“It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
“When I try to imagine the addresses of the houses and apartments I lived in before my grandparents kidnapped me, I can’t remember anything.”
“How rich and diverse, how complex and non-linear the history of all women is.”
“All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.”
Here’s Oriol Miró hand-foiling a single letter of his cover type for the remarkable debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other by Rebecca O’Connor, out now.
“A Note on Wanting”: enjoy this early preview of Matt Haig’s Notes on a Nervous Planet, the follow-up to number one bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive. From the audiobook, read by the author.
‘An immense and moving jazz riff… The acutely immersive world of American Histories is irresistible, and these profoundly moving stories will haunt you long after you’ve finished reading.’
Colin Grant
The Guardian
Watch Robert Webb read from his bestselling memoir How Not to be a Boy at the Hay Festival: ‘I thought only wimps needed manners, and only tough guys were brave.’
Robert Webb
The Hay Festival
“Wideman is a writer who excels at dramatising African American sensibilities and this collection typically addresses issues of race, injustice and inequality with power and potency. Crystallised moments of experience carry entire worlds in stories … from the whimsical to the political. This is published alongside Wideman’s earlier novels and is a gem for anyone yet to discover his work.”
Observer
“Laidlaw brought Glasgow to life more viscerally than any book I had read before: the good and the bad, the language and the humour, the violence and the drinking … This book made me realise that pacey, streetwise thrillers didn’t have to be American: we had mean streets enough of our own.”
The Guardian asked great crime writers to pick their favourite crime novels, and Christopher Brookmyre thinks you should be reading William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw.
“An excellent new book is imminent: Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society features 254 new illustrations, all drawn in his distinctive thick black pen on stark white paper, the naivety of the image offset by the scabrous, surreal or darkly comic text.”
David Shrigley interviewed in the Observer.
Observer
Robert Webb on gender conditioning (or, the way you’re told how to behave because of what’s in your pants) – from the number one bestseller How Not To Be a Boy.
and you could win a fine statuette of his Fourth Plinth commission, to remind you forever that things are Really Good.
The message had been carried through the dawn chorus and into the cold pink morning. Effie Truelove was going to die on Friday…
The Chosen Ones is the thrilling second book in the Worldquake sequence, out now!
Meg Jay talks to Robin Ince on Book Shambles about her book Supernormal, adversity and resilience.