Barbican Press

A startling debut noir. A Trail of Blood on the Snow is a chilling exploration of masculinity, madness, and the harrowing legacy of abuse.

"He remembers me. He remembers the screaming and the blood on the snow. He remembers everything, I can tell."

Rex is 41. Halfway to death and no happier for it. Any promise of a better life got stifled decades ago, when Rex was a limping school kid and Max was the school bully.

Then, a chance encounter. Max standing smug and handsome at a gas station with his oh-so-perfect family.

Rex secretly follows them home. Watches them. Thinks about his own miserable life. What Max did to him, and how a real man would claim revenge.

Rex acts.

Is this the making of a monster, or the breaking of a man?

Silently, digitally, a boy takes apart your family

Tom's a regular teenager – sullen, anxious, super-smart, feeling safe within his bedroom and wedded to his screen.

On a packed train, a London commodities trader gets under his skin.

The trader's got a fine wife, two kids, a yappy dog, big house, annual bonus. Tom hacks him. The trader's hardware becomes stuffed with dangerous, damaging images. Call it collateral damage.

Hacking is what Tom does. He's got control of the keyboards of key players in the fossil fuel industry. If he doesn't bring down the grid, who will?

Roads and trainlines lead the main players to a violent confrontation in the brutalist surrounds of London's Barbican Centre. Government agents work to prevent a global blackout. Tom's set to save the planet.

Who will win?

“An imaginative debut” – Sharma Taylor

“Damion Spencer is a voice to look out for” – Irenosen Okojie

A Barbican First debut

The Devil's Horsewhip is a startlingly fine novel-in-stories about Caribbean folklore, superstitions and legends surrounding death by a writer whose prose judges at Wasafiri have described as vivid and with a spectacular voice.

At the pinnacle of the pandemic—a year already punctuated with daily funeral processions—a Jamaican expat gets an envelope covered in red writing from his doctor. It sends him into a mad tumble between bad omen days and fever dream nights until all that he thinks about is that bitter day in the Jamaican White River Valley, where he and other teenagers escaped a double-cutlass-wielding madman out for blood. But death is not one to give up easily. The years are not long enough, neither is fleeing across continents too far for death's spite and all the worse duppies not to come knocking.

Who will cheat death a second time?

A Christian woman who decides to sleep with an obeah man's monkey. The man with the answer to whether Haitian voodoo is stronger than obeah. A woman who knows how to mourn a dead baby. Or the ones who know how to trap a rolling calf, outrun a three-foot horse, and battle a Chinese duppy and win.

If you're superstitious or wary of those who are, come read these sticky tales spun in barbwire.

When it comes to memoir, Miranda Miller is an incorrigible novelist. Viola, three years old in 1953 when guests gather in her parents' London home to watch the Queen's coronation on TV, is not Miranda. Yet character and author share the same age, the same home, the same parents and three brothers, the same friends and fears and love of books and breathless adventures in her native city.

When I Was brings all the family members centre stage, each character opening their consciousness to reveal a multi-faceted study as life presses in on a family's hopes and dreams.

The novel whisks us through 1950s London, in a tale as true as a novelist can make it. The twists of its drama, as a young girl forges her way into being, let you into secrets of resilience and love.

A WRITER'S DREAM ASSIGNMENT TURNS TO NIGHTMARE

Lucy flies from New York to Deìa, an exclusive village on the Spanish island of Mallorca. In his villa, the famous author Manolo awaits. Lucy needs the story of his life for a magazine. But is she willing to become the next wild chapter in his fierce, rampant, deluded life?

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and tearing at the scars of the Spanish Civil War, this is a novel to thrill your mind and quake your heart.

"A powerful, intense, incredibly frank and uncomfortably erotic portrait of a woman striving to find herself, an intelligent and strong woman who yet has weaknesses that make her vulnerable. The prose is beautiful even when the subject is dangerous." – Crime Time Radio

"A brave and important book that reads like an engrossing thriller." – Grace Nichols, author of Passport to Here and There

"Febrile and frequently disturbing, it had me gripped right to the end." – Mick Jackson, author of The Underground Man

"This is such a powerful, resonant work. If it doesn't reap dozens of literary prizes, then the literary world is as corrupt and supine as I've always believed it to be.” – Morning Star UK

"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly

"Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." Foreword Reviews

"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal

"Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance." Margie Orford

Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.

Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.

A startling, character-driven debut of skilled writing and intelligence, Arx: City of Broken Minds is a standalone epic of grimdark fantasy.

In Arx, no-one remembers anything. Not the Flame Protests. Not the Sightless executioner. Not even themselves.

The story unwinds through the tales of three young characters:

Caelan: His memories have been stolen. All he has left is instinct and fear. Fear of the Fog-Eyes, mindless and drooling. The emptiness that lies in his future unless he can quiet the nameless voice screaming in his head. And he will burn Arx to ashes to avoid it.

Samantha: an asexual blacksmith and perpetual paternal disappointment, knows exactly what she'll be remembered for: Callisteel. A mythic metal that can pierce reality, it waits for her beneath the smog that scars the sky black. No matter the cost.

Ruairi: a famer boy with a twisted spine, heads to Arx desperate to avoid being pitied. On the way, he rescues a man with violet eyes. His reward is a nightmare of blue fire and blood that pushes him to the edge of what his broken body can take – and beyond.

Mindbreakers walk once more in Arx, drawn to the spire of unbroken metal that hangs like a blade against the rotten heart of the city. Now their master has returned, it is only a matter of time before it awakens and slices the connection between reality and memory for good...

Joyful, wild, gay stories from award winning Martin Goodman.

Meet his cast of characters:

New York designer Arnold, whose lovely life blossoms from age 7. We watch him grow famous then learn from the bumps of life.

A young priest who leaves uptight England to lose and find himself in Turkey.

Queenie, scarred from her time as a beautiful boy, meets young Tom, who loves the fact that she's a wreck.

A young Indian teacher meets an older London billionaire who’s not yet out.

And the stunning finale is a gay version of Melville's classic Billy Budd, the tale of a beautiful doomed sailor.

"A ravishing collection, remarkably wide-ranging in subject, mood and tone, each story exquisitely crafted."
– Paul Russell, author of Immaculate Blue

A walk with Per Högselius, skirting shipwrecks and bodies, relics of war and vanished lives, is a deep-dive into landscape and culture. It leaves us fragile and shows us wonders.

'"In 15 fascinating, expansive essays that encompass wars, religions, crime novels, murders, poets, and much more, he proves his point that "the seashore is a borderland," a place that once "evoked fear and repulsion." The collection is a treasure of assemblage. Högselius deftly unites travelogue, memoir, and contemporary culture with historical facts and stories to tremendous effect. Högselius's curious and nimble mind leads readers down a captivating path."' - SHELF AWARENESS, starred review

Holidaymakers go to the beach to play. The world's great writers, film makers and artists head there to tread the margins between life and death. In Death on the Beach, Per Högselius leads us in their footsteps.

What do we find? Life-busting ideas, powerful landscapes, scenes to make you shiver, and an entry-gate to some of the most exciting books and films you've never heard of.

Translated from Swedish by award-winner Agnes Broomé (The Gospel of the Eels), this gripping essay collection reveals that longing inside us that continues to draw us to the sea – even when so many have failed to return.

"Chris Westoby’s THE FEAR TALKING is truly important, beautifully written, and urgently needed. This book will save lives—especially the lives of young people, one of our most vulnerable and underserved populations when it comes to mental and behavioral health. Please give it to some anxious person you love (maybe that anxious person is you)." - Clancy Martin, author of How not to Kill Yourself

A self-help memoir that takes an unflinching look at a young man's undiagnosed anxiety disorder and OCD.

Chris Westoby takes us inside his past self, a teenager from a small English town. He's trying to be a good friend, student, son and boyfriend, but he struggles to be in company without wanting to hide. And things only get worse: it's nearly impossible to take the bus to college without catching the next bus home. His obsessive germaphobia begins to destroy his life. How can one boy overcome all this? Chris gives an unflinching, raw account of his troubles and offers what he's learnt.

