Evocation: Book I in The Summoner’s Circle

S.T. Gibson     Recommended by Staff    

The Devil knows your name, David Aristarkhov.

As a teen, David Aristarkhov was a psychic prodigy, operating under the shadow of his oppressive occultist father. Now, years after his father’s death and rapidly approaching his thirtieth birthday, he is content with the high-powered life he’s curated as a Boston attorney, moonlighting as a powerful medium for his secret society.

But with power comes a price, and the Devil has come to collect on an ancestral deal. David’s days are numbered, and death looms at his door.

Reluctantly, he reaches out to the only person he’s ever trusted, his ex-boyfriend and secret Society rival Rhys, for help. However, the only way to get to Rhys is through his wife, Moira. Thrust into each other’s care, emotions once buried deep resurface, and the trio race to figure out their feelings for one another before the Devil steals David away for good…

The first book in a spellbinding and vibrant new series from The Sunday Times bestselling author of A Dowry of Blood.

Imperial Harvest

Bruce Pascoe     Recommended by Staff    

Imperial Harvest is a timely book that speaks to the universal lessons of war. It addresses pertinent themes of dispossession by tracing imperialist tactics all the way back to the rise of the Khan empire in the 13th century.


Yen Se has lost everything to the Khan’s brutality.

Left with one eye and one leg, he is forced out of his home village to work in the city as a horse handler. Witness to the Khan’s violent crusade, their raids sweeping across Eurasia, he travels with the theatre of war, but exists outside of it; stunned every morning to find himself alive.

Yen Se moves randomly across Europe with a loose band of survivors – men who think of survival, men who think of resistance, and women who dare to dream of peace.

Whilst narrated by a male, women are at the forefront of this story; often the most active of the characters, both for their plight and for their guidance.

Imperial Harvest tells the story of war, but more importantly, of hope.

Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told From the Edges

Lewis Baston     Recommended by Staff    

‘Thrillingly unique, knowledgeable, perceptive and profound’ IAN DUNT

‘A light-footed journey along the fault lines of history.’ KATJA HOYER

The history of Europe told through twenty-nine key borders that define the past, present and future of our continent


Europe’s internal borders have rarely been ‘natural’; they have more often been created by accident or force.

In Borderlines, political historian Lewis Baston journeys along twenty-nine key borders from west to east Europe, examining how the map of our continent has been redrawn over the last century, with varying degrees of success. The fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but today’s map of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945.

To journey to the centre of the story of Europe, Baston takes us to its edges, bringing to life the fascinating and often bizarre histories of these border zones. We visit Baarle, the town broken into thirty fragments by the Netherland-Belgium border, and stop in Ostritz, the eastern German town where Nazis held a rock festival. We meander the back lanes of rural Ireland, and soak up the atmosphere in the coffee houses of the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Through these borderlands, Baston explores how places and people heal from the scars left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences, and he searches for a better European future – finding it in unexpected places.

Cuckoo

Gretchen Felker-Martin     Recommended by Staff    

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers meets Tell Me I’m Worthless in this relentless and visceral horror about a group of queer kids trying to survive the conversion camp from hell, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Manhunt.

Camp Resolution, surrounded by hundreds of miles of Utah desert. A place to help boys and girls stay on the straight and narrow, where they can learn the value of a hard day’s work, get a decent education and where indiscretions can be beaten out of them on a whim.

For Shelby, a young trans woman struggling to find her place in the world, Camp Resolution represents everything she has spent her life trying to escape. But Camp Resolution is not all it seems. The lessons they are all taught make no sense, and the counsellors act odd, even for camp counsellors. At night, Shelby can hear a voice speaking to her over the mountains, and soon, the residents of the camp discover its terrible secret.

To stay alive and escape, the residents of the camp must learn to trust one another – but that is a difficult thing when there are cuckoos in the nest, hungry and out for blood.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

Various     Recommended by Staff    

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka – published to commemorate the centenary of his death

*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily MailNew StatesmanEsquire and the New European*

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

Psykhe

Kate Forsyth     Recommended by Staff    

Kate Forsyth gives voice, power and agency to Psykhe telling this much loved myth from the perspective of the woman at its centre.


It is not wise to anger the gods … or to fall in love with one.

Psykhe has always been different. Fair as Venus, the goddess of love, and with the hard-won ability to save the lives of those of mortal blood, she is both shunned and revered.

When she unwittingly provokes Venus, she and her sisters lose everything. Psykhe must find a way to make amends and support her family.

Befriended by an old woman, Nokturna, Psykhe finds herself irresistibly drawn to her young friend, Ambrose. But neither is what they seem.

For Psykhe has fallen in love with a man whose face she is forbidden to see. After disobeying this injunction, she must risk everything to try to save him, even if it means travelling down to the shadowy Underworld to face Proserpina, queen of the dead.

The way to the realm of the dead is easy. A thrust of a sword, a sudden fall, a careless bite of toadstool, and the soul is sucked away. It is the return journey that is difficult ….

The story of Psyche and Eros has been told for more than two-and-a-half thousand years. Kate Forsyth infuses it with new vigour as a life-affirming celebration of female strength, sexual desire, and empowerment.

Her Side of the Story

Alba de Cespedes     Recommended by Staff    

Looking back over her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in 1930s Rome. A sensitive child, she was always alert to the loneliness and dissatisfaction of her mother and the other women in their crowded apartment block. Observing how their lives were weighed down by housework and the longing for romance, she became determined to seek another future for herself. This conviction will lead her to rebel against the expectations of her family, rail against the unjust treatment of women and seek to build a life with an anti-fascist professor. As her independence grows, so too does resistance against it – even from those closest to her.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the partisan struggle in the Second World War, Her Side of the Story is a profound, devastating story of one woman’s determination to carve her own path.

 A captivating feminist classic about a woman’s struggle for independence in fascist Italy, from the author of Forbidden Notebook – with an afterword by Elena Ferrante.

 ‘Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere…’

Annie Ernaux

Night Watch

Jayne Anne Phillips     Recommended by Staff    

THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER IN FICTION

‘Breathtaking in both its scope and intensity’ TAYARI JONES

‘Shatteringly particular and audaciously universal’ ALICE RANDALL

A mesmerising story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in a mental asylum in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.


In 1874, in the wake of the war, trauma haunts civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year, arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. There, far from family, a beloved neighbour, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The twin horrors of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their history: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the war and never returned. Meanwhile in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility – the mystery behind the man they call the Night Watch; the child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Epic, enthralling and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.

Kindling: Stories

Kathleen Jennings     Recommended by Staff    

A fabulous debut of folk tales and fantasies by an award winning author and illustrator.

Small fires start in the hearts of Kathleen Jennings’s characters and irresistibly spread to those around them. Journeys are taken, debts repaid, disguises put on, and lessons offered – although not often learned – in these fantastic tales. Jennings’ confident voice lulls readers into stepping off the known paths to find Undine Love; The Heart of Owl Abbas;, and further unexpected places and people.

The Case for Open Borders

John Washington     Recommended by Staff    

A beautifully-written, broadly accessible, and forthright argument for a solution to the migration crisis: open the gates.

Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential – as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend – turning our thresholds into barricades.

Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration’s economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities.

This book grounds its argument in the experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis, spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, through detailed reporting, journalist and translator John Washington profiles a character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open borders.

In recent years, important thinkers have begun to urge a profoundly different approach to migration, but no book has made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington’s case shines with the multitudinous voices of people on the move, a portrait in miniature of what a world with open borders will give to our common future.

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