London Writers Awards

Maddy (she/they) is a writer and producer from Brighton, based in South London. Her plays have been performed at the Roundhouse, Vault Festival and Norwich Theatre Stage 2. They have a First-Class degree in Scriptwriting and Performance from the University of East Anglia and was shortlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting. In 2024 she received a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to transition from playwriting to prose, receiving mentorship from Saba Sams. Maddy is interested in telling stories about love, friendship, queerness and money and is inspired by the likes of Miranda July, Sayaka Murata and Sheena Patel.  

Lishani Ramanayake is a Sri Lankan writer who has previously lived in Singapore and now lives in London. Her writing has previously been published in Wasafiri, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, CULTURED and Porter House Review. She has been awarded the Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award, shortlisted for the ALCS-Tom Gallon Trust Award, the Porter House Review Editors Prize and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Her work asks questions about gender, displacement and inherited trauma: where did we come from; what did we carry with us; where do we go from here? 

Laila Obeidat is a Jordanian-Palestinian writer and poet based in London. She studied Comparative Literature at UCL and has worked in digital marketing. Her writing plays with the limitations of narrative and seeks to address its insufficiency in the face of ongoing violence, foregrounding questions on identity and voices in the saturated world of social media. When prompted by odd situations, Laila also writes short fiction about the strange dimensions of being human. She enjoys exploring hybridity in language, contrasting form, and finding humour in the not-funny-at-all.  

Meher Iqbal is a South Asian Muslim writer, born and raised in London. Her writing focuses on family, relationships and mental health through a third culture lens. She is particularly interested in memory: what we retain, the stories we tell ourselves to maintain our worldview, and what it takes to disturb those. She is currently working on her first short story collection and aspires to write a novel next. She was shortlisted for the Aurora Writing Prize 2024, longlisted for the 4th Write Short Story Prize 2024, and her work has been published in Writerly Magazine. She was selected for Hachette’s Changing the Story Freelancer Training Programme in 2023. She holds a BA (Hons) in English from King’s College London. 

J. Lian Ho is a British East Asian writer and documentary filmmaker. In 2023 she received an Arts Council DYCP Award and in 2024 won the Plaza Memoir First Chapters Prize.  

Her novel, an intimate exploration of motherhood, myth-making and migration, reimagines the Chinese folk tale of Nu Wa.  It asks if it’s possible to inhabit a body without shame, rip down the broken sky and build the world anew? 

Jude is a double Grierson Award nominee and has won two Royal Television Society Awards. Her films include Imagine… Malorie Blackman: What If?,  The Secret Life of Sue Townsend (Aged 68 3/4) and Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women. 

Jose is a London-based writer drawn to deeply personal stories. Originally from the Philippines, he started writing during the pandemic in 2020 and has since written several short stories, recently shifting his focus to developing a novel inspired by his heritage. Having studied English Literature and Philosophy at Durham University, Jose’s work often blends introspection and philosophical inquiry into stories that explore the complexities of what it means to be human. 

Susie is a writer, producer and artistic director. She was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and participated in The Stinging Fly Summer School. Her work as producer includes the UK’s first Syrian death metal performance; taking over Piccadilly Circus with an artwork about nuclear threat and the climate crisis; and a 6km route of falling dominoes. She is the director of Metal, which inspires positive change through artistic experimentation. 

V. Matsumari is a queer writer living in London. They have previously written for The Toe Rag, Rat World, Nowhere Girl Collective and Farrago, as well as on their weekly Substack Slow Tidings. They self-published their debut poetry collection, Only Years in the Making, in 2024, and received a Special Commendation in the 2024 4thWrite Short Story Prize. When they’re not rearranging little black lines on a page, they can be found reading under a tree, exploring some body of water, or having a meal with friends.  

Swithun Cooper spent his twenties living with a feminist collective in Leeds and playing in queer punk bands with unprintable names; he now works as a researcher and tutor. His poems and stories have appeared in The London Magazine, Magma and The Rialto, and anthologies including Queer Life, Queer Love 2 and Unreal Sex. He has won an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2023 he was shortlisted for FBA New Voices. With Nazmia Jamal he runs Lesbians Talk Issues, a monthly reading group that explores queer life in the 1990s through the Lesbians Talk… pamphlets from Scarlet Press. 

Judah is a London-based writer and trainee solicitor specialising in public law and human rights. A first-class graduate of the London School of Economics, she has a strong interest in political writing and social justice, exploring themes of power, gender, race, identity, and systemic and institutional change in both her legal and literary work. With experience in content creation, podcasting and student journalism, Judah is keen to hone her craft and enter the world of literary fiction, with a focus on stories that grapple with the intersections of the personal and political.  