Some Expert Reactions

"Read this book, and you will never forget it. As a narrative it's fascinating. As the memoir of a life lived with anxiety, it's incomparable." – Peter Draper, professor emeritus of Nursing Education, University of Hull

"Anxiety is the most common form of mental distress and of course overlaps with normal human emotion. Yet it can be overwhelming and disabling and a gateway to other mental ill health notably depression and self-medication with alcohol and other substances. This engaging account throws a spotlight on how anxiety impacts on everyday life and relationships." – Patrick McGorry, Professor of Youth Mental Health, University of Melbourne

"In The Fear Talking, Chris Westoby achieves the well-nigh impossible, giving us a fully immersive account of adolescent anxiety, allowing the reader to feel and experience with the narrator. If one of the main aims of the memoir form is to induce empathy in readers, Westoby's memoir succeeds brilliantly. The reader comes away with a new and profound understanding of what mental illness feels like from within." – Jonathan Taylor, Associate Professor Creative Writing, University of Leicester

A dystopian novel set around London’s disused Heathrow Airport.

For sixteen years the Earth has baked and no girls have been born. Karen’s the last girl. Steven’s her gay twin. Dad turns their home into a fortress as women take their chance to rule the world. Their eyes are on Steven. Perhaps, with a little medical interference, he could be the saviour of the world. The boys of teensquad run the streets, insects clog the skies, the last chance to save the world is handed to a council of women, and scientists are cooking up a brand new Eden.

The harsh seas of 1968.

Three trawlers from Hulls fleet sink in just 3 weeks.

58 Dead. 1 Survivor.

Enough is enough.

Lilian Bilocca put down her filleting knife, picked up some sheets of paper and stormed into action. She started with a petition and this journey takes her Headscarf Revolutionaries right to the doors of Parliament. Shipping Laws were changed for the better, and thousands of fishermen were made safer. Lilian became a TV star and an international celebrity. It’s hard to live down fame like that in the back streets of Hull. It's harder still for the lone survivor who battled the storms as the trawlers sank.

The Headscarf Revolutionaries thrills with the dangers of the high seas; inspires with the passion of women who changed their world, and reveals the vivid life inside one of history’s most vital communities.

Complete with pages of black and white photographs that capture the characters, trawlers, dangers, and occasional glamour of the era. Includes a foreword by John Prescott.

Some ★★★★★ Reviews:

'History reporting at its best.'

'There is tragedy and loss but also some warm humour.'

'Like a portal that took me back to that time.'

'An incredible story of very brave and driven women.'

'Evokes memories for us Hessle Roaders, both happy and sad.'

'A fascinating read. Highly recommended.'

'An emotionally brilliant read.'

'Brian Lavery has done a fantastic service .'

'A story of pride and grief and social bravery.'

Longlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. A Morning Star 'Radical Book of the Year'.

The Deconstruction of Professor Thrubb is a radical trek through twentieth-century history, with a stunning depiction of Ukraine's civil wars. It's also a brazan campus comedy, a medical drama and a cheery ride through the Scottish Highlands.

A PhD student tracks the biography of Elsie Stewart from her job as a London maid and to the Spanish Civil War while true love runs far from smooth. His neurotic supervisor, Professor Thrub, is a bewildering mentor with secrets of his own.

A contemporary classic from the Czech Republic.

To support his family, a man submits himself to a solo science experiment in the High Andes. This is a cosmic adventure story of big ideas and murder.

Your business is dead. It seems like a deal: leave your family behind in Prague for a year, isolate yourself in a research station in the Andes, and come home with a fortune. With a treatise on black holes for company, Jakob settles in at altitude. The air is thin. Strangers pass by on dangerous pilgrimage while his young wife and kids take life in his mind. In mountain starkness, the big questions take shape: like what happens to love inside a black hole?

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society SCOTTISH FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014

Following in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, THE MONSTER'S WIFE is a literary gothic that re-envisions the classic Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster. To a tiny island in Orkney, peopled by a devout community of twenty, comes Victor Frankenstein, driven there by a Devil's bargain: to make a wife for the Creature who is stalking him across Europe.

In this darkly-wrought answer to Frankenstein, we hear the untold tale of the monster's wife through the perspective of the doctor's housemaid. Oona works below stairs with her best friend May, washing the doctor's linens and keeping the fires lit at the Big House. An orphan whose only legacy is the illness that killed her mother, Oona knows she is doomed. But she is also thirsty for knowledge, determined to know life fully before it slips away. As tensions heighten between Victor and the islanders, Oona becomes the doctor's trusted accomplice, aiding in secret experiments and seeing horrors she sometimes wishes to forget. When May disappears, Oona must face up to growing suspicions about the enigmatic employer to whom she has grown close - but the truth is darker than anything she could imagine.

Poems about the universe: from the sub-atomic level to the cosmic, from bacteria to complex life and exoplanets.

The physicist Richard Feynman challenged poets to step aside from metaphor and capture the stark magnificence of the universe. Spurred to action, James Thornton opened himself to wonders and dived deep into the intricacies of science.

Let his poetry open your eyes.

Complete with an essay on Poetry and Science.

A relentless nautical drama that would define, or end, men’s lives.

The English port city of Hull was home to ‘three day millionaires’ – trawlermen on brief shore leave. They were spilling cash from record catches. With months out working fierce seas, who knew if the next trip would be their last?

The St Finbarr was set to change all that.

She was built as the perfect trawler, no cost spared. She was the future of the industry. She was on her thirteenth voyage.

The Grand Banks, Christmas Day 1966.

No holiday for the crew. They weren’t fishing. They were battling for their lives. Who can survive a fireball at sea? The families of the crew had a cruel wait to find out. Ships hit the fierce seas off Newfoundland to join a two-day rescue mission. From first sparks to gut-wrenching heroics, The Luckiest Thirteen tracks a true story from the far reaches of what fishermen can do.

Waymarks tracks one man through significant encounters with the natural world, around the globe.

An Ethiopian lake, an Australian rainforest, an American desert, an English beach: the stage keeps changing, but the intent stays the same. A poet enters a deep dialogue with birds, animals, people, plants, seas, and all the forces that threaten and churn this mix of life.

James Thornton is a zen priest, and Waymarks sits alongside other classics of metaphysical writing in which poets bare their soul. Teachings from great figures along the way permeate the collection: a West Coast poet, a Japanese Zen Master, a spiritual leader, and the Dalai Lama.

It’s 2103 and Earth is baking. Scientists attempt to cool down the planet. With the coming of rain, a messiah is born.

Eli is a technophobe haunted by premonitions of what will come. His strange magnetism draws many to his cause. For his brother Marek, Eli has always been a messiah. After his short and powerful life, Eli's most haunting prediction comes to pass: children stop being born.

Thirty-five years later, only The Followers of Eli bear children. Marek leads his commune under the glare of the entire world, and recounts Eli’s story to his lover, Natalia. When she is snatched from him, Marek suspects both the followers and outside forces are to blame. Lessons from Marek’s past and revelations from his present inspire one final journey in his brother’s footsteps.

My Brother the Messiah explores spirituality in the twilight of human civilization and presents a dark, vivid future of our world.

Angelica Kaufman is so successful that when she comes to England as a young woman in 1766 a word is coined: Angelicamad.

‘Miller’s intricate fictions are lit by the dark flicker of a strong and original imagination.’ – Hilary Mantel

This sparky, true life novel tells the life story of a woman who battled misogyny to become one of the greatest artists of the Enlightenment Period. After fifteen triumphant years in London, she flees to Italy following the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots.

In Rome, as an old lady, a lively young artist and model names Lucia is Angelica’s guest. And she’s pregnant, ridded with the scandal Angelica has been trying to avoid all her life.

She is the girl I trained myself not to be.

Men can do as they like, but women risk losing everything. In her studio, Angelica relives her journey from a poor background to international fame. She paints her friends (Antonio Canova, Germaine de Stael, Emma Hamilton and Goethe among others) and draws us into her fascinating past. Angelica, Paintress of Minds tells of a gifted and powerful woman with a kind heart.

"Music transcends war trauma in this important, aching, artful Holocaust novel." - The Toronto Star

Otto, a young cello student in Vienna, is snatched from his home and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.

Marched from the camp to the Nazi Adjutant’s house, he is forced to play a Stradivarius cello, eyes closed, for the Adjutant’s wife.

Move forward many decades, and Otto is world famous but in retreat on the coast of Big Sur. A young woman, Rosa, turns up with questions. And her own troubled story. "Secrets connect the two strangers, ones that will change their lives."

Is it ever too late to step forward from the horrors of the Holocaust, and dare to trust again?

The Second World War is over, but young Tomas learns that Europe’s wounds have not yet healed.

Discover the 30th anniversary edition of a Whitbread shortlisted novel - available in the U.S. for the first time.

“You come to see [Tomas] is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults… Simplicity is a great virtue, in novels as elsewhere. After all, it can only be produced from sincerity.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

It’s 1966. Young Tomas is taught by English war veterans, the adults around him haunted by memories of war. He walks the ruins of Coventry with his Gran, the city still rebuilding from the blitz. But his mother is German, and Tomas is torn between two worldviews.

As he nears adulthood Tomas heads to 1970s Berlin. He’s taken in by his enigmatic uncle, a blind, disgraced Nazi soldier. Arm in arm, they explore a drastically changing Berlin. Out in Dresden, a city decimated by Allied firebombs, Tomas finds more family with their hidden stories. This soaring, poignant novel invites readers to explore what we inherit from the wars of our elders, and how we might move on.

A deeply compelling tale of a woman caught inside the destruction of a Communist regime. 

Iordana is a normal girl, brought up with all the perks of Romania’s corrupt communist regime. Then she falls in love and marries the eldest son of her parents’ arch-rival, Romania’s monstrous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.  They become the in-laws from hell, but she brings them their only grandson. And then there’s the 1989 revolution, when crowds will kill anyone with the Ceausescu name. In all the blood and chaos, can Iordana keep her little son alive? 

Drawn from eighty hours of unique interviews and told in Iordana’s own voice; this true-life tale spins readers into the pleasures, excesses and horrors of late twentieth-century Europe.

A powerful tale inspired by the biblical Raising of Lazarus.

What if your beloved friend brings you back from the dead, and you see nothing of any afterlife? And what if that friend is Yeshua, the mystic who will come to be known as Jesus? His miracles are stirring the authorities in Jerusalem, and Lazarus finds himself scrambling after his childhood companion during Passion Week, the turbulent final chapter in Yeshua's life. Meanwhile Lazarus struggles to return to his work and family, feeling a great sense of fragility and lost identity since his return to the living world. He can't help but wonder if he was resurrected to save Yeshua in his time of dire need...

Richard Zimler's impeccably researched novel draws you into to Roman-controlled Jerusalem, the Jewish communities within it and the permeating Greek cultural influences. A cast of biblical figures, from Mary and Joseph to Mary Magdalene, are restored to their roots. Zimler brings us a fascinating, exciting and highly moving read.

Patrick, the first Irish Pope, is sure of many things: his faith, the sanctity of life, that he is a man, that he is celibate.

Then all he's held true is cast into doubt.

How can he act as the moral heart of the church when his convictions falter and his secrets threaten to destroy all he's achieved? Catholicism and modern morality are held in tension, and Pope Patrick must make once unimaginable choices. When the truth begins to emerge, the Vatican wants him silenced. The Pope’s sheltered existence becomes a race of life and death.

PETRARCH FOR THE MODERN EAR, by the translator of a Dante edition that 'ranks with the very best available in English'.

Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Peter Thornton's accessible new translation brings Petrarch to the 21st century in direct, rhymed, English verse - for academics and poetry enthusiasts alike.

Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), Petrarch's various poems often come back to Laura. He adores her in life and after her early death. His Canzoniere also serves as a valuable contemporary insight into 14th century religion and Christendom. Petrarch’s work is one of civilization’s most immaculate achievements. Peter Thornton provides non-intrusive, insightful commentary and guidance through the text.

Winner of the 2023 FICCI India Book of the Year award — a powerful, magical indigenous novel from Nagaland, India's foremost writer.

Drawing on ancient tribal tales, Spirit Nights tells of a prophecy fulfilled when a number of villages are plunged into endless darkness. A terrible taboo has been violated in the spirit world. A wise elder feels the village crumble as her people are isolated and frightened. She knows that only through acting with wisdom and courage, and journeying into unknown realms, can the people get the light back.

But who would dare to do that?

Lockdowns, spirit visions, profound darkness - Spirit Nights delivers a unique tale from Nagaland that parallels our lives today. This is an exciting USA debut for Easterine Kire. Spirit Nights also includes informative notes, and an essay about real 'Dark Time Accounts' - tribal stories of periods when the world tumbles into seemingly endless night time.