***THE NUMBER 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER******THE IRISH BESTSELLER***'This book is a jailbreak and a miracle' NAOMI KLEIN'Essential . . . A project that insists on liberation' TA-NEHISI COATES'You'll carry [it] in your heart for a long time' KAMILA SHAMSIE'Wondrous, devastating and vibrant' BRYAN WASHINGTON'Impossible to put down or forget' RIZ AHMEDA teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing.These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams and lives worth living.We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection, vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment, we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here.'A vital book . . . a profoundly important literary event' CHINA MIEVILLE'A brilliant collection of voices that lays bare the struggles and suffering of ordinary young Palestinians' MONICA ALI'We Are Not Numbers is not just a book — it's my life, their life, and our shared story . . . This is Gaza as it truly is, written by those who live it every day' MOTAZ AZIZA'A rebellion against the singular story. An insightful, multifaceted glimpse into the besieged Gaza Strip, where millions of people continue to confront a genocide waged by an Israeli regime' MOHAMMED EL-KURD

'How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read' MEGAN NOLAN, Sunday Times Pablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring cycle and Ziggy Stardust. And what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us? Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the twenty-first century.

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis within, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works.

Although Anais Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic "distillations" of her secret diaries. A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression, on the one hand, and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, on the other, echoed Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one indulge in one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?

Although Anais Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic "distillations" of her secret diaries. A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression, on the one hand, and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, on the other, echoed Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one indulge in one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?

With the verve and bite of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the whip-smart, wisecracking sensibility of a golden-age Hollywood heroine, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past. “What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.” Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed. In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive. According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit? To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all. Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame. For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.

Women is a novella exploring sexual confusion, female friendship, being a woman, and being a daughter. The book is an urgent recall of heartbreak, a stark portrait of an identity in crisis.

When Sam Bax, that charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth "Olly" Bax, his wife and ardent sidekick, becomes a widow at the edge of twenty-seven.  With no pretense of "courage", Olly grieves, coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family ties and trying to rethink her own life.  Realizing that her risks are as daring as any of Sam's — while he chanced life and limb, Olly risks her heart — she finds that love can take some surprising turns.Laurie Colwin depics Olly's recovery with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentally, creating a real heroine who remains true to her heart and still manages to keep her head.