Sort of Books

Following her acclaimed Ladies'' Lunch novella (2023), Lore Segal continued to create stories about a fictional group of nonagenarian friends as they faced the last years, months and moments of their lives. For Lore Segal, the importance lay in ''still talking'', and still writing to the very end. Fittingly, her last story was published in the New Yorker in the week that she died, aged ninety-six.This posthumous novella of interconnected stories and vignettes is enriched by Segal''s inspiring wit and wisdom, her compassionate gaze, and her unquenchable curiosity about life. It''s a book that entreats us to keep talking, regardless of differences and the trials of ageing - a book that we''ll still be talking about many years hence.

WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025''The most thrilling fiction of the year ... an absolute triumph'' Catherine Taylor, Financial Times''A genre-busting inquiry into life and art, youth and Virginia Woolf'' Guardian, Books to Look Forward to 2025''I loved Theory & Practice ... raw, funny, truthful, youthful'' Tessa Hadley''Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book'' Ali SmithIt''s 1986, and ''beautiful, radical ideas'' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a ''deconstructed'' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ''the Woolfmother'' into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia''s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London''s meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber.In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London''s grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of ''princelings'' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

Comet in Moominland, the first full-length Moomin novel, was published 80 years ago. Tove revised the story a decade later and again in 1968, reframing adventures (and adding new characters). Now for the first time this edition can be read in English, in a brand new translation. Tove Jansson''s story of a mysterious, threatening comet, and the journey of discovery by Moomin and his friend Sniff across the Lonely Mountains, has captivated generations of readers across the world. The story introduced much-loved Moomin characters, including free-spirited Snufkin, the philosophical Muskrat, the intuitive Snorkmaiden, obsessional Hemulens and strange Hattifatteners. Tove Jansson wrote her story in 1946 and its themes evoke both the threats and devastation of war and a determination to have fun whatever. Or as Snorkmaiden observes, ''We began talking about dancing. Suddenly you started talking about the comet. I''m still talking about dancing.''

With an introduction by Jeffery Renard Allen It''s the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a ''real American''. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds - ''with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow'' - that she has fallen in love. Lore Segal described Her First American as ''her favourite child'', a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the charismatic Carter Bayoux, the glimpses he offers of New York''s Black cultural life and the loneliness of addiction, are drawn with nuance, wit and truth. Segal illuminates from an outsider''s perspective both the deep wounds of racism and a bright moment of Black American and Jewish solidarity.

WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025''The most thrilling fiction of the year ... an absolute triumph'' Catherine Taylor, Financial Times''A genre-busting inquiry into life and art, youth and Virginia Woolf'' Guardian, Books to Look Forward to 2025''I loved Theory & Practice ... raw, funny, truthful, youthful'' Tessa Hadley''Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book'' Ali SmithIt''s 1986, and ''beautiful, radical ideas'' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a ''deconstructed'' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ''the Woolfmother'' into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia''s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

In the run-up to Moomins eightieth anniversary (2025) the spotlight is on The Moomins and The Great Flood and the first glimpse it offers of Moomin Valley. Tove Jansson wrote this first ever Moomin story in 1945, in the wake of World War II, and although a children's tale, it vividly evokes the displacement of refugees throughout Europe at the time. A global Moomin.com campaign will celebrate the eighty years of the Moomins with the slogan 'the door is always open', emphasising Jansson's timely message of kindness and inclusiveness towards those forced to flee to safety. This new format edition includes an introduction by much loved author Frank Cottrell-Boyce and a full colour fold-out 'Moomin history' poster.

Now with added author content - a Map of Colombo as viewed from the afterlife + Dramatis Personae A magical realism whodunnit set amid Sri Lanka's civil war Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's foremost author delivers a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.

A Fabulous Find from the Moomin Archives A classic Moomin Book with COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS And a beautiful FOLD-OUT PANORAMA In 1961, at the request of her Italian publishers, Tove Jansson created a unique new edition of Moominland Midwinter, the tale in which Moomin wakes from hibernation to contend alone with the mysterious world of winter. The text and internal line drawings of this much loved story were unchanged, but Tove added a beautiful new cover illustration and seven glorious full-page colour illustrations. This was the only Moomin title that she illustrated in colour and it has long been a prized item for collectors. For the first time, it is available in English. For this new Sort Of edition, Tove's nephew James Zambra restored the original cover and colour illustrations, along with a glorious fold-out panorama of characters from the book, which Tove Jansson painted for the first French edition. Sort Of Books have also added a back cover designed for the first Swedish edition of Moominland Midwinter, an image used on the first Puffin book, and a playful bookplate 'wreath' from the first German book. We believe this is the most beautiful Moomin book ever published!

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunstroem, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietila, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes. Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty. '... Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing. She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It's all peace and quiet now.'

'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

In her last, most profound and poignant Moomin story, Jansson explores themes of loss, legacy and hope. The Moomins have left their beloved Moominvalley but as winter draws near Snufkin, Mymble, Toft and others move into the Moominhouse to await the family's return. Could that gentle flicker of light on the horizon be their boat?

Featuring the much loved stories in Waterstone's Oxfam bestseller, The Invisible Child and The Fir Tree - the Moomins' gloriously funny and generous take on Christmas - Tales from Moominvalley collects together nine delightful Moomin short stories. Highlights include The Spring Tune (which Jarvis Cocker described as the best story about composing music) and The Last Dragon in the World, revealing the true essence of friendship. A perfect Christmas gift to complete the set of Moomin classics.

Moominpappa yearns to make a fresh start, to find a rocky island and lighthouse where he'll feel alert and important again. And so the Moomins set sail for a new home. Moominpappa's longed-for-island proves as mysterious and wild and he'd hoped. It even has a deserted lighthouse. But how is Moominmamma to grow her flowers and what could have happened to the last keeper of the lighthouse?

For Simon Bill's drunken anti-hero, an abstract artist forced to haunt private views to siphon the free booze, the picture looks bleak. He has been dumped by his curator girlfriend and the only dealer left with time for him is the one who sells him drugs. But his luck changes when he's offered a job as artist in residence at a neurological institute. Enthralled by the characters and conditions he encounters - and infatuated by the beautiful amnesiac Emily - he sees a chance to revive his career, and love life, with a neuro-inspired show. However, all is not quite as it seems at the shiny new institute ...In this mordantly witty (modern) art farce, Simon Bill lifts the lid on the venal, novelty-seeking world of London's contemporary art scene, while enlightening us on the fascinating workings of the human brain, particularly as it shapes our response to art. The result is a delightfully dark, highly original novel that is both eye-opening and fun.