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This extraordinary debut is an excavation of betrayal, of motherhood, of time and timelessness, of guilt and consequence, of love coming to an end. Told with dry wit and a startling ferocity, ‘And Notre Dame is Burning’ heralds an urgent new voice in literary fiction.
The snow has melted, but the thaw reveals a world transformed. London is in ruins, its population a fraction of its pre-freeze level. The weather has become wildly unpredictable – huge pressure swings leading to powerful localised storms. And this has led to an epidemic of migraine. When a storm hits, the pain comes, along with a wide range of visual and haptic hallucinations named Migraine ‘aura’. The novel starts with Ellis, one of a very small proportion of the population who don’t suffer from weather-induced migraines, being struck by a migraine attack for the first time. After being blinded by hallucinations, he wakes in a ruined bookshop with its former owner, Sam, who pulled him to safety from the storm. No longer excluded from the migraine epidemic, Ellis decides to find his ex-girlfriend, Luna, and win her back. With Sam tagging along, he sets out from the bookshop and heads south.
‘Goonie’, the raw and joyful debut collection from award-winning Scottish poet and spoken word artist Michael Mullen, begs the question what is community? What do we owe it and what does it owe us? Whether exploring queerness through fierce lyrical poetry or celebrating Mullen’s beloved Scotland through vernacular vignettes, this book’s main preoccupation is how we form the community around us and how it, in turn, forms us. Many of the themes are encapsulated by the title poem as the narrator readies themselves to take the stage and perform for their older relatives wearing an old goonie (a nightdress).
From one of the most admired reporters covering China today, a vital new account of the life and political vision of Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of the People’s Republic whose hard-edged tactics have set the rising superpower on a collision with Western liberal democracies. ‘Party of One’ shatters the many myths and caricatures that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. When the Chinese government refused to renew Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong’s press credentials and forced him to leave mainland China in 2019, he moved to Hong Kong where he continues to cover Chinese politics and its autocratic turn under Xi Jinping.
What do you do when you’re not allowed to attend your father’s funeral? This is the question facing Alekos’s far-flung children from many marriages when the successful, if controversial, Greek sculptor dies in London. His last wife and now widow is determined that they stay away, but for the first time, all the sisters and brothers meet up and plan to take matters into their own hands.
When Cal Sounder gets a call to say that an unknown woman has washed up dead in a faded seaside down, he dives back into his former role as a detective. Intriguingly, the call comes from the matriarch of a local dynasty, Martha Erskine, a Titan who is almost as old and as powerful as Stefan Tonfamecasca, the man who discovered the drug. As Cal begins investigating, he becomes convinced that the victim’s death may be connected to the strikes and wage disputes that the Erskines are fighting off at their huge manufacturing plant nearby – and what Martha wants to know is whether her family are involved in the young woman’s death.
One sunny Sunday, without warning, humankind is reduced to the height of a handspan – an unsightly transformation as potentially fatal as it is inconvenient. On a remote coastal path, Giles awakes in his new body to discover a world reshaped and magnified into a place of astounding abundance and deadly peril. Desperate to reconnect with his loved ones, he seeks the help of fellow survivors, and together they embark on a quest across the altered landscape. But as their journey unfolds, the more the question persists – are they still truly human, or has their reduction in size marked the beginning of a descent into savagery, an evolution into something other? Elsewhere, one week earlier, Professor Elizabeth Goodwin makes a monumental discovery – God is alive and physically among us, but not in the form we’ve been taught to expect.
In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other’s existence. In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with `MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.
The best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called ‘Greener Pastures’. It’s here that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades, and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labour sounds like a pretty fair deal – doesn’t it? Students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite – but how much of a choice do they truly have?
In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; but Kismet can’t so much as imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say ‘no’ and so the die is cast. Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasinally her lover, and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back. Meanwhile Kismet’s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family, and on her nightly truck drives along the highway from the farm to the factories, she tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future – both her daughter’s and her own.
A new collection by one of Scotland’s best loved and liveliest poets, touching on themes of friendship, loss, nature and love
‘Michael Pedersen is one of Britain’s most exciting poets ‘ Daljit Nagra
Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party who continues to threaten its democracy and put its rich legacy at risk. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong’s complex history and its people – diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan – who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today. Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, ‘Fortune’s Bazaar’ is a thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong.
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