, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Jean Giroud (Moebius) and Michael Moorcock, the ground-breaking, experimental adult SF story was a seminal work, inspiring and influencing many comic creators. Its sequel, Heart Of Empire, was published in 2001. Both books have been continually in print since they were first published.
Set fifty years later, The Legend of Luther Arkwright is another stand-alone story. While still maintaining total continuity with the Arkwright mythos, it is a different kind of adult adventure. Pursued across multiple historically divergent parallel worlds, both utopian and dystopian, and facing a far superior adversary, Arkwright battles to save humanity from mass destruction; his only edge is his experience and force of will.
The Legend of Luther Arkwright, beautifully drawn by master storyteller and Eisner Award-winning comics creator Bryan Talbot, is a milestone in British comics history.
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot in a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did for many of the village's children.
Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine.
But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.
The mesmerising new novel from Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement. The world is forever changing. But for so many of us, old wounds run deep. Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
'Lessons is deep and wide, ambitious and humble, wise and substantial... McEwan's best novel in 20 years' New Statesman
'Superb... A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel' Independent
'Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the "commonplace and wondrous" intertwining of global history and everyday life' Daily Telegraph
While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.
His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape us and our memories? What role do chance and contingency play in our existence? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?
We'd like to introduce you to Elizabeth Finch.
We invite you to take her course in Culture and Civilisation.
She will change the way you see the world.
'The task of the present is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more urgent when the past cannot be corrected.'
Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration - always rigorous, always thoughtful. With measured empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness.
As Neil, a former student, unpacks Elizabeth's notebooks, and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. And underpinning them all is the story of J - Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always threatened to divide us.
This is more than a novel. It's a loving tribute to philosophy, a careful evaluation of history, an invitation to think for ourselves. It's a moment to reflect and to gently explore our own theories and assumptions. It is truly a balm for our times.
And you thought your adolescence was scary.
Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back.
As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.
And then the murders start.
As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.
To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin . . .
Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially ‘Clowesian’, and utterly unique in the author’s body of work. This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet.
The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he’s invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?
The second volume of an epic, beautifully illustrated graphic history of humankind, based on Yuval Noah Harari's internationally bestselling phenomenon
When nomadic Homo sapiens settled to live in one place, they started working harder and harder. But why didn't they get a better life in return?
In The Pillars of Civilization, Yuval Noah Harari and his companions including Prof. Saraswati and Dr. Fiction travel the length and breadth of human history to investigate how the Agricultural Revolution changed society forever. Discover how wheat took over the world, how war, famine, disease and inequality became a part of the human condition, and why we might only have ourselves to blame.
The origins of modern farming are told through Elizabethan tragedy, the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News, and the history of inequality is revealed in a superhero detective story.
A radical, witty and colourful retelling of the story of humankind, adapted from Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Volume 2 can be read as a standalone or as a follow-up to Volume 1, The Birth of Humankind.
Praise for Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:
'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species.' - Bill Gates
'Interesting and provocative... It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' - Barack Obama
'Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last... It may be the best book I've ever read' - Chris Evans
'Contains a remarkable piece of information on almost every page and reminds us that we should be grateful to be human.' - Matt Haig
'Sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain... Radiates power and clarity, making the world strange and new' - Sunday Times
'Provocative and fascinating and opinionated...it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. It altered how I view our species and our world.' - Guardian
In this spellbinding new collection, Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of the most enduring stories of all time.
Here are myths of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan war and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens. There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals.This is a world of extremes, and one that resonates deeply with our own: mysterious diseases devastate cities; environmental disasters tear lives apart; women habitually suffer violence at the hands of men.
Unlike in many previous collected myths, female characters take centre stage - Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling, and a magnificent work of scholarship and imagination.
With a series of original drawings by Chris Ofili.
'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' - Olivia Laing
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture-from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis-is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
From the winner of the International Booker Prize and one of the finest writers at work today, an epic and deeply moving novel about the legacy of war and trauma on three generations of women
On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili, along with the entire community, is celebrating the 90th birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. Onto the scene enters Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby.
Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates the gripping, heart-wrenching story that unfolds, in which mother, daughter and grandmother are forced to confront the past head-on. Together with Rafael - father to Gili, lover to Nina and step-son to Vera - the three women embark on an epic journey to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives.
More Than I Love My Life is a grand-scale and sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children.
In Paris in 1934, a young and beautiful Jewish émigrée, Gerda Pohorylles, met a Hungarian political exile, André Friedmann. They reinvented themselves as the photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa – and he would become the most important photojournalist of his generation.
When Gerda was killed in the Spanish Civil war at the age of twenty-six, Robert Capa was her most notable mourner – his grief was beyond control. Her funeral drew crowds of thousands and she became a hero of the political left. Despite the legend that was built around her, she subsequently became a mere footnote in Capa's story. Seventy years after her death a long-lost suitcase was discovered in Mexico, containing thousands of negatives by Capa and Taro. Most astonishingly of all, the 'Mexican suitcase' showed that photographs that had been attributed previously to Capa were, in fact, the work of Taro.
Jane Rogoyska's book will trace Taro's life and reveal the depth of her relationship with Capa. Charismatic and extraordinary, they epitomised one of the most tumultuous periods of the century.
"I've never come across a fictional world as fully-realised as Bryan Talbot's Grandville... It's a world you'll never tire of exploring' IAN RANKIN
Beware the Badger! The acclaimed steampunk series from graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot explores an alternate art-nouveau world populated by intelligent animals, a human underclass, and wondrous technology. Within this rich fantastical milieu, the relentless Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard pursues shadowy death squads, psychotic killers, dark political conspiracies, ruthless crime lords, and bloodthirsty cults through the streets of London and the center of the greatest empire on earth, the Belle Epoque Paris known as Grandville.
Grandville L'Intégrale collects all five Grandville novels in one deluxe hardcover volume accompanied by voluminous author notes never before in print.
*WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IAN RANKIN*
'I have greatly enjoyed the Grandville books. I think they're superbly designed, beautifully conceived, admirably written - everything about them is terrific' PHILIP PULLMAN
'These ingeniously plotted fantasies will make you bark with laughter' METRO
'Utterly delightful' THE TIMES
'Bryan Talbot is a genius' OBSERVER
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The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break.
Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Tóibín - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing.
Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour. The most recently written story here is the harrowing but transcendent 'The End of Days', which imagines the last moments in the life of painter Egon Schiele, watching his wife dying of Spanish flu - the world's worst pandemic, until now.
Much of what MacLaverty writes is an amalgam of sadness and joy, of circumlocution and directness. He never wastes words but neither does he ever forget to make them sing. Each story he writes creates a universe.
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