Saraband

"Outstandingly good … It may be the single most insightful book about climbing ever written."  Paul Sagar, Climber, writer, thinker

What do Zen masters, sixteenth-century Samurai, and the world’s elite climbers have in common?

They have perfected the of awareness, of being in the moment, of trusting the process.

Climbing is a sport of perception, and our successes and failures are matters of mind as much as body.

Written by philosopher, essayist, and lifelong climber Francis Sanzaro, The Zen of Climbing explores the fundamentals of successful climbing, delving into sports psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and Taoism. Awareness, he argues, is the alchemy of climbing, allowing us to merge mental and physical attributes in one embodied whole.

This compact volume puts the climber’s mind at the forefront of practice.

Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time.

Linda Cracknell is a writer of place and nature who believes in being alert, observing, and writing from the particulars of each experience. Engaging bodily with her writing, she is someone for whom getting mud on her boots, sleeping high up in the hills, or being slapped by salt water can all be part of her process. She follows Susan Sontag's advice to “Love words, agonize over sentences and pay attention to the world.”

In this varied collection of essays, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland at low tide, musing on the nineteenth-century Scottish writer whose character was shipwrecked there. She hikes the wooded mountain trail close to her home in winter snow—a place she is intimately familiar with in all weathers and seasons—and she retraces the steps of a multiday hike made almost seven decades after her parents trod the route together. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work.

Reading this collection will open your eyes to the world around you and how you can observe, take note, and later commit those notes and memories to written pieces that will evoke the place and time.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PAUL TORDAY MEMORIAL PRIZE.

A powerful, beautiful novel, set across two decades, in the wake of a devastating maritime tragedy.

“Full of memorable images and singing lines of prose.” Sarah Waters

Tormod Morrison was on board HMY Iolaire on the terrible night as 1919 dawned, when the ship smashed into rocks and sank: some 200 servicemen drowned on the very last leg of their long journey home from war. For Tormod—a man unlike others, with artistry in his fingertips—the disaster would mark him indelibly. And for the stunned islanders, who had so joyfully anticipated the return of their sons, brothers and sweethearts, no shock could have been greater or more difficult to live with.

Two decades later, Alasdair and Rachel are sent to the windswept Isle of Lewis to live with Tormod in his traditional blackhouse home, a world away from the Glasgow of their earliest years. Their grandfather is kind, compassionate, but still deeply affected by the Iolaire shipwreck—by the selfless heroism and desperate tragedy he witnessed. A deeply moving novel about passion constrained, coping with loss and a changing world, As the Women Lay Dreaming explores how a single event can so dramatically impact communities, individuals and, indeed, our very souls.

The first book to focus on Dorothy Wordsworth’s later life and work and the impact of her disability – allowing her to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story.

Dorothy Wordsworth is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803) and as the sister of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life.

Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brother’s success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness, this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story.

Light is fundamental – it interacts with life in profound ways. But light is changing, dramatically, with artificial light pollution, and we don’t truly understand the consequences. Nature writer Anna Levin explores the impact on the planet and on human health.

Artificial light is voracious and spreading. Vanquishing precious darkness across the planet, when we are supposed to be using less energy. The quality of light has altered as well. Technology and legislation have crushed warm incandescent lighting in favour of harsher, often glaring alternatives. Light is fundamental - it really matters: it tells plants which way to grow, birds where to fly and coral when to spawn. It tells each and every one of us when to sleep, wake, eat.

We mess with the eternal rhythm of dawn-day-dusk-night at our peril. But mess with it we have, and we still don't truly understand the consequences. In Incandescent, journalist Anna Levin reveals her own fraught relationship with changes in lighting, and she explores its real impact on nature, our built environment, health and psychological well-being. We need to talk about light, urgently. And ask the critical question: just how bright is our future?

A riotous look at the intersection of politics, protest, and punk—and what it means to turn to art for survival.

Since its inception, punk has defied convention. Angry, unruly, and equipped with an “anti” ethos—anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, anti-corporation, and anti-conformity—it became a rebellion bound in leather and a daring fist in the face of political oppression.

Chronicling a brief history of punks at war, Blitzkrieg Bops, studies those who have soundtracked a movement of resistance—from Stiff Little Fingers protesting the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the South African group National Wake defying apartheid, the Russian protest group Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian feminist punk band Death Pill standing up to Putin, to those fighting for a free Palestine to this day.

Blitzkrieg Bops documents how punk music—with its socially charged lyrics and distorted, cathartic guitar—can ignite movements and be a global source of liberation. Speaking directly to these musicians, journalist Alli Patton shows how they create music to overthrow corrupt governments, stomp out oppressive regimes, fight the establishment and, in turn, fight for their lives.

In this memoir of place, memory and motion, Linda Cracknell reels in the hidden lives of the women who went before her, crystallising her connection to them and to the sea.

When Linda Cracknell’s quest to connect herself and her mother to a seafaring family history finds her in a harbour, bracing herself to throw a line, she is struck by the parallel of this physical action to her years-long mission of reeling the past closer to the present, finding her place in a family tree full of mariners and ship-owners, whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.

She travels the Scottish and South-West England coast – where many of her ancestors lived – by boat and foot; travels on a 121-year-old sailboat; joins a community effort to build and launch a rowing boat on a Highland loch; and lays a family palimpsest in the footsteps of her ancestors across marshes and clifftops. She finds that it is the women in her family who reach across the decades and centuries to catch the line she throws, and begins to understand them more clearly as the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in, and as the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is slowly untangling her complex relationship with her own elderly mother.

What begins as a quest for legacy takes her well beyond, as she grows to understand something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.

A candid and confessional cultural investigation into the kinky world of the foot fetish.

According to recent research, 1 in 7 people have fantasized about feet at some point in their lives, so why is this kink still often considered taboo? Queer writer and podcaster Adam Zmith dips a toe into the cultural and sexual history of the foot fetish—taking readers from medieval poetry to Renaissance paintings, OnlyFans to Fellow Travelers. Enlightening, erotic, and refreshingly nonjudgmental, Solemates is the rich, messy tale of our obsession with everything below the ankle—and a fascinating expose into what our desires reveal about how we view our bodies and our sexuality.

Grief is all around us - even at the heart of the vibrant, vividly characterized, whimsical films of Studio Ghibli.

Though made for adults and children alike, movies produced by Studio Ghibli are filled with themes of loss - of innocence and love, of the world itself and of our connection to it. Whether facing the realities of the death of a loved one, the small and continual losses we encounter throughout our daily lives, or the anticipatory grief of the environment's ongoing decline, each beloved film holds its own lesson we can take forward into our lives and find comfort in.

In Now Go, Karl Thomas Smith enters the emotional waters to interrogate not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief but how these works have informed his own understanding of its manifold faces, weaving cornerstone films and characters - including My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron, and more - with his own life and the broader human experience of loss.

Ghibli films, with all the magic and mystery they contain, become beacons of joy offering us a winking light in the darkness.

Grab a sword and roll for initiative—a queer DnD adventure is about to begin.

Since its inception decades ago, the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons has offered an escape from the real world, the chance to enter distant realms, to walk in new shoes, and be part of immersive, imaginative tales as they unfold. For its LGBTQ+ players, it is also a vessel for exploration, joy, and self-discovery.

Journey on, adventurer, as Dungeon Master Thom James Carter invites you into DnD's exciting queer and utopian possibilities. Traverse its history and contemporary evolution, discover stories from queer players and the homebrewers making it their own, and unlock DnD's power to explore and examine identity—how people want to lead their lives in real and imagined worlds alike.

Anthropologist Naomi Westerman was studying death rituals around the world—when her whole family died.

Upon losing those closest to her, Naomi Westerman saw that death was more than just an abstract academic concept; it was a deeply painful and personal experience. She became fascinated by loss and grief, and hoped to cope and demystify death by turning to history, art, and pop culture.

Happy Death Club examines the many faces of death and grief in Westerman’s own life and in cultures around the world. From expensive coffins and unconventional burials to horror films and true crime, what does our treatment of death and dying have to tell us about how we live our lives? What makes a “good death”? And who owns our bodies before and after we die?

Both meaningful and darkly humorous, Happy Death Club presents a frank, curious look at this universal human experience—one we’re often too afraid to talk about—and what lies beyond.

BFFs shows us that friendships can be the most important, loving, expansive, and emancipatory relationships in our lives—all with the help of our favorite TV, movie, and book besties.

Friendship can be the foundation of our earliest memories and the source of our most formative moments. So why is it often seen as secondary to romantic or familial connection, something we age out of and sacrifice to other relationships? In BFFs, Anahit Behrooz considers female friendship not as something lesser, but as a site of radical intimacy.

From the joys of shared coming-of-age stories and sisterhood, through the pain of break-ups and parting of ways, the vast significance and intensity of feeling within our friendships is explored through depictions in the work of Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Booksmart and Grey's Anatomy, Insecure, The Virgin Suicides and beyond.

Ancient Greece was rich with stories of queer love and genderfluid identity—but what can these ancient stories tell us about our contemporary world?

Tales as old as antiquity—whether the love affair of Achilles and Patroclus, the genderfluid Tiresias, or the infamous Heracles—are still capturing our imaginations thousands of years later. But was antiquity's relationship with queer folk more complicated than we now imagine? Historian Jean Menzies dives into the world of queer readings and retellings of Greek mythology, inviting readers to discover the power to be found in remaking these narratives, time and again.

From explorations of gender and identity across millennia, to celebrating queer love in its many forms, All the Violet Tiaras carves a space for queer stories to be told with all the complexity and tenderness they deserve—and a goddess or two thrown in for good measure.

A tale inspired by real events of sisterhood, heartbreak and resilience in a Highland village home front in World War II Scotland.

Clova, Scotland, 1942. As World War II roars overseas, sisters Nell and Effie Anderson live together in the old schoolhouse of their quiet glen. Effie is a teacher, while Nell works as a postwoman, delivering news—often of the worst—from the frontline to her neighbors. Though they love and care for one another, unspoken tensions and mysteries put distance between them.

When a plane carrying Canadian and British soldiers crashes over their village, the only survivor stumbles to their door. In his pocket is a photo that will set in motion a chain of events threatening to uncover their family’s troubling past.

Told across a dual timeline of the sisters’ adult years and their adolescence during World War I, Whispers in the Glen is a novel about secrets, lies, and the dangers of keeping them hidden.

When the cold months make you hunker down and hide, how do you teach your soul to open up instead—to new rhythms and unlikely beauty—and begin participating in the unique joy of winter?

Helen Moat used to dread winter. When it approached, she would hunker down inside, yearn for the sun, and wait it out. Then, determined to overcome this anxiety, she vowed to set out into the darkness in search of ways to embrace it.

Beginning her discoveries at home in Scotland, she moves on across the world through the Arctic Circle to Asia. Along the way, she finds beauty in the small things that only winter can offer. Helen’s quest to dispel her seasonal blues has its ups and downs; slowly, though, she learns not only to accept the darkness of winter, but to welcome it. When she travels to Lapland and Japan, their cultural and philosophical attitude to the season is a revelation.

