We love getting new books. Who doesn't? Here are some new-in highlights...
We choose our stock carefully, based on our own reading, recommendations from customers and research into trusted sources (why does that sound so enigmatic?) The aim of the game is to make our selection as diverse and eye-opening as possible. We believe in the power of literature to launch cultural and political conversations. We also think it's important just to have a nice read now and again.
If you ever spot a gap on our shelves, please don't hesitate to get in touch and recommend whatever you think is missing! Try as we might, we can sadly only read a fraction of our bookshelves between us.
This batch includes a Pulitzer Prize winner; Austrian, South Korean, Moroccan and Senegalese writers; fiction, non-fiction and a mish-mash of the two; something for everyone.
The White Book - Han Kang
Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, explores grief and tragedy in an introspective but always frank way. Through meditations on the colour white - the white of breast milk, of snow, of the blank page - she writes what ultimately becomes a letter to her older sister, who died in her mother’s arms just two hours after being born.
Men and Apparitions - Lynne Tillman
From Lynne Tillman, the author of this month’s book club (Weird Fucks), Men and Apparitions centres around 38-year-old academic Zeke, whose academic gender studies lead him to a new research topic: himself. He represents the ‘New Man’, who has metamorphosised out of feminist thought and in contrast to old models of masculinity. But what does the New Man look like? How do others perceive him and how does he perceive himself?
"One of the best books written in our time" - Knausgaard
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke
Winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, Peter Handke is one of the most influential and original German-language writers alive today. In this semi-autobiographical novella, published in 1972), Handke writes about his mother’s life and her death by suicide in 1971, at the age of 51. Political, personal and deeply moving, Knausgaard describes this memoir as “One of the best and most important books written in German in our time”.
Brotherhood - Mohammed Mbougar Sarr
Brotherhood takes place in the imaginary town of Kalep, where a fundamentalist Islamist government has spread its brutal authority. In this analysis of tyranny and brutality, Senegalese writer Mohammed Mbougar Sarr explores the ways in which resistance and heroism can often give way to cowardice, all while giving voice to the moral ambiguities and personal struggles involved in each of his characters’ search to impose the values they hold most dear.
When it was first published this work sparked fierce debate across Morocco
Sex and Lies - Leïla Slimani
Slimani’s first work of non-fiction: a collection of essays telling the stories of young Moroccan women who are grappling with a conservative Arab culture that at once condemns and commodifies sex. When first published in 2017 in French this work caused outcry and sparked fierce debate across the Kingdom of Morocco.
The Netanyahus - Joshua Cohen
A portrait of the Israeli prime minister’s father, The Netanyahus riffs freely on a true story, freely mixing fiction and non-fiction - part campus novel, part lecture. Identity and politics are treated with humour in this Pulitzer Prize-winning work.