The Indigo Press

The Spinster Cookbook is a piercing exploration of what it means to cook for one in a society designed for couples and families. With sharp cultural insight, Eli Davies takes us on a culinary tour of the single woman’s kitchen, a space shaped as much by a search for freedom as by appetite.  The kitchen has always been a complex space for women: a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself? Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships and what it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. How does this shape your mealtimes, the way you shop for food, the kitchen equipment you use, and your relationship to cleaning up and looking after yourself? With warmth, humour and insight, The Spinster Cookbook explores shopping and leftovers, solo meals and dinner parties for one, joy and grief and the politics of living on your own. This is a book about making a home in the face of housing precarity, loneliness, heartbreak and social norms, and finding independence, pleasure and self-expression through cooking. It’s a cookbook of sorts, and a manifesto for living differently.

What if the child you mourned had never die? harrowing family story about forced adoption, a sinister chapter in East German history, and father-son relationships expressed through a shared love of nature and fishing. 1978, near Leipzig, East Germany. For Katrin and Hans, every parent’s worst nightmare comes true when they are told that their newborn baby Daniel has died. Amidst the shock and horror of the news, Katrin doubts what the doctors have told her, feeling that they are lying and that Daniel is still alive: doubts which Hans refuses to acknowledge, and which lead to the end of their marriage. After the collapse of the GDR, happy in a new relationship, Hans receives an unexpected phone call which prompts him to investigate the past. His research, which takes him deep into recent history, is met with resistance and silence at every turn, until at last a fishing expedition enables the family to start healing from their trauma. Mayfly Season is an extraordinary portrait of totalitarian state cruelty, the promise of a new beginning and the infinite healing capacity shared by humanity and nature.

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside.  Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame.  When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her. Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart, No Such Thing As Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

With an original style and with poetic repetition, the nameless protagonists, ‘My Women’, bring succinct and emotionally charged stories that evoke life during war in Ukraine with an intensity that is excruciatingly difficult yet deeply moving. My Women won the BBC Book of the Year 2024 in Ukraine and was shortlisted for EBRD Literature Prize 2025. The book has been published in the US, France, Sweden, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, Greece, Lithuania and Italy, with translations forthcoming in Bulgaria, Latvia, Spain and Finland.

Across time and location, women were raised to be agreeable and "good." Hyper-visible as sexual objects but invisible as full people. Living in a physical world created by men for men. Taking on the ultimate role of birth-giver and caretaker, yet seeing it remain an unsung act, even as it's a God-like creation. Only in midlife did Nolan begin to realize she was capable of living outside these cages of conditioning so slyly insidious that they're nearly invisible.  Good Woman elegantly probes the knotty conditions themselves, the costs of adhering to them, and what happens when one refuses to comply. The twelve stunning and unforgettable essays blend memoir, reportage, and history to create a collection that is alternately bold, brash, and explosive, and ravishingly tender, sensual, and joyous. Nolan takes aim at big and old ideas, and she does not miss. Hers is a testimony to witness and to savour.

Anouchka Grose, a leading psychotherapist specialising in climate anxiety, was in general happy with her London life which included a glamorous partner, a teenager, even a spare room. But, shaken by the apparent futility of Western activism in the face of inertia and corruption, she began to question her choices, both material and emotional. Instead of seeking outward answers she went inwards, creating an alternative Eat, Pray, Love for the polycrisis. Inner prepping, or altering your private, interior world as a form of civil resistance, is an oblique way of coming at the classic feminist idea that the personal is political. Grose takes us on an exhilarating, funny, erudite and ultimately uplifting tour of the practices she tried out, including ego-dismantling retreats, animal communication, and tantra, offering myriad ways to revolutionise ourselves and others.

Tamarin Bay, Mauritius, is a travel agent''s paradise: a tropical ocean, fishermen unloading their daily catch, children building sandcastles, surfers riding giant waves. But just along the shoreline is the beach of La Preneuse, the taker of souls. The island is haunted with tragedy and the remnants of colonial rule. But it is also home, where Anita Ram longs to be following the collapse of her marriage. After enduring a shocking betrayal and the sexism and racism of a cold Britain in the early twenty-first century, she finds comfort in simple things; her mother''s cooking, her childhood bedroom, and a handsome architect. Will these be enough for Anita to find happiness again, or will the ghosts of her past consume her?

In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay. When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship. Gaia’s encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider—excluded from a privileged life and beyond the possibility of happiness. Winner of the Campiello Prize, The Bitter Water of the Lake is an unflinching portrait of a generation striving to make a place for themselves in a world markedly different from the one their parents promised them.

The Japanese novel comes of age in this gripping story of love, art and life as a group of architects competes to design the new National Library of Modern Literature in Tokyo. In 1980s Japan, newly-graduated Toru Sakanishi joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. As the sweltering summer months approach, the team migrates from the bustling centre of Tokyo to the beautiful rural surroundings of Mount Asama, where several love stories are woven together and Sakanishi encounters four remarkable women who change the course of his life. From honouring ancestors to illustrating the complexities of the living, Summer at Mount Asama is a prize-winning novel beautifully translated by National Book Award winner Margaret Mitsutani, offering a moving and elegant portrait of the clash of modernity and tradition.

Fourteen-year-old Billie rarely crosses the boundaries of her high-rise housing estate. By the end of the month their money just about stretches to pasta with ketchup, but her mother, Marika, lights up Billie''s world with her imagination and big heart. One day they receive an unwelcome visit from her Hungarian grandmother, and Billie loses much more than the colourful everyday life she shared with her mother. No longer able to ask Marika questions, Billie sets off alone in their old Nissan - determined to meet the father she never knew and find out why she keeps dreaming about the sea, even though she''s never been there. Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.

Has the land come to mimic us vile deeds, or have we only mimicked the land? Daughter. Mother. Glory. Wife of The Devil O'' Th'' Moor. Hope Gleason has many names. The child of a shepherd raised in the remote moors of Northern England, Hope has always understood the satanic brutality of the land. But when an ear-splitting, unknowable sound destroys the nearby village, Hope must embark on a dangerous journey to survive through the ravaged land with a lad, newly orphaned and alone, under her wing. As they trek the wilds together to find her husband, her violent past chases her at every turn and long-buried memories begin to resurface. A pitch-black, magnetic, and unforgettable meditation on the nature of love, evil, and the power of redemption, Land of Hope mixes history and the myths of the English moors to tell a compelling modern English fable of serial killers at the end of the world, by way of the apocalyptic hinterland of The Road, in the style of Everything Under or Elmet.

In a London call centre, Jimmie helps holiday makers with myriad problems, but he is hardly a model employee. He doesn''t simply provide customer service to his clients and advice to his colleagues, he gets involved in their fantasies and frustrations, and now he''s about to be hauled up in front of the boss. From perfecting his roles as an undertaker and as a clown to performing duties above and beyond his employment contract, he debates the importance of the optimum shade for lipstick and bathroom walls, the pros and cons of nudist versus textile, as well as the psychological impacts of an Italian mother and an emotional support animal. This is the second, ribald, scatological novel from the brilliant author of The Appointment. Jimmie''s sly, sharp, melancholy insights into the indignities of a world which aims to eliminate the human will make you laugh, weep and never look the same way at an electric carving knife again.

Moscow, 1985. Four teenagers – Anya, Milka, Petya and Aleksey, whose lives, like those of their Western counterparts, are fuelled by sex, alcohol and cigarettes – yearn for a world of Levi’s, Queen, foreign travel and the freedom to choose their fates. Instead, they encounter heartbreak and tragedy, while all around them Soviet policies, cruel but familiar, are giving way to untested concepts such as glasnost and perestroika and a brief flourishing of hope before the next repressive regime take root. This is the hour between dog and wolf, twilight, when one state has ended and another has not quite begun. Although it depicts a chaotic and desperate era, this exceptional debut novel pulsates with life. It is radiant with friendship and love, the power of international literature, values and politics, as its characters struggle to survive, to save their country and one another.

In 1970s Switzerland, high up in the Valais mountains, is a village where everyone knows everything, and no one says anything. Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father’s abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance. Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence. From then on, Jeanne’s hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor’s cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all. Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage. My Favourite is a powerful novel about departure and return, of love, guilt and shame, and the paralysing effects of trauma. Sarah JollienFardel forcefully describes the price to be paid for Jeanne’s hard-won emancipation, as history inexorably repeats itself.

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. Like drug addicts, we are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and interviews with users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of this machine, asking what we're getting out of it, and what we're getting into.

Can an eleven-year-old boy succeed where others have failed? Can he recover a kidnapped child, disprove a false accusation of assault or win a sleep-deprivation competition that has driven others mad with tragic consequences? He can, if he is accompanied by a black rooster, his protector and friend. And if he is Martin, orphaned after a massacre, full of wisdom, courage and a pure heart. Too good for the selfish and idiotic villagers around him, his integrity entrances an itinerant painter with whom he departs on a quest. His heroic adventures through a morally abhorrent landscape, physically ravaged by war and famine, keep the reader cheering for him and his companion as this fairy tale for adults unfolds. Set against a pseudo-medieval post-apocalyptic backdrop reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter and Missouri Williams, this bestselling novel shines with the inner radiance of good deed in a naughty world that will leave you haunted, horrified, and completely riveted.