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In the early 20th century, a woman and her husband emigrate from Estonia to Canada. Voices over Water is their own record of this passage, evoking in the fine detail of their experience the larger forces to which their lives are subject: war, the unyielding land, famine, silence, and the irreducible strangeness of the bond between them.

In late 1914 Apollinaire swapped the high life of avant-garde Paris for the mud and desolation of war in the trenches. But his poems of this period are wholly different from those that for English readers have come to define the genre of war poetry: exploding shells are compared to champagne bottles, and juxtaposed with the orgy of destruction are nostalgia for antiquity, impatience for the future, melancholy and exuberance. The new translations in this bilingual edition comprise mostly poems written after 1914, but include ‘Zone’ (in the first English version since Samuel Beckett’s to match the original’s use of rhyme) and some other pre-war poems. A century later, they remain as daring and alive as when they were written.

Paul Watson won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu; he has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria ... Deriving from correspondence between poet and war reporter and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and from transcripts and Watson’s own memoir, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare.

Mischief with air guns and catapults, stealing birds’ eggs and collecting butterflies, climbing through a window in the gents in the Rio to see the Saturday morning films for free, leg-crunching tackles in football games in muddy fields – these are the rites of passage of a group of kids growing up in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s. They are recreated in Axholme by Mike Bradwell in the voice of one of the gang, a voice that is funny, outrageous and true.

The Simplon Road is a book about literary obsession. In contrasting essays that delve into childhood and early reading, Ann Pearson and Charles Boyle – who have both written novels about the 19th-century French writer Stendhal – chronicle their involvement with an author who was notoriously keen to cover his tracks.

‘Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss – because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’ – Jennifer Hodgson

Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.

‘Themorning is all angles and degrees / like the coots practising lift-off ...’ The world is multi-faceted and these are not one-track poems: dread, dismay and outright hilarity are all woven in. The essays that follow the poems also exhibit both acute concentration and an openness to other perspectives.

It was the year of Brexit and Trump and also the year when David Bowie died and Jo Cox was murdered and the Premier League was won by who? There was a lot to talk about.

Marjorie Ann Watts’s previous book was described by Salley Vickers as ‘shrewdly observed and wickedly funny’. The stories in this new collection, rooted in the interplay between past and present, demonstrate that age is no less immune to surprise and discovery than childhood.

There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to?Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 176 Interruptions - a revised and expanded edition of 99 Interruptions, published in 2022 - attempts to take them in its stride.

Growing up in Pakistan, Annie experiences the death of her mother, goesto college in Karachi, falls in love with a singer in a band, marries the wrongman, and all her life has visions and illnesses no doctor can explain. Shecomes to believe that external events can cause disruptions in the body, and episodes from other times and placesare interwoven with Annie’s narrative.

When Erin Vincent was fourteen her parents were struck down by a truck driver. Years later, the number fourteen reverberates – in books and films and art and music and in the lives of the people who made them. Finding in these places not comfort or consolation but an infinite network of correspondences, Fourteen Ways of Looking becomes a paradigm for the act of writing itself.

The Absent Therapist is a book of soundings, a jostle of voices that variously argue, remember, explain, justify, speculate and meander . . . Sons and lovers, wanderers, wonderers, stayers, leavers, readers and believers. These are gripping narratives, with intriguing shifts of register, but they are also technically experimental and daring. Each sentence is weighed, poised. The intelligence with which Will Eaves handles language is modest and rare. The absent therapist is the listening reader to whom this compelling book is a fabulous gift.

Including critical analyses, an extensive interview with McBride and previously unseen early drafts, About a Girl is a comprehensive account of an unprecedented literary phenomenon that enlarges our understanding of both McBride's novel and the contemporary literary scene.

Lara Pawson's This Is the Place to Be is a stark, compassionate and troubling text that summons a fragmentary autobiography, circling experiences from her growing up in England and her time as a reporter covering civil wars in Angola and Ivory Coast. She deals with big questions through an intimate mosaic of lived experiences - the blank, funny, awful, gentle shards that remain in memory years after events have taken place - returning her again and again to the themes of identity, violence, race, class, sexuality and the everyday lives of people across several continents.

In June 1819 Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal) is rejected by the woman he loves. Beyle finds himself stranded in an afterlife populated by tourists, shoplifters and characters in novels he hasn't yet written. Footnoting a host of other writers, An Overcoat is an obsessional play upon the life and work of one of the founders of the modern novel.

City Works Dept. has work to to: repairs, maintenance, above all the paying of attention to a stratum of British society whose people and occupations have suffered from long neglect. Philip Hancock's poems do the job with patience, empathy and unshowy skill.

A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, according to Darwin, is ‘the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions’. A blush says something and it speaks true … Texts by Jack Robinson (with citations from a range of fiction and non-fiction) and colour photographs by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (including many of her own artwork) investigate the cultural and social history of the blush from the late 18th century to the present day.

In his first collection of poetry after a career as a novelist spanning five decades, Paul Bailey offers in Inheritance an intimate reckoning. The poems mine memories of childhood, illness and lost loves with unflinching honesty, a generous humour born of self-knowledge, and great depth of feeling.

First poetry collection for 8 years from a long-admired poet who has twice been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize

Broken Consort is a chronicle of close attention (to books, films, plays, paintings and life itself) by Will Eaves, author of Murmur (winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize)

Brilliant Corners is both an inquiry into and a redressal of inherited cultures and the language that trips off our tongue. Its preoccupations are the tangible damage inflicted by empires, plunder of the global money markets, disfigured lives, and the bitter salves of Western privilege. Engaging with writers and artists in the European canon, in a wide range of forms the poems take necessary risks in their scrupulous approach to different experiences.

An urgent and insightful response to Covid and the public events of 2020, written in instalments between March and August 2020 in the poem-journal form of Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice’s widely-admired personal response to the rise of Fascism in the late 1930s