Sparrow on the Rooftop
£12.99Rachel Long’s second collection is a study of desire, crisis and self-realisation, at once moving and whip-smart, from one of our brightest stars.
Showing all 11 resultsSorted by latest
-
-
All In
£16.99Jo and Dave haven’t had a holiday in years. They’ve had other things on their plate: failed IVF, the death of Dave’s mother, doing up the bathroom. So when Dave’s flashy brother Teddy offers to fly in from Dubai and take them – along with his gorgeous young girlfriend and their curmudgeonly father – to a beachfront resort in the Med, the couple can hardly refuse. But while romance might be on the cards for some, Jo and Dave soon find that tensions don’t disappear in paradise. In fact, they might just get worse.
-
Vocal Break
£22.00For millennia, women’s raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. In ‘Vocal Break’, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices – and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism.
-
Eat Bitter
£18.99‘Eat bitter’ is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging. Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection. ‘Eat Bitter’ is a beautiful and fearless exploration of food and feelings, showing readers how to celebrate the ugly and keep going.
-
Homebound
£16.991983: a grieving teenager can’t wait to leave home. 2083: a scientist makes a radical discovery about the human spirit. 2586: a pirate captain navigates the perils of a flooded world. Meanwhile: an astronaut is on a rescue mission in deep space. How do these four pioneering women connect, across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets? The puzzle leads to a vintage computer game, an unforgettable fellow traveller and a quest: to find out what home means to them.
-
A Short Road to Longbrook
£18.99It’s the mid-1960s and Lillian Wells is a clever teenager with a daring pixie cut, tangerine mini-dress and new boyfriend, Jim, who works at the brewery. Even better, he lives across the road, so she’s never far from her bee-hived, high-heeled single mother Winnie, who is prone to attacks of the nerves. But Lillian harbours secret dreams of going to art school in London. When she gets in, how will she tell her mother – and Jim – that she’s leaving Abingdon – and them? Forty years later, Lillian’s own daughter Rachel is heading off to university, but Lillian is not sure either of them are ready. She sees herself and Winnie in Rachel, who is ambitious and intelligent, but also prone to nervous habits. As Lillian tries to bite her tongue about Rachel’s symptoms, she is reminded of what everyone in Abingdon used to say: It’s a short road to Longbrook – the local institution for the mentally ill.
-
Leaving Home
£25.00Mark Haddon’s parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood. As bracing as it is embracing, ‘Leaving Home’ is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
-
A Sicilian Man
£25.00In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy’s history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the galley was Leonardo Sciascia. One of the greatest European writers of the twentieth century, he had published the first Mafia novel, ‘The Day of the Owl’, and was widely seen by Italians as a true moral figure in a country where corruption had seeped into every corner of public and private life. This is the story of Sciascia’s life against the rise of the Mafia and the devastating struggle that ensued for Italy’s soul.
-
Book of Lives
£30.00Raised by scientifically minded parents, Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec: a vast playground for her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother. It was an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would become ‘Cat’s Eye’ to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
-
The Book of Revelations
£22.00How have secrets changed over the generations, and what does that tell us about ourselves and our world? In her intimate new book, bestselling social historian Juliet Nicolson uncovers one of the most enigmatic yet revealing aspects of human behaviour. According to a leading American psychotherapist most of us are keeping 13 secrets at any one time. Secrets can thrill, but they are just as likely to torment; and the deepest ones echo far down the generations. The secrets we keep inside reflect the conventions and taboos of the world outside. As women traditionally sit at the heart of family life, their secrets can open a unique window onto wider society. ‘The Book of Revelations’ unlocks a period of significant transformation for women, from the restrictions just after WWII, through the emancipation of the 1960s and 1970s, to the opportunities and dangers women meet online today.
-
The Big Hop
£22.00Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft – made mainly from wood and stiff linen – struggled to take off from the North American island’s rocky slopes. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men, freezing cold and barely able to move but resolute. They had a dream: to be the first in human history to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. But there were three other teams competing against them, and as the waves raged a few miles below, memories of wartime crashes resurfaced. Mining letters, diaries and evocative unpublished photographs, David Rooney’s deeply researched account of the audacious contest shows how it was the airmen’s thrilling wartime experiences that ultimately led them to the ‘Big Hop’, and brought old friends together for one more daring adventure.