Thanks to our publishers, we haven’t just been blessed with a bump of spring weather this month, we’ve also enjoyed a wave of incredible new books hitting the shelves! Today we’re diving into the non-fiction highlights that came out this month, from guides to life, to punk diaries. With these books, we hope you’ll gather knowledge, encounter new and challenging ideas, and find yourself looking to a more hopeful future.

Starting off with something small but mighty, this month Hoxton Mini Press launched their brand new “pocket primer” series, each written by experts in niche topics you’ve always longed to understand better. They’re highly visual and break down these potentially heavy subjects into more digestible chunks. The first books of the series include Fake News by tech writer Chris Stokel-Walker, and Psychedelics by Mattha Busby. Each one is well researched and written to help open your mind to new big ideas.

Psilocybin. LSD. Ketamine. MDMA. These are the drugs that will change mental health treatment forever. We’re on the cusp of a psychedelic revolution. But how did we get here?

This book traces the evolution of fake news through rumour, conspiracy and misinformation, from Ancient Greece to Donald Trump and then beyond, asking the question: how do we make sense of a post-truth world.

Departing from fake news and psilocybin — let’s talk about ghosts! Thirty years after Derrida’s Spectre of Marx, and just over a decade since Fisher’s cult classic Ghosts of My Life, the concept of Hauntology clings to our present-day cultural landscape like… well, a ghost! In this new application of the concept, William Burns dives into the hauntology of modern horror culture, especially the classic genres of Folk Horror and found footage films.

From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? An exciting read for both horror and cultural philosophy fans, Ghost of an Idea reinvigorates the field of hauntology for the present day.

” As long as I walk every step, everything else I do to stay alive and keep on walking is good enough”.

At 31-years-old, Ursula found herself faced with the life changing diagnosis of Stage 1A Ovarian cancer. Her reaction? Walking for seventeen months across all of Wales. The result was her bestselling memoir, One Woman Walks Wales. Where do you go from walking the whole of Wales? Walking the whole of Europe, of course. Covering an epic 5500 miles over two years, Ursula starts her journey in Kyiv, gets stranded in France during Covid, and finally making it home to Wales. In this second book, Ursula continues to capture the incredible network of people, places and natural landscapes that she encounters. This is the astounding story of a truly remarkable woman.

You don’t need me to tell you that we could all afford to be a lot more sustainable in our lives — just looking at the price of eggs or looking at the news will tell you that. In Your Cozy Life, Raleigh Briggs sets out to help you remedy this, by consuming less and caring for your home in more sustainable ways. This charmingly handwritten and hand-drawn book is full of tutorials to guide you through gardening, food preservation, mending clothes, home repairs, and more. Briggs’ other guides include Fix Your Clothes, Make it Last, and Make Your Place.

Lately it feels like we’re all trying to make sense of the world we find ourselves living in today. ‘The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born,’ wrote the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci at the end of World War I. ‘Now is the time of monsters.’ A witness to the rise of fascism in Italy, Gramsci understood transitions can be dangerous. The world today is at a similar inflection point. This timely book, by two eminent strategic forecasters, Mathew Burrows and Josef Braml, illuminates where the West and the world are headed in the wake of the November election. Not since the end of the Cold War has there been so much pessimism in the West and uncertainty about the future, but with some guiding insights and a call to action we can start to make more sense of it, together.

The term “ally” is thrown around a lot, but increasingly people are questioning what it truly means to be an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community? NV Gay’s The Queer Allies Bible sets out to answer this question. A necessary book in the present climate, this is a multi-generational resource designed to educate people to be inclusive, accepting, and affirming LGBTQIA+ allies.

The year is 1977, and 17-year-old Angela Jaeger is about to fall down the frenetic rabbit hole of the New York punk scene. Starting in the East Village, and travelling across oceans, stages and bars, I Feel Famous is a brilliant scrap book of Jaeger’s life. Each page explodes with her art, photographs and adventures with the likes of Billy Idol, Sid Vicious and Lydia Lunch. Creative, funny and endlessly cool, the result is an unprecedented perspective into an ever-popular moment in contemporary cultural history.

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that ‘teach us about the privilege that is breathing.’ In this compassionate new memoir, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during covid, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother.