Serpent’s Tail Spring 2020
Contents 2–3 Travel Light, Move Fast Alexandra Fuller 4–5 This is Pleasure Mary Gaitskill 6–7 Hollow in the Land James Clarke 8 Act of Grace Anna Krien 9 All This Could Be Yours Jami Attenberg 10 The Disaster Tourist Yun Ko-eun 11 Topics of Conversation Miranda Popkey 12 The Death of Comrade President Alain Mabanckou 13 A Bookshop in Algiers Kaouther Adimi 14 Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls Nina Renata Aron 15 Rabbits for Food Binnie Kirshenbaum 16 Welcome to Viper 17 The Broken Ones Ren Richards 18 A Famished Heart Nicola White 19 Who We Were B. M. Carroll 20 Bitter Wash Road Garry Disher 21 Crime fiction new in paperback 22 Jakob von Gunten Robert Walser 23 Black Like Me John Howard Griffin 24 The Warriors Sol Yurick 25 Dog Poems Various 26 The Warlow Experiment Alix Nathan 27 New in paperback 28 Recently published 29–35 Backlist 36–37 Contact information
Introduction
Serpent’s Tail an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 29 Cloth Fair, London EC1A 7JQ
This season not only are we bringing you outstanding new work from established writers Mary Gaitskill, Alain Mabanckou, Jami Attenberg and Alexandra Fuller, and novels from new writers James Clarke, Yun Ko-eun and Miranda Popkey, we are also thrilled to be launching the first season of outstanding books on our new crime list, Viper, which you can read all about inside. These Serpent’s Tail books are global and local, personal and political. They travel from Iraq to Algeria, Zambia to the Republic of the Congo, New Orleans and Manhattan, South Korea, Australia and closer to home, Lancashire. They take us into war zones and environmental disasters, family conflicts, and friendships stretched to the limits, where characters make impossible choices with surprising and memorable results. Within this beautiful cacophonous symphony of voices, you’ll find tragedy, provocation, loneliness, fellowship, laughter, elegance and – of course – bags of style. Each of the books in this very special selection has something to teach us about how to survive, whatever life throws at you.
For more information about Serpent’s Tail, visit us at www.serpentstail.com Get in touch via email at info@serpentstail.com or on social media at
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Hannah Westland Publisher, Serpent’s Tail
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Travel Light, Move Fast Alexandra Fuller
New title
‘A gorgeously written tribute to a life well lived and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable loss and grief.’ Booklist When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside, where they see out his last days together and then carry his ashes back to their farm in Zambia. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father’s death, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. She then faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost and, eventually, further unimaginable bereavement. Bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, here is a story of joy, resilience and vitality, from a writer at the very height of her powers.
‘Travel Light, Move Fast ceaselessly surprises, delights and devastates in unequal measure. Poignant and utterly profound. I read it in a single sitting.’ Richard E. Grant ‘Her writing is all her own, graceful, full of dry humour, and charming. In her hands, a life becomes art.’ The Millions
Alexandra Fuller’s first book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, sold over 100k copies in the UK alone. Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her mid-twenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming, USA.
Memoir £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 374 3 £12.99 Trade paperback 978 1 78816 383 5 256pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 625 4 September 2019 Uk Com ex Can
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This is Pleasure
New title
Mary Gaitskill
A masterful fictional contribution to the #MeToo debate, set to be the most fiercely debated book of the season This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world’s finest writers, and achieves more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainities to show us that there are many sides to every story. Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever.
Praise for Mary Gaitskill: ‘No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill.’ Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times
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Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry, and the novels Veronica, The Mare and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.
Fiction £7.99 A-format hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 503 7 96pp eISBN: 987 1 78283 6872 Novermber 2019 UK Com ex Can Au
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Hollow in the Land James Clarke
New title
A remarkable work of fiction and a vivid portrait of modern Britain for readers of Jon McGregor, Sarah Hall and Jim Crace Through childhood hopefulness, teenage delinquency, faded first love and middle-aged disillusionment, James Clarke’s extraordinary novel in stories takes us into the Hollow in the Land, a Lancashire valley no longer than ten miles end to end. If you’re born here, you’ll likely spend the rest of your life here, and even those who do make it beyond the bypass often find themselves drawn back. This is a place where the realities of regional decline and political indifference play out in people’s lives: in run-down pubs and sitting rooms, dead-end jobs and black-economy gigs, for-profit care homes, Traveller sites and abandoned warehouses. Clarke’s writing is unsentimental but retains a fierce empathy for the lives it is describing. Through a wide range of characters at every stage of life, Clarke shows us how much of what we become is defined by where we are from. Praise for The Litten Path, winner of the 2019 Betty Trask Prize ‘Clarke moves easily between the registers of class and entitlement, and poverty and disappointment. The landscape, of which he writes with relish, is raw and ever-changing.’ Guardian ‘As memorable as it is unique … This wonderful novel can proudly take its place in the fiery Northern literary renaissance.’ Bookmunch
James Clarke grew up in the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire. He studied English at Manchester Metropolitan University and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the Manchester Writing School in 2017. He currently lives in Manchester and is writing a novel with the working title Sanderson’s Folly.
Fiction Demy Hardback £12.99 ISBN: 978 1 78816 351 4 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 613 1 April 2020 World All Languages Tr
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Act of Grace Anna Krien
Debut
An exhilarating debut novel from the award-winning author of Night Games In this brilliant novel of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, four characters’ lives intertwine across time and place. Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD. A decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father’s dementia and family silences that may never be addressed, begins to test boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey’s tyranny and heal the wounds inflicted by it. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and cultural reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation. It is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer. Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 421 4 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 649 0 June 2020 UK Com ex Can, ex ANZ Au
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Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods. Anna’s writing has been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and the Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and in 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship.
Praise for Night Games: A Journey to the Dark Side of Sport ‘Krien finds no neat answers in Night Games, only grey areas, but it is the wisdom and balance of her writing that captivates’ Daily Telegraph For fans of Rachel Kushner, Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid
All This Could Be Yours
New title
Jami Attenberg
An unforgettable novel of family secrets from New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins Victor Tuchman – a power-hungry real estate developer and all-round bad man – is finally on his deathbed. His daughter Alex feels she can finally unearth the secret of who he really was and what he did over the course of his life. She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous married life. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores while bursting into crying fits. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward – with one another, for themselves and for the sake of their children. ‘Attenberg handles it all with an expert touch … striving for moments of beauty and tenderness in a dark world’ Emma Cline
Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season, All Grown Up, Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and was published in nine countries. She lives in New Orleans. Follow her @jamiattenberg 978 1 78125 705 0 £7.99
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Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 325 5 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 590 5 March 2020 UK Com ex Can Au
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The Disaster Tourist Yun Ko-eun translated by Lizzie Buehler
New title
A satirical Korean eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain and, in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company makes her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips to the desert island of Mui. Yona accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is an underwhelming sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.
Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 7881 6314 9 208pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 585 1
May 2020
World English Language US
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Yun Ko-eun was born in Seoul in 1980. Her short story ‘Piercing’ won the Daesan Literary Award for College Students the year she graduated from university. She received the 2008 Hankyoreh Literature Award for her novel The Zero G Syndrome and in 2015 her short story collection Aloha won the Kim Yong Ik Novel Prize.
For fans of Convenience Store Woman and The Vegetarian Engages with the global dialogue around Extinction Rebellion, sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement
Topics of Conversation Miranda Popkey
Debut
A major debut by a remarkable new writer, for readers of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk and Olivia Laing What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us? Miranda Popkey’s remarkable debut novel follows one woman as she makes her way through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation, each new episode narrated through the conversations she has with other women: in private with friends, at late-night parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, intimacy, cynicism and desire. From the coast of the Adriatic to sun-soaked California, Topics of Conversation maps out one woman’s life through the stories of the women around her. Full of the uncertainty of the present and the instability of the past, sizzling with enigmatic desire, it is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers. ‘An intimate evisceration of our narrow imaginings of female sexuality, a brilliantly structured character study and a book that repeatedly asks how women can fully trust their own desires when they’ve grown up steeped in the wrong stories. Its narrator is as skeptical of her own self-delusive fictions as she is of the stifling clichés and shallow fantasies about women’s interior lives perpetuated by the wider culture.’ Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Miranda Popkey was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1987. She graduated with a BA in Humanities from Yale in 2009, and with an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St Louis in 2018. She has written for, among other outlets, New Republic, Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin and The Cut.
Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 404 7 240pp eISBN: 978 1 782836414 February 2020 UK Com ex Can Au
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The Death of Comrade President Alain Mabanckou translated by Helen Stevenson
New title
No one said coming of age in post-colonial Africa would be easy … In Pointe-Noire, in the small neighbourhood of Voungou, on the family plot where young Michel lives with Maman Pauline and Papa Roger, life goes on. But Michel’s everyday cares – lost grocery money, the whims of his parents’ moods, their neighbours’ squabbling, his endless daydreaming – are soon swept away by the wind of history. In March 1977, just before the arrival of the short rainy season, Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered in Brazzaville, and not even naïve Michel can remain untouched. Starting as a tender portrait of an ordinary Congolese family, Alain Mabanckou quickly expands the scope of his story into a powerful examination of colonialism, decolonisation and the dead ends of the African continent. At a stroke Michel learns the realities of life – and how much must change for everything to stay the same.
Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 232 6 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 540 0 March 2020 World English ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe Au
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‘His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous … He acts the jester but with serious intent and lacerating effect.’ Man Booker International Prize judges’ citation
Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Congo and currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. Mabanckou is a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and was awarded the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de literature. 978 1 78125 674 9 £8.99
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A Bookshop in Algiers Kaouther Adimi translated by Chris Andrews
New title
A moving novel inspired by the true story of the man who discovered Albert Camus and Gertrude Stein A Bookshop in Algiers celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. The novel interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad, dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it. Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from the 1930s to current times, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to literature. A novel about reading and readers, and a lament for lost art that will appeal to fans of The Book Thief, Diary of a Bookseller and The Bookseller of Kabul An insight into twentieth-century cultural and political life in Algeria and France through the figures who defined it
Kaouther Adimi is a young Algerian novelist living in France. A Bookshop in Algiers is her third novel and was published in France in 2017, where it sold over 50,000 copies and received the trifecta of major French award nominations for the Goncourt, Renaudot and Médicis prizes.
Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 469 6 208pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 665 0
April 2020
UK Com ex Can
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Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls Nina Renata Aron
Debut
‘I detonated my young marriage for a chance to step fully and honestly into a life with him … I was insane, in other words.’ Aron’s story of her intense, toxic love affair with drug addict K is gripping, poetic and darkly amusing. But alongside the late nights and broken promises of her own life, Aron builds a bigger picture: the untold story of those who have loved and supported addicts through the ages. From prohibition and the temperance movement, to the emergence of Al Anon, a fellowship for family members of addicts, to the invention of co-dependency, the story of addiction has never been about one person. While exploring her own journey of descent and recovery, Aron asks painful and difficult questions. When does helping become harmful? Whose suffering counts? And are our narratives about love as broken as our drug laws?
Memoir £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 139 8 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 486 1 June 2020 UK Com ex Can
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NIna Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.
A powerful book about a difficult subject that many readers will relate to – covering timely topics such as addiction, co-dependency and feminism For fans of Leslie Jamison, Ariel Levy, Sigrid Rausing and Augusten Burroughs
Rabbits for Food Binnie Kirshenbaum
New title
‘A bitingly funny, and occasionally heartbreaking, look at mental illness, love and relationships, with Kirshenbaum’s familiar black humour.’ The New York Times It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Bunny – an acerbic, mordantly witty and clinically depressed writer – fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Propelled by razor-sharp comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of – or into – the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of America’s finest writers.
‘Binnie Kirshenbaum is an unflinching teller of truths. She’s also sublimely funny. Rabbits for Food shows this immensely gifted writer at the height of her powers.’ Jenny Offill ‘Breaks down the mental breakdown into disquieting bitesized pieces. It’s fast-paced and turbulent, but beautifully complex, and the details are stunning.’ Paul Beatty
Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of the story collection History on a Personal Note and six novels, including On Mermaid Avenue, Hester Among the Ruins, An Almost Perfect Moment and The Scenic Route. Her novels have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by NPR, TIME and the Washington Post. Her work has been translated into seven languages.
Fiction £12.99 / 384pp Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 465 8 eISBN: 978 1 78283 664 3 November 2019 B-format paperback May 2020 / £8.99 ISBN: 978 1 78816 466 5 UK & Com ex Can Au
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Introduction Deadly and desirable, vital and venomous, we present Viper, a new imprint of Serpent’s Tail. Launching in November, and with our first books publishing in spring 2020, we will be bringing you everything from psychological suspense and historical crime to literary thrillers and procedurals with a social conscience. Ren Richards’s The Broken Ones is a haunting page-turner about a lost child and hidden identity, while the reader is forced to face the moral ambiguity of 1980s Ireland when DI Swan investigates a case of religious anorexia in Nicola White’s A Famished Heart. In Who We Were, B. M. Carroll spins a tale of childhood bullying bearing terrible fruit in later life, and we are proud to bring the work of Garry Disher – multiple award-winner and recipient of the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award – to a new readership, with his splendid whodunnit, Bitter Wash Road. Within Viper’s coils, you will find the brightest and best in crime fiction. And we can guarantee, whatever the story, someone won’t make it out alive.
Miranda Jewess Senior Commissioning Editor, Viper 16
The Broken Ones Ren Richards
Viper
Who do you turn to when you’re not sure if you love your child? And when they’re taken, will anyone believe you’re innocent? When her child was taken what did she really see? A bestselling true crime writer, Nell Way tells other people’s stories. But there is one story Nell won’t tell. Ten years ago, and with a different name, she was a teenage mother with a four-year-old she found desperately hard to love. Then the little girl disappeared, and Nell has never shaken off the shadow of suspicion. As she begins to interview the subject of her next book – a woman convicted of murdering her twin sister – it becomes clear that someone has uncovered her true identity. And they know that Nell didn’t tell the truth about the day her daughter disappeared …
Praise for The Glass Spare: ‘This book is luminous and spiky, like a pocketful of jewels.’ Laini Taylor, bestselling author of Daughter of Smoke and Bone ‘Brilliantly crafted … Only someone with a heart of stone will be able to turn away’ Beth Revis, bestselling author of Across the Universe
Ren Richards is the pen name of New York Times and USA Today bestselling YA author Lauren DeStefano. DeStefano has published seven YA novels, four middle-grade novels and has an impending picture book but has always dreamed of breaking into the adult suspense category.
Crime fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 406 1 416pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 642 1 March 2020 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe Au
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A Famished Heart Nicola White
Viper
The first in a powerful new crime trilogy set in 1980s Dublin, exploring the power of the Catholic Church and the powerlessness of unmarried women Her head was bowed, and the hands braced on the chair arms were not like hands at all, but the dry dark claws of a bird … The MacNamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door. One woman was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts – the other was crouched under her own bed. Both had starved themselves to death. Francesca MacNamara returns to Dublin after decades in the United States to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is shows that someone was watching the sisters die … Crime fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 408 5 368pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 643 8 February 2020 World Tr
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Nicola White won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2008 and in 2012 was Leverhulme writerin-residence at Edinburgh University. Her novel The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize and was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Praise for Nicola White: ‘A mesmerising tale of secrets and lies rising from the past to strangle the present.’ Val McDermid ‘As good as it gets: a debut shot through with the real, horrifying cruelty of true crime and a heart-race ending.’ Denise Mina
Who We Were B. M. Carroll
Viper
A gripping novel about the power of childhood cruelty and how it makes us the adults we become It’s been twenty years but all is not forgiven Katy is not the shy schoolgirl she once was, and she’s looking forward to showing her classmates who she’s become. Annabel was the queen bee, but her fall from grace changed her life forever. Zach was cruel, but he thinks he’s changed. Robbie was a target. And he never stood a chance. Their reunion will bring together friends and enemies, many for the first time in decades. But someone is still holding a grudge, and will stop at nothing to reveal their darkest secrets …
Praise for B. M. Carroll: ‘Intriguing, compelling. Impossible to put down and irresistibly good.’ Liane Moriarty ‘Sucked me in from the first page. The characters were intriguing, the plot thrilling and the writing effortless.’ Sally Hepworth
B. M. Carroll was born in Ireland, and spent her early career working in finance. She is the author of eight novels, her most recent being The Missing Pieces of Sophie McCarthy. She lives in Sydney.
Crime fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 417 7 416pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 647 6 May 2020 World All Languages Tr
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Bitter Wash Road Garry Disher
Viper
Discover Australia’s King of Crime Hirsch is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan detective, now hated and despised, he’s been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia’s wheatbelt. Threats. Pistol cartridge in the mailbox. So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities. Either he’s found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area. Or his ‘backup’ is about to put a bullet in him. He’s wrong on both counts. But when the next call-out takes him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, his investigation has disturbing echoes of the past he’s trying to leave behind …
Crime fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 507 5 384pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 696 4 April 2020 UK Comm ex Can, ex ANZ Exclusive Europe
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Garry Disher has published fifty titles across multiple genres, and is best known as Australia’s King of Crime. He has won the Deutsche Krimi Preis three times, the Ned Kelly Award twice, and his novel The Sunken Road was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.
‘Gary Disher is one of Australia’s most admired novelists … a superb chronicler of macho cop culture.’ Sunday Times ‘A popular and prolific crime writer who, his fellow Australians claim, ought to be more highly regarded here. Disher shows that he’s a top-class writer.’ The Times
Attica Locke is the author of Bluebird, Bluebird, which won the Edgar Prize; Black Water Rising, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and several other prizewinning novels. Crime fiction, £7.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 770 8 304pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 320 8 May 2020 UK Comm ex Can
Heaven, My Home Attica Locke
Crime fiction Paperbacks
The hotly anticipated sequel to the CWA Dagger-winning Bluebird, Bluebird When the young son of an Aryan Brotherhood of Texas gang captain goes missing near Caddo Lake, Ranger Darren Matthews has no choice but to investigate the crime. ‘This is the best kind of thriller: as literate and thoughtful as it is fast-moving.’ Mick Herron
Au
A. S. Hatch grew up in Lancashire. He now lives in London and writes fiction in the early hours of the morning before going to work in political communications.
Crime fiction, £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 204 3 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 526 4 April 2020 UK Comm ex Can Exclusive Europe Tr
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This Little Dark Place A. S. Hatch
A gripping psychological thriller: a dark love triangle and an unspeakable act of betrayal Lonely in his marriage, Daniel joins a pen-pal programme for prisoners, and makes contact with Ruby. One day, Ruby comes to find him. Now Daniel has to decide who to choose – and who to trust. ‘An emotionally raw and compulsively readable psychological thriller.’ Alice Blanchard 21
Jakob von Gunten Robert Walser
Classic
Robert Walser’s great masterpiece, reissued with a foreword by J. M. Coetzee The Institut Benjamenta: a school of humility for the unambitious. The young Jakob von Gunten arrives at this most curious of educational establishments with the goal of becoming ‘something very small and subordinate later in life’, a goal he sets about achieving with laconic dedication and wry detachment. Irony, scepticism, absurd images and sensations, disconcerting humour, minor humiliations and minute observations mingle to form one of the signature works of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1908, a forerunner to and key influence on the work of writers such as Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser’s masterpiece is a paean to infinitesimal unimportance, a celebration of the marginal life that is the life of the mind.
Fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 450 4 160pp March 2020 UK Com ex Can
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Robert Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878 and worked as a bank clerk before becoming a writer. In 1929 he was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia and was admitted to Waldau psychiatric hospital. In 1933 he was transferred to the sanitorium at Herisau, where he gave up on writing. Walser died there on Christmas Day, 1956.
‘His greatest novel … a strange mix of exuberance and submission, lyrical abandon and self-abnegation.’ Ben Lerner, New Yorker ‘A clairvoyant of the small … Walser has been my constant companion.’ W. G. Sebald 978 1 84668 958 1 £8.99
Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin with a new introduction from Bernardine Evaristo
Classic
The classic account of a white reporter’s journey across the American racial divide, reissued for the 60th anniversary of the events In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a workingclass black man. Black Like Me is Griffin’s own account of his journey. Published in book form two years later it revealed to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America. Selling over five million copies, Black Like Me became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s. Embraced by some and fiercely criticised by others, its legacy sixty years on remains problematic, but Black Like Me nevertheless stands as a fascinating document of its time.
‘If it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty-six days, then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years.’ Malcolm X ‘Black Like Me awoke significant numbers of white Americans to truths about discrimination of which they had been unaware or had denied.’ Washington Post
John Howard Griffin was born in Texas in 1920. As a student in France in 1939 he was caught up with the outbreak of the Second World War, and worked with the French Resistance before joining the US Army. After the publication of Black Like Me he worked as a human rights activist, and taught at the University of Peace. He died in 1980.
Non-Fiction £9.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 452 8 256pp October 2019 UK Com ex Can
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The Warriors Sol Yurick
Classic
The extraordinary novel that became the legendary cult movie Fourth of July night in New York City. In the darkness of the Bronx, thousands of boys have gathered from across the city. Among them are the warriors of the Coney Island Dominators. Ismael Rivera, leader of the Delancey Thrones, has called an assembly of New York’s disparate youth gangs. Why should they keep taking it from the Man when they could be the ones giving it to everyone else? But when the assembly descends into violence, the Dominators are suddenly a very long way home from home. The Warriors follows the Dominators as they rape and murder their way back to Coney Island through the terrifying New York night. First published in 1965, Sol Yurick’s bleak and shocking novel is a brutal tale of young men left to raise themselves, and an urgent warning about the violence that emerges from the torn fabric of human society.
Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 433 7 224pp eISBN: 978 0 28564 282 9 February 2020 UK Com ex Can
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Sol Yurick was born in 1925 in New York. He enlisted in the army during the Second World War, then studied literature. Yurick was a lifelong social activist and worked in New York City’s welfare department. This experience formed the basis for The Warriors. He lived his whole life in New York.
‘Sol Yurick was too radical, too extreme and too violent for the respectable literary establishment of New York, yet no writer more fully embodied the city’s anguished spirit in the 1960s.’ Guardian ‘A brutal and terrifying book … a deeply significant work of art.’ Cleveland Plain Dealer
Dog Poems
New title
Poems about dogs by the world’s greatest poets Since prehistory, dogs have served as man’s best friend, giving us loyalty, assistance and boundless inspiration. Dogs offer comfort and amusement to their owners; they provide solace when we’re sad, entertaining antics when we’re bored and affection every day. To poets in particular, these beloved creatures are the most bountiful muses, as they bark, yip, hunt, fetch, growl and slumber, reflecting back at us our most heartfelt tenderness and often rewarding us with unconditional love we scarcely deserve. Dog Poems offers a litter of verses in celebration of our most faithful companions by some of the greatest poets of all time.
