Well, it’s been another year of eye-opening nonfiction and we cannot wait to remind you all about it! From poetry to history, from memoir to essays, chiselling down our staff picks was no easy feat. Have a look at the list below for some reading inspiration.

Jack

Black Punk Now by Chris L. Terry & James Spooner
Literature and Memoirs | Soft Skull Press | 9781593767457 | PB | £17.99 | 31/10/2023

Black Punk Now is an anthology of contemporary nonfiction, fiction, illustrations, and comics that collectively describe punk today and give punks — especially the Black ones — a wider frame of reference. It shows all of the strains, styles, and identities of Black punk that are thriving, and gives newcomers to the scene more chances to see themselves. Curated from the perspective of Black writers with connections to the world of punk, the collection mixes media as well as generations, creating a new reference point for music-lovers, readers, and historians by capturing the present and looking towards the future. With strong visual elements integrated throughout, this smart, intimate collection is demonstrative of punk by being punk itself: underground, rebellious, aesthetic but not static — working to decenter whiteness by prioritizing other perspectives. Includes fiction, non-fiction, comics, transcripts, interviews, and more — something for every kind of reader.

Lovebug by Daisy Lafarge
Literary Essays | Peninsula Press | 9781913512378 | PB | £10.99 | 5/10/2023

In this meditative and inventive essay, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand our intimacy with microbial life.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life. Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis — as well as the raw materials of love and life — Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host. Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Writing the Future by Dan Coxon & Richard Hirst
Literary Criticism | Dead Ink | 9781915368027 | PB | £9.99 | 7/9/2023

Science fiction was a defining genre of the postwar era, and its current boom across books, film and TV shows no sign of slowing. Space ships, time travel, aliens and artificial intelligence continue to obsess us, and dreams of the apocalypse haunt our own post-pandemic age. But what is it that compels writers to imagine the future? Writing the Future gathers some of the best contemporary writers of science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia and eco-fiction to explain their craft and explore the many worlds upon which our imaginations might land. Authors such as Toby Litt, Nina Allan, Adam Roberts and Una McCormack reveal how to balance scientific research with creative freedom, examine the different forms the written text might evolve into, and offer practical advice on giving life to your own vision of the future. Whether you’re a reader, a seasoned writer looking to hone your skills, or a beginner who’s just starting out, Writing the Future provides valuable insights into the craft of imagining the worlds of tomorrow.

Julia

Ribwort by Hanna Komar
Poetry | 3TimesRebel Press | 9781739128784 | PB | £12.99 | 17/8/2023

Ribwort is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it’s not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. This is what keeps us going.

In the summer of 2021, these poems were considered protest poems and deemed unpublishable in Belarus. Independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian were being suspended and writers were being persecuted, when people stood up against the falsified election results on 9 August 2020 and the violence which followed afterwards. Every day, still, dozens of people are arrested in Belarus on political grounds. Some call that summer the awakening of Belarusians; others call it the birth of a new, free Belarus. No matter what it’s called, these years have felt for the nation, and for the author of this poems, like unlearning what was already learnt helplessness. Yet these have also been maturing years through courage, solidarity, hope, pain, suffering, and disillusionment. A lot of wounds have opened.

This book doesn’t start with the protest poems of 2020. It consists of sections which tell about the poet’s relationship with her parents and with herself, about her romantic relationships, about her relationship with her homeland, and the poetry of civil resistance. Each of them is administering a leaf of ribwort to help the wounds heal.

Charleston: Race, Water & The Coming Storm by Susan Crawford
Environmental & Green Studies | The Indigo Press | 9781911648543 | PB | £13.99 | 24/8/2023

Unknown to the happy, mostly white visitors who hop from one restaurant to another on the charming streets of the Charleston peninsula, or to readers of the glossy magazines in which the city is named a top destination year after year, rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storms are mere years away from rendering the city uninhabitable. If this precarity is hidden, it is because the city and the state have a strong interest in keeping up appearances. And because the city’s Black and lower-income residents will bear the brunt of the storm. Susan Crawford shows how the city must quickly reimagine its future before rising waters stymie its ability to act at all. Along the way, its inhabitants will need to confront and right historic wrongs. This evocative and profoundly important book crystallises human tendencies to value profit and property above all else, and explains that Charleston, like scores of other global coastal cities, urgently needs to chart a new future for its citizens in the light of the changes ahead.

One Fine Day: A Journey Through English Time by Ian Marchant
History | September Publishing | 9781912836994 | HB | £20 | 6/4/2023

From one of the great chroniclers of our times and our land comes a career-defining book. This is the story of Ian Marchant’s great (x7) grandfather, Thomas Marchant who left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. Life-loving Thomas — who liked a drink and game of cards — feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. Thomas wrote about his family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud, and about the making and drinking of cider. But, as Ian discovers, he was also a Fifteener, a Jacobite sympathiser determined to bring down the monarchy. Ian Marchant tells the story of uncovering a new relative and digs deep into the daily life and political concerns of the 1720s. By exploring the Marchant family’s journey — and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent and illness ridden) became the England of 2021, Marchant discovers just how much we have to learn from our ancestors. By turns funny, lyrical, moving and illuminating, this is a conversation with the dead to find what is still alive. A conversation between a world that stood on the brink of industrialisation and a world that is now exhausted by it.

