“Everything we need is right here. Everything we are is enough.”

Notes on a Nervous Planet

Matt Haig

“How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep that a secret? This book is how.”

My Name Is Why

Lemn Sissay

“I was a man, that much was clear. But, years after I became one, I still wondered what, exactly, that meant.”

Amateur

Thomas Page McBee

“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock”

The Living Mountain

Nan Shepherd

“The only difference between a medicine and a poison is the dosage.”

The Way of All Flesh

Ambrose Parry

    • Books & Authors
    • About
  • About us
  • News
  • Events
  • Catalogues
  • Press
  • Rights & Sales
  • Jobs
  • Submissions
  • Contact
Christmas scavenger hunt

PRESENTING: Canongate Clues! A digital scavenger hunt where you (yes, you) could win EVERY SINGLE HARDBACK WE HAVE PUBLISHED THIS YEAR. Look at all of them. What a prize! All could be yours. Start here.

@canongatebooks • 10 Dec 2019

Night Boat to Tangier – one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year

“A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories.”

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry has been named one of the ten best books of 2019 by the New York Times.

Read the article

The Art of Rest

Claudia Hammond

“This fascinating, entertaining and lucidly written book should be read by anyone ready to confess that rest is not their forte. We start to see that the subject is complicated partly because most of us are no good at resting. We are restless about rest. We feel guilty about it. We live in a culture obsessed with being busy – and this boasting about being busy is, Hammond argues, caught up with status.”

The Guardian review Claudia Hammond’s The Art of Rest.

Read the review

Kate Kellaway

Guardian

Being a good host is about more than just the food

“The French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote: ‘Love begins when something impossible is overcome.’ The same could be said of hospitality: the act of accepting from another, of receiving the other, only begins, only touches the rim of true hospitability, when it pushes you beyond your limits, discomfits you, allows in the unexpected, brings about what you never imagined.”

Priya Basil, author of Be My Guest, writes in the Observer about what it means to be a host – on the domestic and family level, and as a country receiving new arrivals.

Read the article

Observer

Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness – coming March 2020

Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness – coming March 2020

Nina Mingya Powles wins the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize

Nina Mingya Powles wins the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize

Maria Popova introduces Consolations by David Whyte

Maria Popova introduces Consolations by David Whyte

7 November 2019 publication day instapost

PUBLICATION DAY! And what a publication day! Featuring Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas, Consolations by David Whyte, Almost Everything by Anne Lamott, Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill.

@canongateboooks • 7 Nov 2019

Fuck, Now There Are Two of You insta

Fuck, Now There Are Two of You is the perfect kids book you should probably never read to your kids. But if you (or someone you know) is raising two loving, sweet, beautiful, essentially fucking exhausting and intolerable children, then you should still get it immediately. Because two is definitely a million more kids than one. (Fuck, Now There Are Two of You is the sequel to the New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep.)

@canongatebooks • 28 Oct 2019

Kevin Barry and Mary Costello on the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year shortlist

Kevin Barry and Mary Costello on the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year shortlist

Choose Your Own Apocalypse – the game!

Eliot wrote that the world ends “not with a bang but a whimper”: he might be right, but then on the other hand maybe it will end with a bang? Or maybe it’ll end with crab-human mutants? And just maybe it’s time for you to decide which.

We made a game you can play right now, based on Rob Sears’ hilarious book Choose Your Own Apocalypse with Kim Jong-Un & Friends. Go and keep the world safe for another day, or at least, play some ineffectual role in deciding exactly how it dies…

Play the game

Turbulent indigos: glorious Joni Mitchell watercolours – in pictures

The Guardian has published a selection of Joni Mitchell’s stunning watercolours from Morning Glory on the Vine, including the above (of Neil Young).

See the gallery

Guardian

Dear Girls by Ali Wong photograph

“God, I was disgusting!” – Ali Wong on why women’s bodies are the last taboo

“Offstage, she seems softer and more laid-back than her fierce and foul-mouthed standup persona. In the book, she recalls starting out: ‘I was very dirty back then. Even now, I’ll look back on those days and think: “God, you were disgusting.”’ Which is very funny if you have seen any of Wong’s comedy, because you will know how filthy she is now. In Baby Cobra, there are gags about anal sex and vaginal secretions; in Hard Knock Wife, there are jokes about the things she would like to do to their nanny if he was 25, male and ‘not ugly’.”

