Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Hiromi Kawakami ( hardback Jan 2025)
£14.99
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.
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After A Dance, Bridget O’Connor (paperback Feb 2025)
£10.99
After a Dance is the compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O'Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author's daughter, Constance Straughan. Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday.In After A Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here - at its best and at its delightful worst.
The Women, Kristin Hannah ( paperback Feb 2025)
£9.99
The Women is a story of devastating loss and epic love. It would be the journey of a lifetime. . .. ‘Women can be heroes, too’. When twenty-year-old nursing student, Frances “Frankie” McGrath, hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation.
Raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different path for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurses Corps and follows his path.
As green and inexperienced as the young men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed America.
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar (paperback from 6 Feb 2025)
£9.99
This book is thrilling. It's like watching the novel itself be reinvented' - Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake'This book vibrates with love of life, beauty and language. I’m in awe...' - Natalie Portman
Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.
As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew. Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! was an instant New York Times bestseller w/c 27/1/24
The Amendments, Niamh Mulvey, paperback March 2025
£9.99
Delving into the lives of three generations of women, The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey is an extraordinary novel about love and freedom, belonging and rebellion – and about how our past is a vital presence which sits alongside us. Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby.
For Adrienne, it’s the start of a new life. For Nell, it’s the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist’s office. Because she can’t go into this without dealing with the truth: that she has been a mother before, and now she can hardly bring herself to speak to her own mother, let alone return home to Ireland.
Nell is running out of places to hide from her past. But to Ireland and the past is where she must go, and that is where The Amendments takes us: to the heat of Nell’s teenage years in the early 2000s, as Ireland was unpicking itself from its faith and embracing the hedonism of the Celtic Tiger. To 1983, when Nell’s mother Dolores was grappling with the tensions of the women’s rights movement.
And then to the farms and suburbs and towns that made and unmade the lives at the centre of this story, bound together by the terrible secret that Nell still cannot face.
