Books for Busy People: Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
We know in this time of lockdown many people are missing the opportunity to browse our bookshelves, particularly with Christmas round the corner. So we’re introducing new curated book recommendation lists, to help you find the perfect gifts for friends and loved ones.
Sometimes finding time and head space to sit down and commit to a novel can be rather daunting. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still find refuge in a book. This is a list for those busy people in your life, the people who need a pick me up, to take five minutes to themselves and slow down. Browse and buy through our bookshop store or order through our website.
Books for Busy People: Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
Paperback RRP £8.99
Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
A Good Man is Hard to Find: Faber Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Paperback RRP £3.50
Flannery O'Connor's famous fifties story evokes heat and dust, family and feuding, God and grace - and is utterly uncompromising in its brutality.
AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. by Arundhati Roy
Paperback RRP £6.00
In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
The Magic Hour: 100 Poems from the Tuesday Afternoon Poetry Club by Charlotte Moore
Hardback RRP £12.99
The Magic Hour offers a source of lifelong pleasure and nourishment, with words to delight and console, while reminding us of moments of personal significance. It demonstrates how we can all benefit from a dose of poetry in our daily lives. The poems are grouped into themes - from home and lovers, to war and the planets - each framed with a little context and delightful insights from members of the Tuesday Afternoon Poetry Club.
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books by Hilary Mantel
Hardback RRP £16.98
A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light. Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.
Come Rain or Come Shine: Faber Stories by Kazuo Ishiguro
Paperback RRP £3.50
In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting.
Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith
Paperback RRP £5.99
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak
Paperback RRP £4.99
In this beautifully written and illuminating polemic, Booker Prize nominee Elif Shafak reflects on our age of pessimism, when emotions guide and misguide our politics, and misinformation and fear are the norm. A tender, uplifting plea for optimism, Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to reveal how writing can nurture democracy, tolerance and progress. And in the process, she answers one of the most urgent questions of our time.
RENDANG by Will Harris
Paperback RRP £10.99
Winner of the Forward Prize: Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry 2020. A startlingly radical and surreal poetic journey, RENDANG takes the reader from West Sumatra to Planet Mongo via Gray's Inn Road, alighting on Indonesian artefacts, gentrification, and citizenry. RENDANG is an urgent comment on what it means to be a person now, a dissection of and love letter to the histories, places, and things that make us.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems by Audre Lorde
Paperback RRP £12.99
Your Silence Will Not Protect You is a posthumous collection of essays, speeches, and poems by African American author and poet Audre Lorde.
Love in Colour : Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola
Hardback RRP £16.99
Bolu Babalola finds the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology and rewrites them with incredible new detail and vivacity in this debut collection. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines iconic Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from countries that no longer exist in our world.
Dark Days by James Baldwin
Paperback RRP £1.00
Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays - Dark Days , The Price of the Ticket and The White Man's Guilt - blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world.
Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan
Paperback RRP £8.99
A shocking collection of dark stories, ranging from chilling contemporary fairytales to disturbing supernatural fiction. These dark tales explore women's fears with electrifying honesty and invention and speak to one another about female bodies, domestic claustrophobia, desire and violence.
The Air Year by Caroline Bird
Paperback RRP £9.99
Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.
Poor by Caleb Femi
Paperback RRP £9.99
In Poor , Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it.
Browse and buy through our bookshop store or order your copy today.
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