Ali Wong interviewed in the Guardian about her new book, Dear Girls.

Read the interview

Guardian

Joni Mitchell Discusses Her New Book of Early Songs and Drawings

“I became engrossed in Mitchell’s drawings while browsing the book—they’re vivid, intimate—but her handwritten lyrics and poems are just as revelatory.”

Morning Glory on the Vine in the New Yorker.

Read the article

Amanda Petrusich

New Yorker

Gina Miller: the woman who took on the UK government and won – twice

Gina Miller, author of the extraordinary memoir Rise, has taken the UK government all the way to the Supreme Court twice and now won twice. First on its authority to trigger article 50 without parliamentary approval and now on the unlawful prorogation of parliament.

Read the article

Guardian

5 questions for Kevin Barry

“Annie Dillard said once that the only advice any writer needs is to keep your overheads low. In our present epoch, this means you have to be very, very careful about where you choose to live. I live cheaply in the rural north west of Ireland and this means I don’t have to teach, I can just write. The city as an entity really doesn’t want anything to do with writers anymore—we’ve been priced out, as have all creative people except those from backgrounds of privilege. So screw the city—it’s the city’s loss.”

Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier, answers five questions on writing and its obstacles over at Literary Hub.

Read the interview

Literary Hub

James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Time, writes about the intersections of languages with each other, and with power, at the Guardian:

“The transformation tends to be presented in popular history as an absolute, as the triumph of English over French, as if languages were hermetic national systems, as if English were taken prisoner by French with the Norman conquest in 1066, was tyrannised by it for the next 300 years, then burst free and drove the aggressor back across the Channel. As well as describing, in English, the death of French as a living language in England, Trevisa sounds the death knell for living Latin by the then radical act of translating a learned work from Latin into English.

“But neither French nor Latin went away. They seeped into what we call English and made themselves at home, giving the language its fantastical redundancy, creating something half-Germanic, half-Romance. Trilinguality was internalised. Otherwise the Albert Hall would resound to ‘Land of hope and woolder/Mother of the frith,’ and we’d sing ‘God beery our gladman Queen’ and leave the EU not to take back control but to ‘take wield again’. We’re born in English, live, love, wonder, feel and die in English, but we’re conceived, we emerge, exist, touch, desire, doubt, experience, suffer, succeed, fail and perish in French and Latin.”

Read the article

Guardian

The Art of Dying cover

Read an extract

My Name Is Why number one instagram post

We got the great news today that My Name Is Why by the legendary Lemn Sissay is going straight into the bestseller charts at NUMBER ONE. The perfect start for this important, unforgettable book. Congratulations, Lemn!

@canongatebooks • 4 Sep 2019

My Name Is Why cover

Read an extract

Canongate Acquires Whyte's Consolations

Canongate Acquires Whyte’s Consolations

Goldsmiths 1982, Janine Instagram post

Ali Smith’s (2nd) pick for her Goldsmiths Prize fantasy winner: ‘Gray’s books have transformed the possibilities of the novel, and 1982, Janine, a book about a man in a room for one night up against the question of whether to live or not is one of his most powerful, a perfecting of his combination of anarchy, politeness and lyricism, his philosophical understanding of the epic quotidian and his good-natured existentialism. It remakes the novel – and it’s never going to not be a really unputdownable read.’

@goldsmithsprize • 30 Jul 2019

Kevin Barry Booker longlist Instagram post

Congratulations to our very own Kevin Barry, whose Night Boat to Tangier has made the Booker longlist! It’s a dark treasure of a book, and it’s great to see it being recognised. Richly deserved. ‘A masterpiece delivered by a glittering talent at the peak of his powers’ Big Issue ‘A blackly comic journey into the abyss’ Guardian

@canongatebooks • 24 Jul 2019

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • …
  • 43
  • Next
  • Books & Authors
  • About us
  • News
  • Events
  • Catalogues
  • Press
  • Rights & Sales
  • Jobs
  • Submissions
  • Contact

We regularly send emails to people we like, and we like you.