Spring 2024 Preview
Posted 17th October 2023
JANUARY
In Italy: Venice, Rome and Beyond by Cynthia Zarin | Non-Fiction| £6.99 | 18 January 2024
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on four Italian spaces. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, the Basilica and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life for the reader.
‘In Cynthia Zarin’s stunningly lyrical book, Rome and Venice are mirrors that say: Time is irrelevant here.’ André Aciman
FEBRUARY
Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin |Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins| Fiction | £9.99 | 8 February 2024
Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of art college in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar. Set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean, Vladivostok Circus explores collaboration, creativity and belonging, all the while immersing the reader in Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.
‘Fragmentation, recurring imagery and a flair for evoking atmosphere so effective that lassitude seems to seep through the pages recalls Deborah Levy’s writing.’ Guardian
Poverty Creek Journal: On Life and Running by Thomas Gardner | Non-Fiction | £9.99 | 29 February 2024
Over the course of one year, Thomas Gardner records his runs. Fifty-two entries, none exceeding a paragraph. Each run is simultaneously captured in its precise moment and opened up to something timeless and limitless. A singular and remarkable work, a miniature marvel of nature writing, philosophy and poetry.
‘[It] makes something lovely and meaningful of a difficult year.’ New Yorker
MARCH
The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig | Translated by Julia Sanches | With an introduction by Wendy Erskine | Fiction – Modern Classics | £10.99 | 14 March 2024
Spring, 1974. After twelve years abroad, Natàlia Miralpeix returns to Barcelona and her family. Change is in the air: revolution sexual, political and artistic is simmering. Franco may still be in power, but his death is only two years away. The younger generation write poetry, listen to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and talk of a freer future. The older generation, though, carry the hidden wounds of the Civil War, their divided loyalties, and their own thwarted dreams, rebellions and desires.
A classic in Spain, never translated into English before, and Montserrat Roig’s most beloved work.
‘A shining light of Catalan literature.’ Colm Tóibín
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel | Fiction | £9.99 | 28 March 2024
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the girls’ lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates.
‘A knockout, a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers. I’ve never read a book like this, that captures girlhood and life itself in the fleeting moments that make us.’ Rachel Khong
APRIL
By the River: Essays from the Water’s Edge | Various Contributors| Non-Fiction | £9.99 | 11 April 2024
Building on the success of our Pond, Kitchen, Garden and Dog anthologies, comes an evocative collection to escape into nature through literature.
Twelve writers consider the subject of rivers and how they shape us throughout our lives, demarcating cities as well as moulding our creative consciousness. Tessa Hadley revisits Rumer Godden’s The River; Jo Hamya pays homage to Virginia Woolf; Michael Malay goes nightfishing for eels by the river Severn; and Marchelle Farrell revisits the tropical waterfalls of her childhood home in Trinidad.
By the River explores the cultural, social and psychological significance of the rivers that run through our societies and our minds, bringing together these twelve contemporary writers in a celebration of water and its transformative qualities.
Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury | Fiction | £9.99 | 25 April 2024
In prose rich with allusions to Carson McCullers, Jan Morris and Patti Smith, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a compassionate, gripping and emotionally charged narrative. In focusing on the pre-transition subject, Griffin Hansbury explores the dangerous forces they often must escape to survive.
‘Filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture.’ Michelle Tea
MAY
Belly Up: Stories by Rita Bullwinkel | Fiction | £9.99 | 9 May 2024
A story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they’ve been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.
‘Creepy, deadpan debut . . . full of squirmy pleasures.’ Kristen Roupenian
Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg |Translated by Beryl Stockman | Fiction – Modern Classics | £9.99 | 30 May 2024
Set in the 1970s, these novellas feel like a departure from Ginzburg’s portrayal of post-war Italy as they grapple with the domestic pressures of a country’s loosening of social rules. Underneath a subtle, stripped-down prose and a rich cast of characters, runs a seam of unhappiness and isolation, as Natalia Ginzburg explores the allure of memories and the complexity of family and relationships.
‘These two novellas are suffused with the rigorous wisdom Ginzburg earned through calamity and her determination to persist nonetheless in her work.’ Los Angeles Review of Books
JUNE
hungry for what: stories by María Bastarós| Translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn | Fiction | £9.99 | 13 June 2024
An exceptional collection of feminist, darkly comic short stories, from a voice new to the English language. Mostly set in marginalised urban spaces and foregrounding the voices and experiences of women and girls, hungry for what focuses on the terror and claustrophobia of normality, prising back its veneer of respectability to reveal the hostility and danger seething beneath.
‘A Molotov cocktail made into a choral and feminist novel, mocking and poetic.’ Andrea Núñez, Literaturbia
Who’s There? Travels in Time and Place by Simon Loftus | Non-Fiction | £9.99 | 27 June
Simon Loftus’s explorations begin with a performance of Hamlet off the coast of Africa, in 1607, and each of the stories that follow echoes and reflects the opening words of that play, ‘Who’s there?’. They encompass the strange foundations of probability theory, the forthright epitaphs of Suffolk gravestones, the pursuit of wine, dusk on the beach of Essaouira, the simit vendors of Istanbul, an elegy for Palmyra. And much more.
Vividly evocative, this collection is a coda to Simon’s acclaimed Pike in the Basement.