This is happening tonight and if you come along you won't regret it. No link, just do a search for Carcanet + Éireann Lorsung + book launch. A little bit of my face, a lot more of Éireann's face, and some exceptionally good poems and thinking about poems.
**Fri 21st March, 7pm**
**Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham**
Xiaolu Guo in conversation with me
Nottingham is about as far as you can get from the sea in the UK, which makes it the perfect place to talk to Xiaolu Guo about whaling, 19th century girls who disguise themselves as cabin boys, Taoism, and her new Moby Dick book, 'Call Me Ishmaelle.' Come and join us, ye landlubbers!
Don't miss these March events happening 'off-site'! We often work with people and venues across Nottingham to bring big names to the city and this month we've got two great examples.
As ever, book on our website- link in bio or below:
/events
#indiebookshop
#supportyourlocal
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#literature
#jonmcgregor
#xiaoluguo
#taoleighgoffe
#blackstudies
Gurnaik Johal published a cracking debut short story collection, 'We Move,' a couple of years ago, and I was expecting this novel to be similarly fleeting/glancing and finely distilled. But when he says, in last week's Observer piece on the Best New Novelists of 2025, that he tried to write "the opposite of a short story," he very much hits the nail on the head. This is a novel absolutely full to the brim with story, character, detail, layer, theme and everything else; it's the literary equivalent of having a hundred tabs open at once, and although you might now and again need to check your notes to keep up it will 100% be worth the effort. This novel somehow manages, in its ebbs and flows and sudden floods, to be both noisy/spectacular and quiet/contemplative, and I loved it.
I realise I'm not really telling you what this book is about, but you can google that. Let's just say it's well worth dipping your toes in, and being swept away.
10/10, would recommend.
(And in light of recent discussion re blurbs, allow me to acknowledge that yes I have met Gurnaik, yes we have done some work together, and that I first met him after being sent his first book of stories and loving them and blurbing them, and no I would not be saying anything about this book if I didn't like it because I'm not as shallow as it turns out most people think most writers are?)
This isn’t coming out until June 2025 so I’ll write more about it nearer the time, but let’s just say that if you had a hunch Wendy Erskine would definitely manage to translate her short story brilliance to the novel then your hunch is about to be totes vindicated my god I’m in bits
I read ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME in the summer and then I kept losing track of it and it kept resurfacing in various stacks of books, like a half-remembered memory or like a day I couldn’t shake off, and when I revisited it what stayed with me was the mood, the atmosphere, the textural quality of a very very calm nightmare in which the narrator has fallen out of time and is stuck on the same recurring day, a day in late autumn moving backwards and forwards between Paris and a small French village, stuck with the same recurring moments and encounters while everyone she knows goes on without her. 100% sure the marketing team are under strict instruction not to mention Groundhog Day so let’s just say a deep deep dive into the metaphysical and metaphorical implications of being cut adrift from everyone you love without them knowing is very much what I’m here for right now.
When I started reading this, I wasn’t sure how Solvej Balle could keep the premise going for the length of a whole book; by the time I finished, I was desperate to get my hands on volumes 2-7. (Seven volumes! Seven! @faberbooks you crazy adorable mothers!)
10/10 would recommend if you find yourself set adrift on memory bliss
#bookstagram
#booktime
#reading
#existentialdread
#frenchnoir
#woodsmoke
#nov18
Happy publication day to @morganjtalty , whose debut novel FIRE EXIT hits the shelves in UK bookshops today.
Featuring cover art by @mayatihtiyasart .
🔥🔥🔥
A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his mother as her lifelong depression intensifies, and staring across the water to the reservation, at the house in which his daughter has grown up. Elizabeth, his daughter, doesn’t know he exists.
Charles spent his own childhood on the same reservation, with a Native stepfather who treated him as his son – until tragedy struck, leaving a burning hole at the centre of their lives. As an adult Charles was forced to leave the reservation. When his first love Mary found out she was pregnant, she decided to conceal their daughter’s true heritage, in order to ensure Elizabeth’s tribal enrollment.
In her twenties now, Elizabeth is struggling. Observed from afar by her real father, who can see the connection between his daughter and his mother, the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth’s life are beginning to show. As firmly as Charles believes the truth will set them all free, the price of it may be the destruction of them all.
FIRE EXIT is a novel of exceptional heart. It’s a deeply layered story of family and blood ties; full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, it shows us intergenerational connections from all angles, and their capacity to break, reform, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us.
🔥🔥🔥
#fireexit #morgantalty #publicationday #debutnovel #penobscot #penobscotriver #readindigenouswriters #americanfiction #americannovel #americanliterature #bookstagram #igreads #igbooks #independentpublishing #andotherstories #americanlife #brandontaylor #timwinton #colinbarrett #tommyorange #jonmcgregor #newbooks
“I have written a memoir and you may be in it” is hands down the best e-mail subject line ever, if you’re sending a book promo to everyone in your email contacts list.
I met @susanellenfinlay once, via university work, so although I was pret-ty sure I wouldn’t appear in her memoir the subject line amused me enough to immediately order a copy.
Anyway, sorry, I don’t appear in this book. Things and places that do appear: paintings, PowerPoint slides, ideas about art, ideas about Art, detailed accountings of the intersection between money, rent, and an ability to make or to think about art and writing, Nottingham, London, Berlin, universities and FE colleges, polo-necks, asymmetric clothing, the author’s ability to take herself both completely seriously and not seriously at all, love, not-love, trains, Amsterdam, various teas, and many people who will recognise their own appearance in the text.
The tone is an extremely dry kind of deadpan smart and funny which I immediately warmed to, and although I don’t even know if this is really a memoir or an essay or a scrapbook I really loved it and I think you will too, especially if you’re in it, which you probably are.
10/10 highly recommend if you’ve ever thought you should probably move to Berlin, or if you think the idea of moving to Berlin is not for the likes of you
