Our Current Bestsellers
Selected by the Bookshop
From the publisher:
Translated by Barbara J. HavelandLonglisted for the International Booker Prize 2025The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.'A total explosion.' Nicole…
From the publisher:
Translated by John HoweBy walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an…
From the publisher:
This collection, selected by Seamus Perry from Everett’s many pieces for the LRB, includes several essays on Shakespeare, as well as on Jane Austen, Henry James, Keats, Pope, Larkin, Kipling and Barbara Pym. Everett defines no…
From the publisher:
Sometimes it’s very uplifting to feel one’s fleshy boundaries dissolve. To not know where one ends and the world begins. To feel someone's breast is your breast too. Total immersion can be very transporting indeed.‘I think…
Recommended by Rachael
‘O Caledonia!’s Janet is a classic comic heroine, in that she is also a classic tragic heroine: lonely, unloved, overlooked, and yet somehow staunchly herself throughout. And who that self is is truly splendid: imaginative, spiky, bookish, fiercely intelligent, and completely socially unaware. Her family despise her – her mother Vera finds even the sight of Janet reading ‘peculiarly irritating’. Her schoolmates make use of her intelligence to cheat on their homework and laugh at her ‘exaggerated stories of her incompetence in every aspect of the day's routine, and the dire consequences it provoked’, while also preferring to avoid spending any actual time with her. We know from the start how Janet will end the novel – dead in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted on the stone staircase in the dilapidated castle in which her family live and run a boarding school – and by the end we’ll know how and why she got there, but all the real fun is in the journey the novel takes us on through 'l’étouffoir familial', the family suffocation chamber (Proust by way of Janet).’
From the publisher:
Translated by Sophie Hughes With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of…
From the publisher:
A short story by Laura Beatty about death – and life. After a stranger calls at Evi’s house, she becomes convinced she has been visited by Death. But what is really happening?Poetic, moving and often funny, Laura’s…
From the publisher:
Part of the beauty of the art of cooking is that it involves transience, making something delightful that then vanishes, and that in turn involves cherishing the time we spend on perfecting a dish. Cooking yourself something delicious is…
From the publisher:
How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest…Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild…
From the publisher:
Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites,…
Latest booklists
Latest booklists