While the Earth Holds Its Breath nurtures resilience and determination, finding a joyous positivity that does not ignore the darkness, but finds something to love there.

An anthology of new travel writing by and for rebellious women adventuring through the world.

Travel writing can be exclusive, centering macho narratives of discovery and intrepid exploration, often made by men who step out on their own. But what about the everyday traveling we all do, the journeys we make out of necessity, or the stories of women sharing in adventure?

There She Goes seeks to expand and redefine the genre of travel writing. In essays that are both defiant and deeply personal, we see the grit, purpose, and determination of women traveling with babies, with periods, with grief and loss, with menopause, with magic and humor, with bodies that are disabled or seen as foreign and other. Leena Rustom Nammari crosses between the West Bank and Jordan as a Palestinian travelling away from her homeland; Claire Askew recounts her pilgrimage to Salem, to honor the people murdered during the witch trials; and Lee Craigie upends the competitive parameters of an off-road bike race in the Highlands of Scotland

This inspirational collection offers a new perspective on what it means to be adventurous. In times where fear and worry seem so prevalent, it is a gift of courage and celebration.

An electrifying debut novel about grief, power and desire—and the tangles in between that make up a life.

When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague—the poet—his fascination soon begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods.

Meanwhile, his homophobic and spiteful mother—who cast a shadow over his childhood—is continuing to make his life difficult. As he is pulled back and forth between these two different worlds, his fixation on the poet, his Kingfisher, grows into something more powerful. She becomes his sole focus. He is hypnotized.

But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he's forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone.

A pocketful of nature poetry in all its green glory from the In the Moment series

Taking time for nature poetry is an act of reverence for the natural world, and a path to understanding our part in it. The poems in this pocket sized anthology will transport you, sending you into the garden, forests, mountains, and shores with searching hands and open eyes.

Through centuries of storytelling, nature poetry has shapeshifted through the major upheavals in our relationship with the landscapes, plants and other species with whom we share the Earth. As our environment is destabilized and threatened by the climate crisis today, we find renewed meanings in these poems once again.  They become sources of joy or hope, and catalysts for action.

Together, they show what we have in common across countries and centuries: an undeniable kinship with nature and a fierce will to protect it.

From the author of The Zen of Climbing and The Craft of Bouldering, a manifesto for a new approach to connecting meaningfully with the wildness around and within us.

In recent years, we have woken up to the crucial role that nature plays in our well-being. As we live increasingly urbanized lives, we seek out wilderness and green space in times of hardship and turmoil, or simply during our leisure time. In the process of exploring and understanding more about the benefits of being in nature, many of us have taken up swimming, forest bathing, cycling, hiking and running in the open air. But when we spend this time in the wild are we really connected to it?

Francis Sanzaro argues that we often obscure opportunities for real connection through our attachment to screens, our anxieties about our "everyday" lives, or simply through our egos. When we observe nature, we rarely do so without subconsciously filtering out the parts that don't fit into the perfect snapshot we crave.

To foster a genuine connection with the natural world, and to better protect it, we must embrace its contradictions as well as the surface beauty. Through deeper engagement with our environment, we can discover the wild within ourselves, too.

New from the popular In the Moment series—in search of the darkest night skies, Anna Levin uncovers a sense of wonder about the universe that will help you to understand more about our own pale blue dot.

The darkness of the night represents something unknowable and mysterious. But when we look up, we can find celestial light shows, whole galaxies, and even a new perspective on our Earthly concerns. The night sky offers us an essential connection to something bigger than ourselves, a vast, timeless expanse that extinguishes our individual concerns.

Humans have tried to make sense of the night sky since ancient times. From physicists and meteorologists to astrologists, artists, philosophers and poets, it has been a source of inspiration, wonder, and exploration. Now, our access to darkness is under threat, and many of us are flocking to see the stars while we can—in a new wave of ‘astrotourism’.

In this concise volume, Anna Levin looks at how we can learn from and nurture our relationship with the night sky, even—especially—in the context of our changing world.

Understanding, loving and protecting butterflies—in all their enchantments.

A first of its kind in combining the history of human interest in butterflies with a guide to practical observation, this pocket guide encourages us to nurture our curiosity and head out into our local environment, focusing on edgeland habitats that are home to many species.

It is perhaps because butterflies are so fragile and fleeting that we are so beguiled by them. But now, as numbers dwindle, they have never been more difficult to spot.

The Butterfly paves the way toward uncovering the history of our fascination with butterflies and learning how to spot and identify them.

Nominated for Reading the West Awards 2025

From the author of The Zen of Climbing, this enlightening and essential book is an inspired collection of concise essays and reflections on the art of bouldering.

More than a sport, bouldering is a craft that demands equal fine-tuning of the mind and body. It calls for total commitment and attentiveness.

Climber, writer, and philosopher Francis Sanzaro brings the discipline into conversation with other sports and arts including architecture, dance, skateboarding, painting, parkour, martial arts, and gymnastics.

Sanzaro shows how the pursuit of bouldering is akin to developing a philosophy—something that can be nurtured and strengthened like a muscle, benefiting both body and soul. He explores all aspects of the craft and gives boulderers a voice of their own.

It's the eve of the 1980s. Police officer Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine—young, Black, artistic, and fighting discrimination on two fronts.

As the list of victims grows and police fail to catch the killer, women are too terrified to go out after dark. To the feminists, the Butcher is a symptom of wider misogyny. Their anger finds an outlet in violence, and Liz is torn between loyalty to them and her colleagues and job.

In this novel based on the true events of the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the feminist arson campaign it triggered targeting porn outlets, Ajay Close combines the tension of a police procedural with the power and passion of the Women's Lib movement. By turns emotional, action-packed, and darkly funny, What Doesn't Kill Us reveals just how much the world has changed since the 1970s—and how much it hasn't

Past and present converge as Linda Cracknell doubles back to walk in the footsteps of others.

Across Norway, Kenya, and the northerly islands of Skye in Scotland and Lindisfarne in England, Doubling Back traces the contours of history. Following paths long mythologized by writers and relatives gone before, Linda Cracknell charts how places immortalized in writing and memory create portals; wrinkles in time and geography that allow us to recreate journeys of others moving at a slow and steady pace, on foot.

Join Linda as she traverses the dangerous crevasses of the Swiss Alps to retrace the mountaineering past of the father she barely knew. Walk with her as she follows the escape route of a Norwegian scientist on the run in the Second World War, or as she simply celebrates the joy found in the 'friendly paths' of her local, regular terrain, and the rhythms and ritual of returning home.

Published in the UK to rave reviews and serialized on BBC radio, this beautifully rendered account of walking and memory helps us to locate ourselves in time and space and to reflect on our future on this fragile Earth.

Learn from Britain's leading dragonfly expert how to invite dragonflies and damselflies into your garden and help them thrive there.

In this compact and accessible wildlife primer, 'Dragonfly Ambassador' Ruary Mackenzie Dodds shows how to set up a tranquil garden haven for dragonflies, with straightforward, easy-to-follow guidance on preparing your pond, what plants to include in it, and how to manage and enjoy it.

Caring for something as precious and delicate as a dragonfly can provide a welcome respite from the everyday demands of life. We can, as always, learn so much from the natural world, even—and sometimes especially—from its smallest creatures.

Learn how to transform your garden into a haven for dragonflies and damselflies, nurturing your own mental health and protecting the planet as you do so. With stunning colors and phenomenal flying abilities, dragonflies are beautiful creatures that are also vital to our ecosystem. Every pond counts!

From the author of a Guardian memoir of the year 2022

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one.

So, she wrote Expecting.

Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one's life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective that are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.

Ramaswamy bears witness to the experience of pregnancy in an intimate yet expansive book of lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.

Bringing together landscapes, geology, history, people, and their whisky, and addressing the key role of peatlands in mitigating climate change, Peat and Whisky: The Unbreakable Bond is a love letter to the unique substance that forms part of the DNA of Scotch whisky.

Through epic journeys around Scotland and elsewhere, and back in time, Mike Billett dives deep into the science and stories of ancient peatlands and bogs, capturing the spirit of places where whisky has been distilled for centuries. He sheds light on how peat imparts its distinctive aroma and flavor to the world's finest single malts. He looks back to tradition and heritage, as well as forward to a future in which peat will remain part of the whisky recipe, while at the same time becoming an increasingly precious living sponge for atmospheric carbon. He takes us to places where the bond between peat and whisky is growing around the world.

Whether you're a whisky connoisseur, a lover of Scotland's beautiful landscapes, an armchair traveler or a history buff, this unforgettable book will deepen your appreciation for the land itself and help you to understand the profound connection between peat and the unmistakable character of uisge beatha, the water of life.

“If you have been still enough for long enough, your eyes will have attuned and begun to read the seasurge fluently, so you recognize the blunt curve and flourished tail of a diving otter. Home your eyes in on that portion of the sea, permit nothing else to move, and you will see the otter eel-catching, resurfacing.”

It is a special privilege and a richly rewarding experience to observe a wild animal hunting, interacting with its young or its mate, exploring its habitat, or escaping a predator.

To watch wildlife, it’s essential not only to learn an animal’s ways, the times and places you may find it, but also to station yourself, focus, and wait. The experience depends on your stillness, silence, and full attention, watching and listening with minimal movement so that your presence is not sensed.

With decades of close observation of wild animals and birds, Jim Crumley has found himself up close and personal with many of our most elusive creatures, studying their movements, noting details, and offering intimate insights into their extraordinary lives. Here, he draws us into his magical world, showing how we can learn to watch wildlife well.

A tender and poignant debut of the redemptive power of unexpected friendship.

In an old-fashioned fishing community on Morecambe Bay, change is imperceptibly slow. Treacherous tides sweep the quicksands, claiming everything in their path.

As a boy, Arthur had followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footprints, learning to read the currents and shifting sands. Now retired and widowed, though, he feels invisible, redundant. His daughter wants him in a retirement home. No one listens to his rants about the newcomers striking out nightly onto the bay for cockles, seemingly oblivious to the danger.

When Arthur’s path crosses Suling’s, both are running out of options. Barely yet an adult, Suling’s hopes for a better life have given way to fear: she’s without papers or money, speaks no English, and chased by ruthless debt collectors. Her only next step is to trust the old man.

Combining warmth and suspense and recalling a true incident, The Bay tells a tender story about loneliness, confronting prejudice, and the comfort of friendship, however unlikely—as well as exposing one of the most pressing social ills of our age.  

The Bay is an engrossing novel recalling the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster of 2004.

Permaculture needs all of us, and all of us need permaculture.

Permaculture is a way of farming, gardening, or managing land for sustainable food that emphasizes a reciprocal relationship with nature. It’s also a way of living that has countless benefits for both individual and collective well-being and is an essential tool in the fight of our lives: tackling the climate crisis.

Incorporating such concepts and practices as rewilding and community resilience, permaculture is an approach with core principles that center collectivism and stewardship. From these principles, we can take key lessons about how we interact with nature and with others in all areas of life.

Exploring the history of permaculture, how it exists today, and combining practical prompts with personal stories, this book is written with expertise, yet is accessible and enjoyable for beginners and the experienced alike.

Whether you’re completely new to permaculture, or you’re someone with experience who wants to reconnect and learn more about its history and principles, this book will contain valuable lessons for growth far beyond the garden.

An intimate story of a Polish family torn apart by war: of heartbreak, loss, and survival against the odds.

Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 on his aristocratic family’s large estate, near Lwow, now Ukrainian Lviv. He was the son of a charismatic Polish lancer: one of the skilled cavalrymen who were proud of their descent from the legendary ‘winger hussars’ with their spectacular eagle feather armour. 

After an idyllic and undeniably privileged rural childhood, family and military upheavals would change Julian’s life forever. His eccentric and artistic family were torn apart by successive Soviet and German occupations. His teenage years involved work as a courier for the Resistance, participation in the Warsaw Uprising, and a spell in a Nazi labour camp. Fortunate to escape with his life, he made his way to the UK as a refugee, where he married and eventually acquired British citizenship. But an intense affection for the vanished people and places of his childhood memories remained.

In 2022, Putin's war in Ukraine and the sight of refugees passing through Lviv added urgency to his writer daughter Catherine's project of a lifetime, to try to uncover for herself everything that had been lost a generation before.

The Last Lancer pieces together beguiling glimpses of how the Czerkawski family lived and died in a region with a proud but turbulent history. It sheds light on their trauma, at the same time offering a deep, personal understanding of what was, and continues to be, a troubled place.

“With skilled close readings of her work, Hay convincingly argues that Brontë’s writing on loneliness and society’s expectations for women remain relevant … accessible … a fine place to start for readers new to her work.” Publishers Weekly

Anne Brontë is now widely believed to have written the finest of all the Brontë works—and the first ever feminist novel. Why, then, is she less famous than Charlotte and Emily? Discover the real Anne and why she remained for so long in her sisters' shadow.

Anne’s writing has often been compared harshly with that of Charlotte and Emily—as if living in her sisters’ shadows throughout her life wasn’t enough. But her reputation, literary and personal, has changed dramatically since Agnes Grey was first published in 1846. Then, shocked reviewers complained of her "crudeness" and "vulgarity"—words used to this day to belittle women writing about oppression.

Her second and most famous work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was groundbreaking in its subject matter: marital and alcohol abuse and the rights of married women. A book that refused to sweep difficult truths under the rug. A book so ahead of its time that even her sisters weren’t ready for it, Charlotte being one of its harshest critics. And yet today's critics see it as perhaps the best of all the Brontë works. With such a contradictory life and legacy: who was Anne, really? It’s time to find out.

An accessible exploration of England's prehistoric past through the clues set in stone by our ancient ancestors. Stan Abbott explores Britain's neolithic remains, including Castlerigg and Long Meg and her Daughters.

In Ring of Stone Circles, Stan Abbott sets out to explore one part of England for the visible clues to our mysterious past from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages: stone circles and standing stones, in Cumbria—the Northern English county that boasts more of these monuments than any other. Here, the country’s tallest mountains are ringed by almost fifty circles and henges, most of them sited in the foothills or on outlying plateaux. But why were these built?

We may never have a definitive answer to this question, but by observing and comparing sites, a greater understanding emerges. Were some circles built for ritualistic purposes, or perhaps astronomical? Were they burial sites, or simply meeting places?

Join Stan Abbott as he searches for the hidden stories these great monuments guard—and might reveal if we get to know them.

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and named among the 50 most notable new books from Africa, Castles from Cobwebs follows one girl’s transition from youthful innocence to understanding as she navigates questions about family, identity, and race.

"I'd always known that I was Brown. Black was different though; it came announced. Black came with expectations, of rhythm and other things that might trip me up."

Imani is a foundling. Rescued as a baby and raised by nuns on a remote Northumbrian island, she grows up with an ever-increasing feeling of displacement. Full of questions, Imani turns to her shadow, Amarie, and her friend Harold. When Harold can't find the answers, she puts it down to what the nuns call her "greater purpose". At nineteen, Imani answers a phone call that will change her life: she is being called to Ghana after the sudden death of her biological mother. 

Past, present, faith and reality are spun together in this enthralling debut. Following her transition from innocence to understanding, Imani's experience illuminates the stories we all tell to make ourselves whole.

A novel based on the shocking true eighteenth-century story of a Scottish noblewoman whose own husband faked her death and exiled her to a remote island, where she could never be found.

Edinburgh, January 1732. It’s the funeral of Rachel, wife of high-ranking aristocrat Lord Grange, whose unexpected death has shocked the mourners.

But Rachel is, in fact, very much alive. She has been brutally kidnapped and her death has been faked—by her own husband. Whether punishment for being “too feisty for a lady” and not submissive enough for a wife, or to cover up his treasonous Jacobite leanings, or simply to replace her with his long-time mistress, he has banished Rachel to a remote and barren island. There she will be subjected to a life of hardship and loneliness, unable to speak the islanders’ language, far from her beloved children and without hope of being found.

Lady Grange has until now been remembered only by her husband’s unflattering account, but this novel reveals events from the perspective of the real Lady Grange. At last, centuries later, her story is reclaimed.

From the leading lady of Scottish historical mysteries comes her US debut novel: a shocking tale of betrayal and murder in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots.

1567, Scotland: no place for a woman. Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son. She can rely only on the loyalty of her ladies-in-waiting, chiefly Marie Seton. Meanwhile the political turmoil in the country is mirrored behind the walls of beautiful Fyvie Castle. Lilias’s marriage to Marie’s nephew, the ruthlessly ambitious Alexander Seton, goes awry after the birth of yet another daughter. He blames her—and contemplates drastic action. To what lengths will a man go to secure a son and heir?

The Green Lady is a shocking tale of intrigue, secrets, treachery, and murder, based on true events, but seen from a different perspective than is found in most history books. Casting a fascinating light on the ruthless nature of power, the story highlights the precarious position of sixteenth-century women, even those in the most privileged of circumstances.

This is a story of gardens and how people can grow well in them. 

Through a lifetime’s experience of award-winning work in community gardens and in mental health care and training, Jan Cameron shows us how tending green spaces can bring tremendous benefits to mental health.

Using the garden's annual cycle, Cameron reveals how stages of the growing year can act as a powerful metaphor and even mirror healing mechanisms that can help in times of distress, anxiety, or depression. By exploring practices used in therapeutic and community garden settings we learn techniques that can be applied whatever your circumstances.

The Garden Cure is full of ideas and tools that will help support your own and others' physical and mental well-being, especially when life is challenging. How, in other words, gardening helps us all grow and thrive.

Acclaimed Dutch author Saskia Goldschmidt explores the dangers of industrial gas extraction, changing farming methods and their impact on our environment, and what it means to have your identity intensely entwined with your place of birth, in this compelling family saga.

Femke, her mother Trijn and her grandfather have very different ideas about how to run their family farm. Tensions between mother and daughter are growing; Femke wants to switch to sustainable growing principles, while her mother considers this an attack on tradition. To make matters worse, their home province of Groningen is experiencing a series of earthquakes caused by a gas extraction operation near their farm. While the cracks and splinters in their farmhouse increase, the authorities and the state-owned gas company refuse to offer the local farming community any help.

In Shocked Earth, Saskia Goldschmidt investigates what it means to have your principles at odds with your closest kin. And how to keep standing when the world as you know it is slowly falling apart.

Nominated in Scotland’s National Book Awards

In this searing, frank and funny memoir, Catherine Simpson describes what it’s been like to live in her woman’s body, and to reach the realisation that all that time she’d spent trying to change her body to conform - often to unattainable standards - could be seen from a completely different perspective.

By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine Simpson and her body had gone through a lot together—from period pain and early menopause to shaming and harassment. But there had been success, joy, love, and laughter too: far more freedoms than her mother had, a fulfilling family life and career, and even the promise of further gains for her daughters.

So when a cancer diagnosis upends her life, Catherine is forced to reflect on her body, then and now. From growing up on a farm where veterinarians were more common than doctors, and where illness was “a nuisance,” she finds herself faced with the nuisance of a lifetime.

One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and takes stock of the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to appreciate the skin she is in—to be grateful for her body and all that it does and is.

A treasure trove of fascinating stories, little-known places and hidden gems of history, Westering is a coast-to-coast British journey from Norfolk to the Welsh coast, by an established travel writer.

From Great Yarmouth to Aberystwyth, Westering takes us across England from the Fens, Leicester, the Black Country and central Wales. It connects landscape, place and memory to evoke a narrative unravelling the deep topography, and following a westerly route that runs against the grain of the land, its geology, culture and historical bedrock.

With the industrial Midlands sandwiched between bucolic landscapes in East Anglia and Wales, here we explore places too often overlooked. Along the way we encounter deserted medieval villages, battlefield sites, the ghosts of Roman soldiers, valleys drowned for reservoirs, ancient forests, John Clare's beloved fields, and the urban edgelands. Notions of home and belonging, landscapes of loss and absence, birds and the resilience of nature, the psychology of walking, and the psychogeography of liminal places all frame the story.

Approval is a powerful meditation on judgment, the adoption process, and fatherhood, told from a perspective rarely explored in fiction: a man’s response to a couple’s infertility.

Approval follows would-be parents David and Cici through a series of forays into the past as they go through the motions of applying to adopt a child. Their story builds a picture of hope, vulnerability and fear as David is put under intense and intrusive scrutiny during their battle against faceless bureaucracy. From family background and early experiences to adult relationships, he is forced to revisit uncomfortable – sometimes painful – episodes, in the hope of meeting the authority’s requirements. 

Confronting a lonely, difficult and uncertain path to family life, and raising questions about how much intervention and judgement is necessary for the state to ascertain fitness to parent, Approval ultimately invites the reader to decide.

Even in the brick and concrete heart of our cities, nature finds a way. Birds and mammals, insects, plants and trees—they all manage to thrive in the urban jungle, and Bob Gilbert is their champion and their chronicler. He explores the hidden wildlife of the inner city and its edgelands, finding unexpected beauty in the cracks and crannies, and uncovering the deep and essential relationship that exists between people and nature when they are bound together in such close proximity.

Beginning from Poplar, the East End area in which he lives, Bob explores, in particular, our relationship with the trees that have helped shape London; from the original wildwood through to the street trees of today. He draws from history and natural history, poetry and painting, myth and magic, and a great deal of walking, observing and listening. 

Beautifully written, passionate and defiant, Ghost Trees tells the secrets and stories of the urban wildscape, of glorious nature resilient and resurgent on our very doorsteps.

The personal collides with the political in this literary tour-de-force. In the 1950s, an eminent British writer pens a novel questioning the ethics of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but soon he’s trying to outrun his own past.

Hakone, Japan, 2003. An eminent British writer in his 70s, Sir Edward Strathairn, returns to a resort in the Japanese mountains where, in his youth, he spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter.

It was there he wrote his best-selling novel, The Waterwheel, accusing America of being in denial about the horrific aftermath of the Tokyo firebombings and the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

London, England, 1952. A young Edward falls in love with an avant-garde American artist, Macy. After their tumultuous relationship and breakup, he heads for Japan, where he is smitten again as he writes the novel that makes him famous. 

This is as much a thrilling romance as it is a sensitive exploration of blame, power and guilt in postwar America and Japan. With a narrator whose behavior strikes the national conscience as much as his own, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful will stay with readers long after the final page is turned.

This biography with a twist unravels myths and delves into the work of the great author for answers to the question: Who was the real Emily Brontë?

Emily Brontë occupies a special place in the English literary canon. And rightly so: the incomparable Wuthering Heights is a novel that has bewitched us for almost 200 years, and the character of Heathcliff is seen by some as the ultimate romantic hero—and villain. But Emily herself remains an enigmatic figure, often portrayed as awkward, volatile, as a misanthrope, as “no normal being.” That’s the conventional wisdom on Emily as a person, but is it accurate, is it fair?

In this biography with a twist, Claire O’Callaghan conjures a new image of Emily and rehabilitates her reputation by exploring the themes of her life and work—her feminism, her passion for the natural world—as well as the art she has inspired, and even the “fake news” stories about her. What do we really know about her romantic life, for example, or about who and what inspired her characters and stories?

What we discover is that Emily was, in fact, a thoroughly modern woman. So now, two centuries on, it’s time for the real Emily Brontë to step forward.

An authoritative guide to the history, landscape and lore along the scenic English train line between Settle and Carlisle, by an established travel writer and railway aficionado.

Widely known as England's most picturesque line, the enduring Settle-Carlisle Railway crosses the north Pennines between Yorkshire and Cumbria, traversing stunning scenery from the Dales through the lonely and lofty fells to the limestone pavements of Westmorland, and on into the lush, green Eden Valley.

Best First Book of the Year, Scotland's National Book Awards 2021. An entertaining Scottish memoir of rain, biting bugs, and minor humiliations, lightened with music, booze, dry humor and an array of eccentric characters.

R.M. Murray has a story. Quite a few of them. Of seasickness, hangovers, the wrong kind of weather. Of the joy of woe, and disappointments fairy-lit with hope. From fishing in the endless rain on the Isle of Lewis to performing in a punk band with Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi at Glasgow's famous School of Art. A stargazer, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

This is a memoir... of sorts. A join-the-dots journey through a life. A series of vignettes and minor personal fables. If it were a wine it would be very dry with an insolent nose and a desperate finish. Complex but approachable. And affordable.

Birds are beloved for their song and have featured in our own music for centuries. Singing Like Larks opens a rare window onto birdlife, folklore, traditional verse, and song writing, especially in the British Isles.

In this charming volume, folklore, verse, and nature writing combine to explore why birds appear in so many folk songs, with song lyrics, history, and anecdotes drawing on a rich heritage. Ornithological folk songs are themselves something of a threatened species. Melodies lost in the passage of time, their lyrics tucked in archives, our awareness of birds, their song and our own traditions must be passed down from one generation to the next. Lifetimes of wisdom are etched into these songs, preserving the natural rhythms of times past and our connection to feathered friends.

A treasury of bird-related folk songs, this is also an account of one young nature writer’s journey into the world of folk music, and a joyous celebration of song, the seasons, and our love of birds.

A haunting exploration of the Cold War arms race that tells the story of a true, covered-up germ warfare incident in a remote part of Scotland, involving the US, Canadian, and UK governments.

NOMINATED FOR THE 2021 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE

Operation Cauldron, 1952: Top-secret germ warfare experiments on monkeys and guinea pigs are taking place aboard a vessel moored off the Isle of Lewis. Local villagers Jessie and Duncan encounter strange sights on the deserted beach nearby and suspect the worst. And one government scientist wrestles with his own inner anguish over the testing, struggling to navigate the moral arguments for and against such dangerous testing and extreme deterrent weapons. When a noxious cloud of plague bacteria is released into the path of a passing trawler, disaster threatens. Will a deadly pandemic be inevitable?

A haunting exploration of the costs and fallout of warmongering, Donald S Murray follows his prize-winning first novel with an equally moving exploration of another little-known incident in the Outer Hebridean island where he grew up.

“Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from life’s grim moments … this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms.” Publishers Weekly 

Cold Fish Soup is a series of meditations, often humorous, about life and death in a crumbling, forgotten English seaside town, and how people can find sanctuary and curious tales in the most unexpected places.

Before teenager Adam Farrer relocated with his family to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of this isolated, faded seaside town in a down-trodden part of Yorkshire, northern England. The move represented just one thing to him: a chance to leave the insecurities of adolescence behind. He could do that anywhere. But he didn’t anticipate how much he’d grow to love the quirks of the town, nor care about its eroding cliffs and declining high street.

Cold Fish Soup is an affectionate look at a place and its inhabitants—and the ways in which they can shape and influence someone throughout their life. Drawing on his own experience, Adam shares stories from adolescence to adulthood of reinvention, male mental health and suicide, friendship, interdimensional werewolves, burlesque dancing pensioners, and his compulsion toward the sea.

In this personal, insightful, and funny account, Adam explores the power of community and what it means to love and be shaped by a place that is running out of time.

Charlotte Bronte Revisited looks again at Charlotte Brontë's life and work through 21st-century eyes. Discover her private world of convention, rebellion, and imagination, and how they shaped her life, writing, and obsessions—including the paranormal, nature, feminism and politics. 

Everybody knows Charlotte Brontë. World-famous for her novel Jane Eyre, she's a giant of literature and has been written about in reverential tones in scores of textbooks over the years. But what do we really know about Charlotte?

This is a celebration of all things Charlotte Brontë, and emphatically shows why her writing was so far ahead of its time, and is as relevant today as ever.

An unforgettable story of outrunning poverty through the power of stories and imagination.

In a neglected part of town beset with social problems, from unemployment and crime to inequalities of health and education, a twelve-year-old girl sees an opportunity to claim a new identity for herself.

Escaping her chaotic home life, Sherrie-Lee witnesses a bungled bank robbery and manipulates one of the failed robbers into taking her in. Alone and away from home she is free to be whoever she wants, inventing stories and personas to make sense of the seemingly random world she lives in. In her new freedom she finds a mixed sense of possibility and loneliness, along with a growing worry for her younger brother back home. But it’s not long before Sherrie-Lee’s deceits start catching up with her and she’s forced to flee once again.

Fossils expertly captures the powerless half-light of adolescence and the shaky existence of all who are lost.

“Full of memorable images and singing lines of prose.” Sarah Waters on Donald S. Murray's previous work 

From the author of the multi award-winning Scottish bestseller As the Women Lay Dreaming comes the remarkable “unreliable biography” of serial swindler Karl Einarsson.

As a child of the late nineteenth century in the North Atlantic’s windswept, fog-bound Faroe Islands, Karl Einarsson grows up believing he is superior to his peers, destined for a life of art and adventure. As soon as he is old enough, he sets out for Denmark and begins his own reinvention.

Once untethered from his past, Einarsson’s lies begin to spiral. He begins a life of serial scamming, swindling everyone from fishermen to aristocrats. He has set his sights on Atlantis, but when his schemes find him in 1930s Berlin, for the first time Einarsson is forced to reckon with something bigger than himself. As the Nazis rise to power around him, his indifference becomes unwitting complicity, and even betrayal. 

Based on the true story of Karl Einarsson’s life, this is an outlandish tale of island claustrophobia, of those who leave and those who stay behind, and the many dangers of delusions, deceit, and false identities.

Tracing our environmental impact through time, David Howe demonstrates how humanity’s exploitation of Earth’s natural resources has pushed our planet to its limit and asks: What’s next for our depleted planet?

Everything we use started life in the earth, as a rock or a mineral vein, a layer of an ancient seabed, or perhaps the remains of a 400-million-year-old volcano. Humanity's ability to fashion nature to its own ends is by no means a new phenomenon—we have been inventing new ways to help ourselves to its bounty for tens of thousands of years. But today, we mine, quarry, pump, cut, blast, and crush Earth's resources at an unprecedented rate. We have become a dominant, even dangerous, force on the planet.

In Extraction to Extinction, David Howe traces our impact through time to unearth how our obsession with endlessly producing and throwing away more and more stuff could destroy our planet. But is there still time to turn it around? 

A stimulating collection of essays about our environment, nature, and wildlife by world-renowned naturalist and conservationist Roy Dennis.

A new collection of vibrant essays to inform, stimulate and inspire every nature lover.

Times of darkness offer opportunities to reflect. In Mistletoe Winter, Roy Dennis offers his reflections on the natural world from the past year—from the welcome signs of change to the ongoing problems we are posing for nature, and what humankind can and must do about them.

As in his companion volume, Cottongrass Summer, Roy Dennis balances his alarm at the crisis confronting the natural world with his own sense of optimism that new generations can make crucial changes for the future. One of our most prominent advocates for our planet and its species, he writes with insight and originality. This volume will provide inspiration and ideas for everyone who cares about our planet and its species.

Finding herself at a crossroads and in need of a change from her job and domestic responsibilities, Helen Moat set herself the challenge of a lifetime: She got on her bike and embarked on an epic cycle ride across Europe, all the way to Istanbul, accompanied by her eighteen-year-old son.

When Helen Moat sets out to cycle across Europe on her sit-up-and-beg bike—aka "The Tank"—she's not sure whether she is running away from the past or pedaling towards it. As she cycles the Rhine and Danube through the days of unfolding spring, the sky filled with birdsong, she senses her bird-loving father is by her side. Increasingly, she loses herself in her surroundings and memories of a childhood spent in the outdoors of rural Northern Ireland. Gradually, the natural beauty of Europe's great waterways bring healing, as does the kindness of friends and strangers along the way. She feels a sense of belonging on a continent shaped by war and peace, peoples divided and reunited, a shared history.

But when the birdsong fades across the parched, late-summer landscapes of Bulgaria and Turkey, Helen finds herself recalling the Troubles and confronting a suppressed secret. This is her life-affirming account of an unforgettable, if sometimes bumpy, ride.

A collection of vibrant essays on climate change, and conservation to inform, stimulate and call every nature lover to action.

“I can’t think of a more important book that’s been written about British wildlife in the past 20 years ... Roy Dennis [is] the UK’s pre-eminent conservationist of the past half century .." BBC Countryfile Magazine

Through unparalleled expertise as a field naturalist, Roy Dennis is able to write about the natural world in a way that considers both the problems and the progress in ecology and conservation. Beginning with cottongrass, whose snow-white blooms blow gently in the wind across the wetter moors and bogs, this is a year-round trove of insight and knowledge for anyone who cares about the natural world, from birdsong and biodiversity to sphagnum and species reintroduction.

Written by one of the UK's most prominent advocates for rewilding, the essays have a clear message: Never give up on trying to conserve and restore wildlife and the wild places you cherish. It's essential to try and to succeed. And remember, it's never "if," but "when," and with climate chaos closing in, the time is now.