The perfect gift for literary dog lovers Renowned poets spanning a great range of eras and styles, all writing in praise of the dog. Including poems from Lord Byron, Pablo Neruda, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Thomas Hardy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Elizabeth Bishop, Alexander Pope and Ogden Nash From silly to savage to heartrendingly loyal, every quirk of the canine character is collected here for your enjoyment
Loving friend, the gift of one, Who, her own true faith, hath run, Through thy lower nature ; Be my benediction said With my hand upon thy head Gentle fellow-creature … From ‘To Flush, My Dog’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Poetry £7.99 A-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 365 1 112pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 620 9 October 2019 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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The Warlow Experiment Alix Nathan
New in paperback
What kind of person keeps a man underground for seven years? The year is 1792 and Herbert Powyss is set on making his name as a scientist. Determined to study the effects of prolonged solitude on another human being, he advertises for someone willing to live in his cellar for seven years in return for a generous financial reward. The only man to apply is John Warlow, a semi-literate farm labourer with a wife and six children to support. Cut off from nature, Warlow soon begins losing his grip on sanity while, above ground, Powyss rapidly becomes obsessed with Warlow’s wife, Hannah. One of 2019’s most high-profile hardback publications, now out in paperback More than eight thousand copies in print Featured on Radio Four’s Book at Bedtime
Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 170 1 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 507 3 April 2020 World ex USA and Can Exclusive Europe Audio: 978 1 78283 578 3
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Tr
. Alix Nathan read English and Music at York University. She lives in the Welsh Marches where she owns some ancient woodland with her husband. Her short stories have been published in Ambit, The London Magazine and New Welsh Review and read on BBC Radio 4.
‘An extraordinary, quite brilliant book.’ C. J. Sansom ‘She leaves her reader restless, curious, wanting more. She is an original, with a virtuoso touch.’ Hilary Mantel ‘Original and beautifully written, this is a meaty, gripping novel of obsession gone sour.’ Daily Mail
New in Paperback
Open Up
Say Say Say
The Pine Islands
Trust Exercise
The Moth Presents: Occasional Magic
‘Empowering, educational and very entertaining’ Elle
’Something quite special, unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ Tessa Hadley
‘A comic confrontation with mortality … we absolutely loved it’ The Man Booker International Prize 2019 judges
‘An intelligent and layered portrait of a school’s legacy … dramatic and memorable’ New Yorker
‘Beautifully simple, authentic, a little bit therapeutic and utterly addictive’ Sunday Times
Non-fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 188 6 eISBN: 978 1 78283 516 5 January 2020 UK Com ex Can Audio: 978 1 78283 566 0
Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 223 4 eISBN: 978 1 78283 535 6 March 2020 UK Com ex Can
Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 168 8 eISBN: 978 1 78283 506 6 February 2020 UK Com ex Can,
Non-fiction £9.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 667 1 eISBN: 978 1 78283 261 4 March 2020 UK Com ex Can
Alex Holder
Lila Savage
Marion Poschmann
Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 092 6 eISBN: 978 1 78283 465 6 April 2020 World ex USA, Can
Susan Choi
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Recently Published
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
Wayward Lives, Address Unknown Beautiful Experiments Kathrine Kressmann
In the Dream House
Saidiya Hartman
Taylor
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
‘A visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and range’ Man Booker International Prize citation
‘Exhilarating … A rich resurrection of a forgotten history’ The New York Times
‘The most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction’ The New York Times Book Review
‘A vicious little gem of a novel’ Cosmopolitan
‘An intimate, unrelenting style that grabs you by the throat and sinks its perfectly polished nails in’ Harper’s Bazaar
Fiction £20 Royal hardback ISBN: 978 1 78125 891 0 eISBN: 978 1 78283 374 1 November 2019 UK Com ex Can
Non-fiction £17.99 220mm x 153mm trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 323 1 eISBN: 978 1 78283 589 9 August 2019 UK Com ex Can
Fiction £7.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 341 5 eISBN: 978 1 78283 609 4 September 2019 UK Com ex Can Audio: 978 1 78283 628 5
Fiction £8.99 B-format trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 340 8 eISBN: 978 1 78283 608 7 June 2019 UK Com ex Can,
Memoir £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 224 1 eISBN:978 1 78283 536 3 January 2020 UK Com ex Can
László Krasznahorkai
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Carmen Maria Machado
Alix Kates Shulman
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Catalogue cover: Steve Panton Catalogue artwork: Two Associates
37
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