Sophia Khan is a writer and teacher based in Harrow, where she has taught for over fourteen years. She is a member of REWRITE and has previously had short stories published in REWRITE Reads as well as The Decolonial Passage. In 2023 she was longlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. In 2024 she won the silver award for fiction in the Creative Future Writers Award.  

Sukie Wilson (they/them) is a writer whose work blends the speculative and the real. They write stories about strange people doing strange things. Their work is informed by their experience of chronic illness, and how time moves slower for the sick. Sukie’s short story ‘Leaving Night Country’ won the 2024 Desperate Literature prize. Their work has appeared in the 2024 Brick Lane Bookshop Prize anthology and The London Magazine, among others. They are currently working on a collection of speculative short stories, centring strange characters experiencing ordinary traumas via extraordinary means. 

Daniel Culpan is a freelance arts and culture writer with bylines in Art Monthly, Art Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, i-D and others. He won the 2016 Frieze Writer’s Prize and was a second-prize winner of the 2023 International Awards for Art Criticism. In 2023, his short story ‘Threshold’ was shortlisted for the Evening Standard Stories Competition and his novel-in-progress was longlisted for the Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers’ Prize. He was also a member of the inaugural 2013 Curtis Brown Creative Six-Month Writing Course. 

Nic Falvo is an Italian-born writer and teacher based in London. He holds a BA in Humanities and Media, and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of London. 

Falvo’s writing has been recognised in several competitions, including being shortlisted for the Holland House Books’ Novella Project competition and the Spread the Word 1-2-1 feedback opportunity with Andrew James, founder and agent at Frog Literary Agency. 

As a gay writer born in another country, his writing explores themes of identity, self-acceptance and the challenges of belonging. 

Emily D. Bean is a writer and teacher from South London. She has written a range of short stories as well as three novels, in genres including speculative sci-fi, contemporary fantasy and romance. She’s passionate about meaningful representation in fiction, and loves to read stories with well-rounded, interesting disabled characters. Despite being an avid romcom reader, Save the Date is Emily’s first romcom novel. Emily was a winner of the 2022 Book Edit Writers’ Prize. 

Nkenna is a London-based writer of Nigerian heritage whose novels and screenplays centre on flawed, black women. In 2018 she was selected to participate in Arvon’s Written: Fiction Work-in-Progress course, led by Patrice Lawrence and Kerry Young. Her current project, ‘The Resurrected Sister’, is the first book in a contemporary fantasy series for adults. Set in a fictional world where magic intertwines with modernity and gods live amongst people, she explores themes of familial relationships, grief, and identity. She’s also a novice ceramicist who mostly makes bowl-esque creations that are more fun than functional. 

I’m an aspiring writer who lives in south London, teaches, and writes. I write novels and short stories about complicated women, and a few men. My first literary novel was longlisted for the inaugural SI Leeds prize in 2012 , and my most recent psychological thriller Grudge was runner up for its opening pages in the Harvill Secker Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Competition in 2021. I read voraciously and love the works of James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Douglas Kennedy, John Cheever, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Sue Miller, and Laila Lalami.  

Coggin Galbreath is a writer and performer from Texas. Coggin holds degrees in English and Comparative Literature from the University of St Andrews and in Musical Theatre Performance from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Their writing has been published in Newfound and Stand, and listed for the Brick Lane Prize, the Masters Review Short Story Award, and the Hachette Children’s Novel Award. They previously developed a commercial novel for adults on the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme for emerging novelists. Coggin also makes and presents new cabaret across the UK as Patti Boo Productions.  

Victoria began writing children’s fiction while working as a primary school teacher and sharing the wonder of incredible books with children. The first chapters of The Turning Tide were shortlisted for the London Library Emerging Writers Program 2024.  

Victoria wrote The Turning Tide during an extraordinarily difficult year for children. The traumatic legacy of the pandemic was compounded by the cost of living crisis and austerity. Victoria was inspired by the everyday resilience and compassion of her pupils in the face of devastating personal circumstances. Just like those children, the protagonist of The Turning Tide must use her resilience, compassion and conviction that a better world is possible to triumph over adversities that have demoralised the adults around her.  

Rukiya Shanthi is a British-Sri Lankan writer who grew up in Wales and is based in north-west London. She is drawn to writing children’s adventures representing diverse communities, based on her childhood experience and travels as a doctor and strategy consultant. Her ambition is to share forgotten histories that reveal how we have always been more connected than divided. The novel was a finalist in the 2019 Adventures in Fiction “Spotlight First Novel” Competition and the WOWCON 2024 pitch contest. Rukiya was shortlisted for the 2023/24 Megaphone mentorship programme and longlisted for City Lit’s 24-25 Malorie Blackman Scholarships. Outside of writing, she works as a freelance consultant and enjoys dancing while cooking, playing eclectic music and watching sports. 