Sinéad

Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan
Poetry | Banshee Press | 9781838312695 | PB | £8.99 | 8/6/2023

Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan’s Let The Dead concerns itself with life’s alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet’s adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of ‘delicate anthers’ and ‘disembodied tongues’. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence. Brennan draws on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial pasts to create a pertinent and elegant poetic narrative on history.

Before We Go Live: Navigating the Abusive World of Online Entertainment
by Stephen Flavall
Biography | Spender Books | 9781739285906 | PB | £10.99 | 29/6/2023

Streaming video games is now a billion-dollar industry. In 2022, Twitch alone has over 140 million active monthly users, with top players earning millions each year. But success breeds envy, and when big money’s being made, everyone wants a piece. In Before We Go Live, professional streamer Stephen Flavall, aka ‘jorbs’, invites the reader behind the scenes of this new frontier. From the boardrooms of LA to doctors’ offices in the Midwest, dealing with trolls and stalkers to mingling with crypto scammers and ruthless opportunists, Before We Go Live is both a true story about the dark realities of streaming and the tale of a deep and enduring friendship. It’s about what happens when real life intersects with entertainment, and learning to act with kindness and humour in an online world full of prejudice and abuse.

Tender Maps: Travels in Search of the Emotion of Place by Alice Maddicott
Literature and Memoirs | September Publishing | 9781914613326 | HB | £19.99 | 6/7/2023

Tender Maps is an attempt to define the indefinable, and an exploration of why it is so crucial that we try. From the bluebell woods of Somerset to the freeways of LA, from Istanbul to Nashville, Tbilisi to Venice, Alice Maddicott has journeyed restlessly in search of the thing that meant the most to her: the feeling of a place. But this is more than a travelogue — it’s also a journey of ideas about our experience of place, which encompasses early mapmaking , radical land art, Celtic Christianity, Situationism, children’s literature, and much more. Throughout this exploration is threaded the concept of tender mapping starting with 17th century maps of tenderness and later introducing the embroidered maps made by young girls in the 18th century, Tender Maps navigates the different ways that women and girls locate their emotional experiences of moving through their world. Tender Maps also has a strand of personal memoir; a search for a home. The book culminates in a manifesto on the power of being in place; of recognising the sentience of places, and entering into a dialogue with our cities. A collaboration with the land. Of seeing atmosphere the emotion of place as something political and vital, not a passive, negligible background to our activities. How we can all make tender maps, and in so doing we open up the world.

Em

Julian by Fleur Pierets, translated by Elizabeth Kahn
Literature and Memoirs | 3TimesRebel Press | 9781739452841 | PB | £12.99 | 14/9/2023

Belgian artist Fleur Pierets wanted to marry her partner Julian in all countries where two women are allowed to marry. The aim was to raise awareness of equal marriage rights in a positive way. But the ‘world tour of love’ was interrupted: after her fourth marriage, in Paris, Julian was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. She died two months later. Pierets had only one thing left to do: write. This book is divided into three sections: Before, During and After. The first part tells the story of how Julian and Fleur Pierets met, delves into their careers before they fell in love and gives context to their intense relationship and collaboration. The second part is literally the heart of the memoir. It’s a celebration of love, freedom, progress and, above all, the power of their commitment. It is about their magazine Et Alors? and their famous Project 22: to get married in every country where same-sex marriage was legal. They got married in New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Antwerp, while raising awareness of same-sex relationships. The third and final part is about Julian’s illness and eventual death. There’s also lightness, hope and, above all, the realisation that true love does exist. Julian explores themes of love, commitment, activism, loss and grief. It’s a testament to the power of love in the face of illness and hatred. Pieret’s writing is deceptively simple, very essay-like, yet full of heart.

Bleed: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care by Tracey Lindeman
Health & Counselling | ECW Press | 9781770416536 | PB | £18.99 | 20/4/2023

Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That feeling better just takes yoga, CBD oil, and the blood of a unicorn on a full moon? That’s the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. This disease affecting one in ten cis women and uncounted numbers of others is chronically overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood — and improperly treated across the medical system. Discrimination and medical gaslighting are rife in endo care, often leaving patients worse off than when they arrived. Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of Bleed — part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, Bleed tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalising women. Using an intersectional lens, Bleed dives into how the system perpetuates misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other prejudices to this day. Bleed isn’t a self-help book. It’s an evidence file and an eye-opening, enraging read. It will validate those who have been gaslit, mistreated, or ignored by medicine and spur readers to fight for nothing short of revolution.

Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home by Penny Johnson
& Raja Shehadeh
History | Olive Branch Press | 9781623717469 | PB | £16.99 | 11/7/2023

How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers — essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists — respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions — poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political — make for an offering that is remarkable for the candour and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine.