Jonathan Cape

  • Night side of the river

    £18.99

    Our lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips. We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect. To live amongst us. To remind us. To tempt us. To take their revenge. These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten – and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

  • Politics on the edge

    £22.00

    Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow and inadequate our democracy and government had become. Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict. This book invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage.

  • Lifescapes

    £18.99

    ‘What is life?’ asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In ‘Lifescapes’, acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.

  • The wren, the wren

    £18.99

    Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.

  • Prophet

    £18.99

    Your happiest memory is their deadliest weapon. This is Prophet. It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you. But who has created it? And what do they want? An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. It’s brightly lit, warm and inviting but it has no power, no water, no connection to the real world. It’s like a memory made flesh – a nostalgic flight of fancy. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past. And the deaths quickly follow.Something is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. This is a weapon like no other. But nobody knows who created it, or why. Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator.

  • After the funeral

    £18.99

    From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, a masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. In each of the twelve stories in ‘After the Funeral’, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognise each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age – everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife.

  • The late Americans

    £18.99

    In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a social circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to figure out what they want, and who they are. At the centre of the group are three dancers: Ivan, tall and stoic, who is leaving ballet for a career in finance; Fatima, whose work ethic earns her both admiration and enmity; and Noah, who ‘didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.’ As they test their own desires in a series of relationships – and in other, clandestine ways – they are buffeted by other volatile figures in town, from an unruly, vulnerable young poet to a local landlord nursing a lifetime of resentment. Finally, after a series of violent encounters, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives, and waves of long-buried heartache resolve into moments of unexpected tenderness.

  • The universe in a box

    £22.00

    How was our universe built? What happened at its beginning? And where do humans fit in? We are a minuscule part of an incredible continuum: a chain of events spanning 13.8 billion years, with an infinite future. But what does that future hold? And will we ever truly understand our cosmic home? ‘The Universe In a Box’ is Andrew Pontzen’s tribute to simulation – the remarkable fusion of technology and science that, over the last century, has allowed us to understand the distant past and far future of the universe. It challenges everything we think we know about galaxies, black holes and matter itself. And it reveals the pioneer scientists who unlocked mysteries of space, from redshift to improbable dark materials that pass, ghost-like, through solid rock.

  • Time is a mother

    £12.00

    In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.

  • Ways of life

    £30.00

    The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Alfred Wallis, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked – in a pebble, feather or seedhead.

  • The three of us

    £14.99

    Husband. Best friend. What if your two favourite people hated each other with a passion? A nice house, a carefree life, a doting husband , a best friend who never leaves your side. What more could you ask for? There’s just one problem, your husband and best friend love you, but they hate each other. Set over the course of a single day, husband, wife and best friend Temi toe the lines of compromise and betrayal. Told in three parts, each voice as compelling as the next, three people’s lives, and their visions of themselves and each other begin to slowly unravel, until a startling discovery throws everyone’s integrity into question.

  • Fire rush

    £16.99

    This is our dancing time. Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide – a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry. But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape. When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her first to Bristol – where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country – and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.