Eileen Myles reads from their first collection of poetry since 2018’s Evolution. The poems in a “Working Life” evoke the joy and unease in the quotidian, moving ‘with call and response between perception and thought’, as Camille Roy writes in Brooklyn Rail magazine. Myles is in conversation with journalist and activist Amelia Abraham, whose Queer I…

Isabelle Baafi, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for her pamphlet Ripe, constructs her debut collection Chaotic Good (Faber) around the story of an escape from a toxic marriage. ‘Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance,’ writes poet Will Harris. ‘Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that – with each turn of the cha…

In Poor Artists (Particular Books) Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente (AKA The White Pube), explore the bizarre world of contemporary art through their protagonist Quest Talukdar. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true…

The Third Realm is the next instalment of the series Karl Ove Knausgaard began with The Morning Star and continued in The Wolves of Eternity; like its two precursors, it is a breathtaking exploration of ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, ‘re-enchanting the cosmos with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it’ (in the words …

‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is’, writes Andrew O’Hagan of Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today…

In Black Meme (Verso) Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understand…

In his memoir Sonic Life (Faber), Thurston Moore recounts a life that has been defined by music. Following a childhood rock ’n’ roll epiphany in the early 1960s, his infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave led him to move to New York City, where he immersed himself in the underground music and art scenes. In 1981 he co-found…

Described by Mick Herron as ‘seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall’, Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake (Cape) reaffirms her position as one of America’s most exciting and accomplished writers of fiction. In a reimagining of the spy novel for an age of ecological crisis, Kushner leads us to a remote Neanderthal cave in rural France…

In ‘a wonderful book about looking and learning’ (Gavin Francis) retired GP Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger’s work and friendship had on her working life as a doctor in a deprived London borough. Five decades of engagement with Berger’s work and twenty years of friendship with the man himself made her, she is convinced, a better …

Taking us from the awkwardness of middle school to the transcendence of a sex club, SLUTS: Anthology (Cipher Press) presents a diverse collection of writing – fiction and non-fiction, pro and con, philosophical and compulsive – exploring the eternally controversial word. Whether an insult or badge of honour, an identity or a state of mind, SLUTS en…

If Only – first published in Norway in 2001, and now brought into English by Charlotte Barslund – is viewed in Norway as Vigdis Hjorth’s masterpiece, a story of the devastation wreaked on one woman’s life by an ill-advised affair. Hjorth (whose other novels in English include Is Mother Dead?, Will and Testament and Long Live the Post Horn!) is in c…

In Mother State (Allen Lane), Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mot…

Best known for her novels – most recently, 2021’s The Fell – now Sarah Moss has turned her hand to life-writing. My Good Bright Wolf unflinchingly details her experience of girlhood and anorexia in prose described by Jan Carson as ‘part memoir, part confessional, part dark and feverish fairytale’. Moss was in conversation with Octavia Bright, autho…

Why be a slug? Slugs: A Manifesto (Makina Books) explores a creature that survives by being disgusting. Weaving together manifesto, memoir and poetic language, artist Abi Palmer considers the politics of space, iridescent queerness, and shapeshifting viscous ‘slug time’. In the face of a potential apocalypse, Slugs: A Manifesto envisions a future w…

In her first novel Hagstone (Fourth Estate), Sinéad Gleeson – who has, in the words of Anne Enright, ‘changed the Irish literary landscape through her advocacy for the female voice’ – explores the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world in the setting of a remote island housing a commune of women seeking refuge …

In Catherine Lacey’s dystopian thriller, recently published in paperback by Granta, CM Lucca, widow of a recently deceased avant-garde artist, sets out to write a biography of the woman she idolised. Her quest leads her, through a maze of pseudonyms, half-truths and outright fabrications, on a journey into the Southern Territory, a fascist theocrac…

Palestinian writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press) has been hailed as ‘already a masterpiece’ (Slavoj Žižek), ‘a filthy, elegant book’ (Raven Leilani) and ‘bonkers’ (Elif Batuman). A young Palestinian woman, wealthy but stateless and with no access to her wealth, finds her life and sense of self unravelling as sh…

‘There are very few writers with as clear and thrilling a love for the stuff of language as Eley Williams’, writes Jon McGregor. Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good revels in the same inventiveness and experimentation that made her debut collection of short stories, Attrib. and Other Stories, so beloved; courtroom artists, childhood crushes, schola…

Published to coincide with the poet’s 85th birthday, Ash Keys (Jonathan Cape) presents a new selection of Longley’s finest works. Born in Belfast in 1939, his verse inhabits the landscapes Ireland’s west, at the same time occupying a space within a distinctly European tradition, ranging freely across the continent's histories, tragedies and triumph…

Strange Relations (Sceptre) explores the crisis in mid-century masculinity through the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. The nonfiction debut of Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Ralf Webb, it considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever and James Baldwi…

Juliet Jacques is one of the most electrifying short fiction writers working in the UK today; The Woman in the Portrait (Cipher) collects her published and unpublished fiction, work which Agata Pyzik has described as a ‘large canvas on which the pattern for a utopian socialist queer life might be inscribed’. Jacques was joined in conversation by th…

Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece of exile and homecoming, Return to my Native Land – beautifully translated by John Berger – is now a Penguin Classic. To celebrate, Jason Allen-Paisant (who has written the introduction for the new edition) and Colin Grant discuss the poem. Allen-Paisant’s most recent poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet)…

In her first novel The Last Sane Woman (Verso) poet Hannah Regel investigates the pains and pleasures of artistic practice carried out against the odds. While researching in a small archive dedicated to women’s art young graduate Nicola Long happens upon one half of a correspondence, conducted half a century before, written by a recently graduated …

Poets Ella Frears and Will Burns were at the shop to read from and talk about their new collections. Ella’s Goodlord, from Rough Trade Books, takes the form of a long, lyrical email to an estate agent, interrogating our obsession with ‘property’ with Frears’ characteristic humour and sharpness, while Will’s Natural Burial Ground (Corsair) is the se…

In her latest semi-autobiographical novel Playboy (Tuskar Rock, translated by Holly James), leading French writer Constance Debré describes how a woman, at the age of 43, abandons her apartment, her marriage and her successful legal career to lead a new life as an out lesbian and a writer. In a series of short, sharp vignettes the narrator describe…