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The spellbinding new book by the prizewinning writer Kapka Kassabova tells the story of her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe: a gripping portrayal of human-animal interdependence, and a plea for a different way of living. Living with one of these communities over the course of one summer, Kassabova experiences the intensity, brutality, beauty and isolation of their existence. She witnesses the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance – the seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this work and the rich histories that shaped this Balkan region, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of the small community. Anima is an extraordinary portrayal of pastoral life, where humans and animals exist in profound interdependence. Kassabova conjures the spirit of this remarkable place with intimacy and empathy, and helps us imagine how we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world.

A story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends AN OBSERVER FICTION BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024 Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits - torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love. Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose startling astronomical discoveries may never have been acknowledged. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Thomas finds solace studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love? Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas. In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world, and the sheer miracle of being alive.

From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring - and surviving - an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art - and finding the strength to stand up again.

IF YOU COULD NEVER STAY, WHERE WOULD YOU GO? The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets The Midnight Library in this life-affirming debut novel of adventure, wonder and self-discovery. Paris, 1885- Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her satchel that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she is stricken by a mysterious illness. When a visit to a doctor only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she discovers it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her incredible lifelong journey on the run from her condition. From the scorched dunes of the Calanshio Sand Sea, to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and, ultimately, to truly live. But the longer she wanders, the more she understands that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else's...

Two teenage girls fixated on each other's bodies enter into a destructive competition; a woman's encounter with her ex forces her to reflect on the women's group that saved her; a couple's future is called into question after the damp expert they hire for their bathroom offers them free counselling; an older man's buried grief emerges during an altercation with a mother driving a 4×4; and over the course of a bitter winter a waitress lacks the money to fix an impacted tooth as the cracks begin to show in her precariously balanced life. Free Therapy takes us into the inner lives of women and men who are versed in the language of therapy, possessed with the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but finding themselves unwilling to doing so. As her characters try and fail to connect - via sex, friendship, screens and work - Rebecca Ivory explores desire in all its forms, revealing the ways in which we posture and present, and the softness and insecurities that lie beneath. Perfectly observed, wry and illuminated by moments of sympathy and wisdom, Free Therapy shows us ourselves as we truly are.

Spring 2015, New York. On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast. Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she? As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.

Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily - independent, headstrong, rational - has never quite believed in love; while Sam - confident, passionate, romantic - thought he understood it inside out. Lily is an award-winning television documentary maker. Sam is an award-winning playwright. Both are in relationships that have quietly expired, but their encounter makes Lily and Sam come alive again. As they begin to work together on the page and on screen, an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist. Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds and, for Lily, offers her a surprising form of liberation. But what will happen to them when familiarity, illness and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? Taking us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal across a lifetime, What Will Survive of Us reveals what is left of us when we strip away every layer.

This bold new take on the life and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt explores her lessons for living in an age of uncertainty The violent unease of today's world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all. Born in the first decade of the last century, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of the world's most influential - and controversial - public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. In place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it. Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt's life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present. It calls on each of us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did - unflinchingly, lovingly and defiantly - through our own unpredictable times.

Monica is a dazzling, spectacular tapestry of interconnected narratives that together tell a life story. Abandoned by her free-spirited parents, this eponymous protagonist is a rag-to-riches character who succeeds in clawing her way to the top - only to lose it all in a stroke of bad luck. Monica lives out the rest of her contemplative days in search of her parents, encountering a cast of eccentric characters who help piece together the story of her life. This graphic novel extravaganza is an unforgettable ode to the many genres that have defined the comics form - from war, romance and horror to crime and the supernatural. Mysterious, uncategorisable and quintessentially Clowesian, here is a multi-layered masterpiece born of a lifetime of inspiration. Monica marks the creative apex of Daniel Clowes' distinguished career, one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century.

The genre-bending and masterful new collection of ghost stories from Jeanette Winterson A ghost has no substance, but it has power - and presence - and it can appear in alternative forms. In the metaverse, we are all alternative forms. The Dead will join us. Our lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips. We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They've simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect. To live amongst us. To remind us. To tempt us. To take their revenge. These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead - of those we've lost, loved, forgotten... and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Illuminating, provocative and bold, The Universe in a Box is the story of the technologies that allow us to look up, to learn and to discover our place in the cosmos How do scientists study the entire universe? How can we make sense of its vast, intricate workings? We are part of an incredible chain of events stretching 13.8 billion years into the past and even further into the future. But what does that future hold? And will we ever truly understand our cosmic home? The Universe in a Box is Andrew Pontzen's tribute to simulations - the remarkable computer codes that, over the last century, have allowed us to understand the distant past and far future of the universe. It reframes what we think we know about galaxies, black holes and matter itself. And it reveals the stories of the pioneering scientists who unlocked the mysteries of space, from redshift to improbable dark materials that pass, ghostlike, through solid rock. Illuminating, provocative and bold, this is the story of the technologies that allow us to look up, to learn and to discover our place in the cosmos.

It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird. The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of The Guardian's Counrtry Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts. Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more wreathed in mystery. Captivated, Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence. Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead. Yet this is also a book about so much more. Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the profound interconnections of the whole biosphere. From the deep-sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun, he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum. These birds without borders are a perfect symbol to express the unity of the living planet. But they also illuminate how no creature, least of all ourselves, can be said to be alive in isolation. We are all inextricably connected. Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer's Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth by one of our greatest nature writers.

Is it possible life without romantic love isn't so bad? An essential memoir about building life on your own terms When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed. With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.

Set in the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing. Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.

SELIN IS THE LUCKIEST PERSON IN HER FAMILY: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's her second year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with her? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel-a life worthy of becoming a novel-without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself? Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice - no matter the cost. Next on the list: international travel. Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either / Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.