Goldsmiths, University of London

A coming to terms with marriage and career, the life-long impact of a father''s alcoholism, and an aunt''s insistent example to live an unroofed life."I had gone to the common under the vague impression that I wished to recapture something of a life I no longer possessed."Engaging with fiction, auto-fiction, place writing, and visual cultures, as well their various intersections with solitude, privilege, gender, whiteness, ageing, memory, and illness, Common is an introspective novel about loss, disillusionment, and the attempt to reconnect with both the legacies of the past and the intransigence of the present.Following the death of his aunt, Abilene, in between two national lockdowns the narrator, Robert, travels from his home near Manchester to his childhood home in Hampshire to settle the affairs of her estate. Upon arriving at his aunt?s house and confronted with all the debris of a life left behind, Robert goes for a walk on nearby Ludshott Common, a large area of ancient heathland. This walk becomes the catalyst for a number of transitions. Robert takes the sudden decision to abandon his role as executor and instead builds a hut on the common, where he stays for seven days. Robert is not entirely sure why he has done this, nor what he is necessarily hoping to achieve by doing so, uncertain whether he is searching for answers from this landscape or whether he wishes more simply for a break from his present circumstances. The ensuing first-person narrative is a portrait of living in nature and the reasons for the profound influence of Abilene on Robert. The novel records the building of the hut, Robert?s walks on the common, and his subsequent attempts to come to terms with his marriage and career, parenthood, white male privilege, art and music, the life-long impact of his father''s alcoholism, and his aunt''s insistent example to live an unroofed life.Common is concerned with quietness and circularity and, by extension, with implicitly challenging fictional conventions of cause and effect. The novel?s drama revolves around the effects and layers of damage, but from the perspective of what is neither quite confronted nor named.

Poems about historical women in STEM fields.Women have always worked in technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Sometimes they made important discoveries and breakthroughs; sometimes they simply managed to exist and persist despite endless obstacles and a criminal lack of acknowledgment. Carefully researched, thoughtful, pitch perfect and precise, these poems about historical women scientists are hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. There are women here whose names you may know (Rachel Carson, Mae Jemison, Hedy Lamarr, Ada Lovelace, Beatrix Potter) and others you probably don?t (Tapputi-Belatekallim, June Bacon-Bercey, Eugenie Clark, Beatrice Medicine, Gladys West). Randall has a fine-tuned knack for metaphor and plain language, and her poetry unpicks injustice alongside complex scientific ideas. If you?ve seen Randall?s poems in Scientific American, Analog, or Asimov?s Science Fiction, you may already have been drawn into these extraordinary stories. Illustrated with portraits by NASA artist Kristin DiVona, these poems will resonate with scientists, feminists, thinkers, learners, philosophers, poets, and truth-seekers young, old and everywhere in between.

A group of Victorian women, shipwrecked on an island in a parallel universe, fight for change.Thirty "surplus" mothers from asylums, workhouses, and the streets of Victorian England are shipwrecked on an island in an alternate universe. To survive, they must create a new society amid the lethal black sands and mysterious beasts. How will they shake off the patriarchal chains that bound them and raise their children to be free? How will Betty, who longs to be back under the guidance of her master, survive, as the community evolves? And who is watching them?