Damisi is an aspiring Children’s and YA fiction writer on a mission to use her writing to give voice to the challenges that children face, challenges that may otherwise not be heard. She studied Law and European Legal Studies at King’s College University, London, and works in a related field. An alumna of the Faber Academy’s ‘Writing for Children’ course, she’s currently writing “Poisoned Water”, a cli-fi meets mystery novel. When she’s not picking at the complexities of legal and compliance issues, she likes to express her creativity through stories, journals, poems and songs.  

Noel is a queer, neurodivergent writer based in London. Originally from Greece, he moved to the UK in 2010 to study criminology and steal jobs. Some of the jobs he’s stolen over the years are barista, street fundraiser (for a day) and English teacher. He’s also volunteered as a spokesperson for the Migrants’ Rights Network, and he currently works as a production editor for marketing-focused festival Cannes Lions. His middle-grade novel The Everyworlds was longlisted for the 2023 Jericho 500 competition. In his free time he binges series while watching TikToks, bakes cakes while binging series and takes long walks in London’s parks with his husband and their 6-year-old Cavapoo, Archie. 

Shivanthi is a doctor in adult mental health in the NHS, which appeals to her love of stories and the role they play in our lives. She began this story on the Faber Write your novel course. The story was Highly Commended in the 2022 FAB prize, picked for the 2022 Cornerstone’s Literary Consultancy ELEVATE scheme, shortlisted for the 2023 Golden Egg Award for Fiction and a recipient of the 2023-2024 Megaphone Mentoring Scheme. 

Jyoti Patel is a British Indian author living in London. An extract of her debut novel “The Things That We Lost” was chosen as the winning submission for the 2021 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, selected from over 2,000 entries. Jyoti is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA and was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best New Novelists for 2023. Her writing has previously been published as part of We Present’s ‘Literally’ series and in the anthology for the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize, for which she was shortlisted.

Oisín McKenna grew up in Drogheda, Ireland, and lives in London. His novel Evenings and Weekends, described by both Dazed and The Evening Standard as ‘the book of the summer’, was published in 2024 by 4^th Estate (UK) and Mariner Books (US). He was awarded the Next Generation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Evenings and Weekends and it was developed with further support from Arts Council England. In 2022, he was awarded a London Writers Award, and in 2017, he was named in the Irish Times as one of the best spoken word artists in the country. He has written and performed four theatre shows, including ADMIN, an award-winning production at Dublin Fringe 2019, and his writing has appeared in GQ, the Evening Standard, the Irish Times, Banshee, and more.

Nilesha Chauvet is a British Indian novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, The Revenge of Rita Marsh, was published by Faber as a crime thriller super lead title in July 2024. Nilesha writes zeitgeist psychological suspense, crime, and thriller. She is also the Managing Director of GOOD which advises commercial brands on Purpose, and helps charities raise millions of pounds for good causes.  An alumna of London Writers Awards 2021, Nilesha also studied creative writing at City Lit and is a graduate of Faber Academy. She read Philosophy & Theology at Oxford and is an ordained Interfaith Minister. Nilesha is represented by Nelle Andrew at Rachel Mills Literary.

Tọlá Okogwu is an award-winning and bestselling author. She studied Journalism and spent some years exploring the world of blogging, haircare and freelance writing before returning to her first love…fiction. Tọlá’s debut novel, Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun was shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Barnes & Noble Children’s and YA Book Awards and The Week Junior Book Awards as well as longlisted for The Jhalak Prize, whilst her 2024 World Book Day title, Onyeka and the Secret Superhero, was a UK top ten Bestseller. Tọlá’s originally self-published picture book series, Daddy Do My Hair is a firm family favourite and she also writes under the pen name, Lola Morayo, with five books in the Aziza’s Secret Fairy Door series, published by Macmillan Children’s Books.

Emma Leong is a Literary Agent, representing both fiction and non-fiction. Her publishing career started here at Janklow and Nesbit in 2019, having studied Law and Psychology. She is editorially focused, representing new writers and keen to build and nurture international careers for them, working very closely with the New York office and Translation Rights team.  Her clients include Chukwuebuka Ibeh, Christina Carè, Rupert Dastur, Olivia Petter, and on behalf of the US office, Erica Berry, Aisha Muharrar, Dawnie Walton, Katherine Min, to name a few. She lives in London.

Cara Lee Simpson is an agent at Susanna Lea Associates where she represents literary and general fiction with wide appeal and prize-winning potential. She has degrees from the London School of Economics and King’s College London. Her clients have been International No. 1 bestsellers and won prizes including ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year, The Ngaio Marsh Awards, and The Polari Prize, and have featured on a range of shortlists. She is developing a curated list of career authors and loves to work with those early on in their writing process.

Oli Munson is a director at A M Heath. His award-winning list includes commercial fiction across all genres with a particular focus on crime, thrillers and speculative fiction.

After graduating from the University of Exeter with a degree in English Literature, Lorna Hemingway (she/her) completed her MA in Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, where she was personally mentored by Michael Rosen. Lorna joined Bell Lomax Moreton in 2019 and is now building her own list and is searching for picture books, chapter books, middle grade, and YA.

A brilliant new talent writing from lived experience makes his debut with this irresistible and original story in the vein of Young Mungo and Hang the Moon, that pierces the beautiful, brilliant, and lightning-quick mind of a teenage girl growing up with undiagnosed ADHD in working-class Scotland.

In the blazing hot summer of 1994, there’s nothing for Cora Mowat to do but hang around in empty parking lots. Stuck in her Mom’s small house and tired of her own restless mind, she’s desperate to break free of the limits of Fife but unsure of what the future holds—if it holds anything at all for a girl like her trying to find her way in the world.

After her mother invites a new man to live with them, tensions quickly rise in the cramped house. Gunner is kind but strange, too—a one-eyed shoplifter with more than a few hidden secrets. But when tragedy strikes shortly after, Cora rebels against her small-town existence in search of love, acceptance, and a path to something good. If only she can learn to navigate her grief and everything she thinks she knows about who she is and what she might be capable of, she may finally find the way forward.

In this extraordinary debut, drawn from experience but written with riotous imagination, Tom Newlands explores a teenage girl’s coming-of-age in post-industrial Scotland and what it means to yearn for a life that feels out of reach. Vibrant, lyrical and fiercely funny, Only Here, Only Now is a story of identity and family that shines with hope and resilience.

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Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz – a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights.

It’s 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi’s mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

Twenty years later, Rafi is flying home from Australia for his best friend’s wedding. He has everything he ever wanted: starring roles in musical theatre, the perfect boyfriend and freedom from expectation. But returning to Blackburn is the ultimate test: can he show his true self to his community?

Navigating family and identity from boyhood to adulthood, as well as the changing eras of ABBA, skinheads and urbanisation, Rafi must follow his heart to achieve his dreams.

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‘Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics’ ANDREW McMILLAN

‘Insightful, affecting and assured . . . Written with a poetry as defamiliarising as it is rich’ OISÍN FAGAN

‘Strange, intriguing, exhilarating’ CAMILLA GRUDOVA

‘Extraordinary’ ADAM ZMITH


The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.

She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows – almost – about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.

Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

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remember / tidal volume is estimated based on // what’s left in the lung as it closes / remember love is based on tides / as they come in closer

As the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, Jamie was warned by the doctor that due to their underlying health they would not be a priority for critical care treatment. Using the compressed form of a sonnet, they kept rewriting and re-experiencing different voices and identities to explore what it means to face one’s mortality so directly, suddenly, and unexpectedly.

This work became a pamphlet, Shield, following Jamie through the grief of facing death while newly married, and into a place of resilience, resistance, and a commitment to creation against mortality.

i’d rather die  / as i’ve lived as i’ve lived filled with love and / i’d rather die fierce as myself

‘These are arresting, heart-stopping poems lit with a rare intensity. Hale’s poems don’t pull any punches, they explore what it is to live in a body and on the way touch the centre of the fragility deep inside all of us. Humane poems that will make you ache.’ –Mona Arshi

The first book in THE DREAM TEAM series.

‘Exciting, original and heart-warming’ – Jacqueline Wilson

‘Priscilla Mante is an author to watch’ – Aisha Bushby

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A relatable, inclusive story about families, unlikely friendships and girl power. Perfect for fans of Ella on the Outside and Jacqueline Wilson.

Ola! I’m Jasmina Santos-Campbell (but you can call me Jaz). You’ve probably heard of me and my football team the Bramrock Stars before. No? Well, you will soon because we’re almost famous!

Forming the Stars was my genius idea – you see I need to prove to Mae (that’s my mum!) that I’m a football star so she’ll want to come back home.

The idea was the easy part, though. Now I’ve got a team of seven very different girls and we need to work together, to be taken seriously as footballers.

We are the DREAM TEAM and we’re going to show the world that girls CAN play football!

‘These poems unveil an exciting new voice. Niroshini is unafraid to climb the ladder of risk, swerving from the territory of girlhood to the pain of an underexamined past, gently excavating ancestral memory.’ Mona Arshi

‘I read Niroshini’s work, feeling like I’m centre stage about to watch everything unfold. I love how I was brought into history, lived experience and language. The skill in holding the reader, and allowing their imagination to latch on to the story.’ Yomi Ṣode

Everything begins with a kiss       at the plantation       and then a disrobing

Niroshini’s poems live at the intersection of beauty, history and violence. They embody the stillness within the maelstrom required to reclaim oneself from unlawful ownership, from colonial and gender-based trauma. We find ourselves on a rooftop in Colombo, in Neruda’s latrine, submerged in the waters of the Indian Ocean, and on the battlefield with Kali, imagined as a mother in conversation with her daughter. The voices contained within each tableau are tenderly devastating, entreating girls, like the gods, to call out their one thousand and eight names.

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‘Diamond-sharp, timely and urgent‘ Observer, Best Debuts of 2021

‘Subtle, elegant, scorching… The literary debut of the summer’ Vogue

‘I’m full of the hope, on reading it, that this is the kind of book that doesn’t just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible’ Ali Smith

‘Exquisite, daring, utterly captivating. A stunning new writer’ Bernardine Evaristo

Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.

The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?

Assembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life.

‘One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . You’ll read it in one sitting’ Sunday Times Style

‘Expertly crafted, remarkable, astonishing… A literary debut with flavours of Jordan Peele’s Get Out‘ Bookseller, Editor’s Choice

‘Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway meets Citizen by Claudia Rankine… As breathtakingly graceful as it is mercilessly true’ Olivia Sudjic

‘Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society’ Diana Evans

‘This marvel of a novel manages to say all there is to say about Britain today’ Sabrina Mahfouz

‘Original, thought-provoking and gripping. I was hooked from the beginning and couldn’t put it down’ LIBBY PAGE

‘ The Mismatch transported me back to that feeling of first love and first heartbreak. Enlightening, poignant and romantic’ SOPHIE COUSENS, author of This Time Next Year

‘A powerful love and life story of past and present Iranian experiences in the UK. Beautiful writing and complex, fascinating characters’ HELLY ACTON, author of The Shelf

‘Refreshing and engaging . . . a compelling new voice in contemporary fiction’ LAUREN HO, author of Last Tang Standing

‘Wonderful vibrant characters. [I] absolutely loved it’ KIRSTY CAPES, author of Careless

Soraya knows she could never fall for someone like Magnus. He’s her complete opposite in every way.

Popular and confident, Magnus seems to have his life figured out, while Soraya has got to twenty-one and has somehow never been kissed.

Soraya’s mother Neda also knows what it’s like to feel mismatched. She left Iran with her husband in the wake of revolution, and the aftershocks of that decision are still being felt decades later.

When Soraya sets her sights on Magnus for her first kiss, the last thing she expects to find is first love.

But sometimes the person you least expect might turn out to be the perfect fit . . .

With unforgettable characters at its heart, THE MISMATCH is a pitch-perfect coming-of-age story and a fresh take on how what you think you want isn’t always what brings you happiness.

In 2019, Liam Konemann began collating what he called ‘The Appendix’, a simple record of ongoing transphobia in the UK that he came across in day-to-day life: from the flippant comments of peers to calculated articles and reviews in newspapers. When the list began to take its toll on his mental health, he changed tack by asking different questions: how is beauty in transmasculinity found? And how is it maintained in a transphobic world?

The Appendix, in its new incarnation, begins at the end. Considering the final item on the list, we travel back in time through Liam’s life and his formative experiences on both sides of the globe, and examine the wider hostile climate that trans people face today. In response, focus shifts to celebrate trans joy, the complexities of finding it and, crucially, holding on to it.

Eleanor Penny’s Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and and the kind. It attends to the assumptions we may make about the civilised self, assumptions all too often proven hollow or insubstantial in times of crisis. Mercy is a dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail. A highly anticipated debut.

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Cabbages . . . The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud, that’s where we put the heroin . . .

There’s a stash of heroin waiting to be imported, and no one seems sure what to do with it . . . But Ayla’s a gardener, and she has a plan.

Offering a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London heroin trade, Keeping the House lifts the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice: not only in McDonald’s queues and men’s clubs, but in spotless living rooms and whispering kitchens. Spanning three generations, this is the story of the women who keep their family – and their family business – afloat, juggling everything from police surveillance to trickier questions of community, belonging and love.

3, 2, 1… sniff deep. A quick rush from sniffing poppers comes to you from the nineteenth century, via ruthless business practices, police raids and a booming online sex subculture.

The story of poppers starts with experiments on frogs legs and the Victorian doctor who first found a use for amyl nitrite in relieving angina pain. It moves through the development of the pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century, the capitalist creation of the “ideal” gay male, a raid on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1986, and the porn supercuts that encourage viewers to “goon out” online.

This book is not just a history. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world. And it explores the startling connections between Victorian infirmaries, Studio 54 and cam sex subcultures. Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures tells the tale of a drug and uncovers the queer potential inside us all.

Twelve-year-old Luke Smith-Sharma shovels coal under a half-bombed, blackened power station. With his best friend Ravi he keeps his head down, hoping to one day earn his freedom and return to his family, while avoiding the wrath of the evil Tabatha Margate. When he tries to help new girl Jess, Luke is punished and sent to clean the sewers of the haunted East Wing, a place from which few return.

Whilst serving his punishment, Luke realises he can see things others can’t in the Power Station: ghostly things . He befriends a ghost-girl called Alma, who can ride clouds through the night sky and bend their shape to her will. But when Luke discovers the terrible truth of why Tabatha Margate is kidnapping children and forcing them to work in the power station, Alma agrees to help him and his friends escape. Will Alma convince the mysterious ghost council to help their cause? And can Luke find his voice, while trying to find a way home?

Marvin is an ordinary boy who loves spending time with Grandpa, reading comics, and making science experiments with his best friend Joe. But everything changes when he discovers a mysterious superhero suit hidden in the attic . . . to his amazement, Marvin learns that he is next in a long line of superheroes. Now the time has come to meet his destiny!

When the Science Fair is thrown into chaos by super-villain Mastermind and her giant robot, Marvin is the only one who can stop them. Will Marvin be brave enough to step into his power-and into his superhero suit-to become the great and marvellous superhero Marv?

The first book in a powerful series of one boy’s journey to unlock the superhero within.

Poetry Book Society Summer 2022 Pamphlet Choice

‘This is a unique collection of poems so full of heart, humour and ache.’ Rachel Long

‘Helen Bowell’s The Barman is as funny and good as it is precise, at home in the interstices between cultures and TV channels, chips and chip grease, romance and boredom.’ Will Harris

Helen Bowell and The Barman are a relationship from which you won’t easily look away. This debut pamphlet is a sharp, witty exploration of the nuances of a sometimes reluctant codependency. At times it feels like you are the third housemate, unashamedly pressing your ear to the wall to hear conversations as intimate as they are absurd. Bowell deftly interrogates what it means to feel both othered and adored, comfortable and wary. The Barman is an introduction to a poetic voice unique in its ability to subtly express its desires, leaving enough room for the reader to find parts of themself in the world it creates.

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Five years since his daughter’s death. Now it’s happening again.

‘The Next to Die is a remarkably assured debut. It oozes the sour tang of authenticity, mingling psychiatry and crime with the mean streets of London.’ Andrew Taylor

Dylan Kasper is stuck. Living in self-imposed reclusion from his former life in the police, he’s been in a downward spiral since his daughter’s death five years ago.

All that changes when the son of an esteemed professor jumps under an inner-city train. His former colleagues call it suicide, but Kasper knows different. This has all happened before – to him, and his dead daughter.

Taking on the investigation himself, Kasper soon realises the terrible trouble young Tommy had found himself in. With nowhere to run, he thought suicide was the only way to keep his family safe.

But before long, Kasper’s investigation makes him target number one. Can he keep his demons in check and stay alive long enough to bring those responsible to justice?

‘A joy to read, a full universe of feeling, an effortless page-turner by a born storyteller. One Small Voice is the great contemporary middle class Indian novel, showing us ordinary people knocked about by the specific sociopolitical currents of turn-of-the-century India, but also wrestling with universal challenges of family, ambition, friendship and shame’ Max Porter, author of The Death of Francis Bacon

India, 1992. The country is ablaze with riots. In Lucknow, ten-year-old Shubhankar witnesses a terrible act of mob violence in which his family are complicit: an act that will alter the course of his life.

In the two decades that follow, Shabby must wrestle with the ghosts of his past, the expectations of his family, and the seismic shifts taking place around him as the country enters the new millennium. As an adult in Mumbai, he encounters Syed and Shruti, who, like him, are seeking the freedom to rewrite their stories while navigating the contradictions of modern India. As the rising tide of nationalism sweeps across the country, their friendship becomes a rock they all cling to.

Until one day, Shabby makes a split-second decision that will change everything…

Dazzling and deeply moving, One Small Voice is a novel of modern India: of violence and prejudice, friendship and loyalty, community and tradition, and of a young man coming of age in a country on fire.

‘Funny, sharp and tender, McPherson brings great insight to the struggle to reconcile where we’ve come from with who we want to be.’

Diana Reid, author of Love & Virtue and Seeing Other People​

Sam is struggling to find her place at university. There are so many parts of her that don’t seem to fit – her family doesn’t understand her new life, and her new friends don’t know the secrets that she carries with her: the sudden death of her father, her brother’s trouble with the law, and her sense that she feels things that make her different.

That changes when a lecturer introduces Sam to Julia, his charming wife and a corporate lawyer who agrees to mentor Sam through law school. Their closeness provides a way for Sam to understand who she is, and who she wants to become.

With time, this unspools into a dynamic of mutual preoccupation and boundary crossing, as they navigate their feelings for one another, the appropriateness of their relationship, and where it might be heading.

Higher Education is a story about identity, intellectualism and class, and the transformative power of education from an exceptional new voice in Australian literary fiction.

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‘Being Black British is more than an identity, it is a journey into uncharted waters of personal history. Alexis Keir’s deeply moving account will ring true for all of those navigating their own stories.’ David Lammy

‘It took two decades for me to go in search of the parts of myself I had left behind in the Caribbean. What ghosts were waiting for me there? There was a thick, black journal in my flat, stuffed with letters, postcards, handwritten notes and diary entries. For the first time in years, I opened it.’

Twenty years after living there as a child, Alexis Keir returns to the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. He is keen to uncover lost memories and rediscover old connections. But he also carries with him the childhood scars of being separated from his parents and put into uncaring hands.

Inspired by the embrace of his relatives in the Caribbean, Alexis begins to unravel the stories of others who left Saint Vincent, searching through diary pages and newspaper articles, shipping and hospital records and faded photographs. He uncovers tales of exploitation, endeavour and bravery of those who had to find a home far away from where they were born.

A child born with vitiligo, torn from his mother’s arms to be exhibited as a showground attraction in England; a woman who, in the century before the Windrush generation, became one of the earliest Black nurses to be recorded as working in a London hospital; a young boy who became a footman in a Yorkshire stately home. And Alexis’s mother, a student nurse who arrives in 1960s London, ready to start a new life in a cold, grey country – and the man from her island whom she falls in love with.

From the Caribbean to England, North America and New Zealand, from windswept islands to the rainy streets of London, and spanning generations of travellers from the 19th century to the present, Windward Family takes you inside the beating heart of a Black British family, separated by thousands of miles but united by love, loss and belonging.

A luminous, boldly imagined debut novel about three Vietnamese siblings who seek refuge in the UK, expanding into a sweeping meditation on love, ancestry, and the power of storytelling

There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies–everything in between is speculation.

After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh begin a perilous journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.

In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers resettle in the UK and confront their new identities as refugees, first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality and raging anti-immigrant sentiment. Anh works in a clothing factory to pay their bills. Minh loiters about with fellow unemployed high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his British friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. With every choice they make, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.

Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart their fate, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by war and loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.

Verge is a devastatingly funny and richly imagined road-trip novel set in a perilous and xenophobic near-future Britain where the island has fractured into individual counties and ancient magical practices are once more ascendant. The day that Rowena Murray was born two-hundred-and-fifty starlings fell out of the sky, and ever since she’s been marked by ill-fortune.

First came the visions, then her boyfriend dropped dead. Now death has taken her father, too. Salvation, Rowena’s mother says, lies to the North in Culcrith, where her grandmother can save her from the curse. Her mother’s farmhand, a young Egyptian man named Halim, is to drive Rowena through multiple checkpoints and borders, across a mysterious and treacherous landscape inhabited by people who have married old traditions with intensified prejudices.

The trip isn’t easy: Rowena is spiky, obsessive, and sees Death everywhere, while Halim is uptight and quiet, with demons of his own. What begins as a battle of wills between the two develops into an alliance, and perhaps something more… if only they can let their guard down and let the wild in.

A fun, fresh and fast-paced series based on African mythology, YOMI is an adventure full of heart and humour.

Yomi and her younger brother Kayode are supposed to be on the trip of a lifetime visiting The Gambia with their Uncle Olu. Instead, their uncle’s work has made this the most boring holiday ever! But when Yomi witnesses the Dragon King, Ninki Nanka, being kidnapped from the sky, things get a lot more exciting. Determined to save him, Yomi and Kayode uncover secrets and meet many magnificent beasts – but will it be enough Ninki Nanka?

BEAST QUEST meets Pokémon, the series is perfect for fans of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, FUTURE HERO and DRAGON MOUNTAIN.

‘Excellent . . . Ashani Lewis is superbly talented.’ Katherine Rundell

‘Thoughtful, intelligent and beautifully written . . . Lewis is definitely a new talent to watch.’ Marie Claire, “Best Books of 2024”

In one of America’s Happiest Cities, thirty-eight-year-old Elen is trapped under the shadow of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains. Her husband has left her. Her belongings are in the boot of her car. Her days are filled mostly with silence and drinking. When she meets four English teenagers in an empty bar, she is enamoured.

Luka, Clover, George and Lyn are wealthy squatters, drifting between ski resorts and breaking into empty AirBnBs. When they bring Elen into their fold – and into their messy, entangled relationships – she senses a violent secret that fuels the four’s never-ending disappearing act.

Dazzling, cultish, and intensely committed to creating their own utopia, they force Elen to ruminate on the irresistible pull of bright young things.

She doesn’t understand what they want from her, but how can she leave when she has nowhere else to go?

A dark meditation on the dangers and seductive power of youthful idealism, and the slippages between friendship and love, Winter Animals is an extraordinary debut examining freedom, friendship, desire and excess.

‘It is heartbreaking, it is courageous, and it will leave you full of hope’ Laura Dockrill, author and 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction Judge

‘An unflinching look at one family’s experience of immigration, exploring mental health, identity and family’ Louise Hare

‘Don’t go Mammy please.’ Stuttered words filled her ears, sent frissons of guilt through her as she bent over him; held him to her thumping chest. Tears sliding from her face to his.

Raef is left behind in Grenada when his mother, Cilla, follows her husband to England in search of a better life. When they are finally reunited seven years later, they are strangers – and the emotional impact of the separation leads to events that rip their family apart. As they try to move forward with their lives, his mother’s secret will make Raef question all he’s ever known of who he is.

A Trace of Sun is, in part, inspired by the author’s own family experiences.

Only Here, Only Now tells the story of Cora, a young girl making her way through the maze that is teenage life in post-industrial Scotland.

Travelling between Muircross, Abbotscraig and Glasgow in the mid 1990s, we are given the total privilege, delight and heartbreak of sitting on Cora’s shoulder as she makes the journey from uncomfortable teenager to capable young woman.

Meticulously researched, Only Here, Only Now introduces a character and a view on the world that we haven’t had the opportunity to see before. Neurodivergent himself, Tom’s depiction of Cora as a young girl living with ADHD is deeply compassionate, nuanced and authentic.

Profoundly necessary in the current climate, Only Here, Only Now is a story filled with humour, honesty, and an abundance of love – found often in the most surprising of places.

‘Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics’ ANDREW McMILLAN

‘Strange, intriguing, exhilarating’ CAMILLA GRUDOVA

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.

She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows – almost – about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.

Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

‘ZADIE SMITH-ESQUE IN ITS KALEIDOSCOPE OF LONDON’ NIAMH CAMPBELL

‘A MASTERPIECE. THIS SEARING TALE OF LOVE, SEX AND CLASS WILL RESONATE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME’ OWEN JONES

Summer in London stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive.

Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she’s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil and harbouring secret dreams of his own.

Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate, Keith. But there’s a problem: Keith has a boyfriend and there might not be room for three people in the relationship. Then there’s Rosaleen, Phil’s mother, who’s tired of feeling like a side character in her own life. She’s just been diagnosed with cancer and is travelling to London to tell Phil, if she can ever get hold of him.

As Saturday night approaches, all their lives are set to change forever. It’s the hottest summer on record and the weekend is about to begin…

…But amidst all this turmoil, what has a whale got to do with it all?

‘A bold, breathless, provocative story of revenge.’ CHRIS WHITAKER
‘Got under my skin in a really terrifying way . . . Seriously impressive.’ AJAY CHOWDHURY

Rita Marsh is a good person.

By day, she runs a care home, looking after the elderly and infirm.

By night, she’s a vigilante, posing online as young girls and snaring the men who prey on them, exposing them for what they are.

Rita has successfully kept her two lives separate for years. But when an old classmate returns from her past, her two worlds start to collide. With both of her selves unravelling, Rita will have to choose between justice and revenge.

Is she a force for good – or will she become someone to fear?