The Indigo Press – förlag

With over 80 billion pieces of clothing produced each year and with human made stuff now outweighing living biomass, this is the story of the first sorting site for the deluge of items we discard every single day.Having spent decades exploring charity shops for bargains and treasure, Tansy Hoskins decided to dig deep into the world of charity shop volunteering. From used underwear to wolf pelts, Charity Shop World is a personal account of sorting through donations to reveal the entanglement of people and products. This book also investigates the export of clothes to overseas markets and landfill, revealing hidden shareholders behind a multi-million pound business.Taking us to the heart of a country hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, Charity Shop World reveals surprising places of human connectivity, where local communities struggle to find their way through economic hardship to reach a more sustainable way of living.In a world where ‘broken’ things and ‘unwanted’ people are expelled to the margins of society, this book is a powerful call for a new way of living to rise up from the debris of overproduction and consumption.

When did we stop dreaming of a better future?What happened to the sci-fi golden age of the 1950s, when futurism flourished as a discipline and drove innovation?As a society, either we struggle to imagine something good for the times to come or we fail to picture any future at all. Our world is in polycrisis; we face climate breakdown, societal fracturing, governmental collapse, war, and rising inequality.The exciting outcomes we dreamed of, from the space race to the wonder material plastic, have brought contingent problems of their own. We haven’t yet developed mainstream and accessible new narratives to replace these failures, and if you ask someone to imagine ‘the future’, they’ll probably still picture flying cars.Designing Hope resets expectations. Through the lens of four emerging futures, Sarah Housley shows us visions of hope that inspire action and critical thinking about how we’ll live in the decades to come.

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.

Could you put your beliefs before your family?Epic Annette is the extraordinary true story of Annette Beaumanoir: brilliant and fierce, she was a medical student living in a world at war who, at nineteen years old, joined the French Resistance and saved the lives of two Jewish children in Paris on the eve of their deportation to the camps.As a doctor and mother devoted to justice and equality, Annette was later found guilty of treachery for supporting the Algerian FLN in France and sentenced to ten years in prison. The story of her dramatic escape, trial in absentia and decades in exile, separated from her children, resembles that of the great heroes whose love for individuals had to compete with their destiny and love of humanity.Annette will remain with you forever. With this gripping personal tale of heroism and grief, author Anne Weber joins Homer in her ability to conjure a titan in an epic poem.

From Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of I Choose Elena, comes an immersive polyphonic memoir exploring the intricacies of abuse, trauma, and shame.Through the voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, Lucia speaks of vulnerability and acceptance, and the reclaiming of ourselves in a world that repeatedly asks us to carry the weight of the shame of the atrocities committed against us.Widely researched and boldly argued, My Body Keeps Your Secrets reveals the secrets a body keeps — the trauma that can rewrite our biology, our relationship with sex, and how we connect with others, establishing Lucia's credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker of a new generation.

In a time of war, what is the shape of love? Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have been wrenched from school and forced to abandon her books as her family flees to safety. In this unfamiliar, crowded and often hostile community, she must carve out a new existence. As she struggles to maintain her sense of self, she remains fiercely protective of her mute brother, Hagos – each sibling resisting the roles gender and society assign.Through a cast of complex, beautifully-drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia questions what it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be an individual when circumstance has forced the loss of all that makes a home or a future.

What if the child you mourned had never died?A 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.

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.

What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true spirit of a nation?In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert Mugabe’s rule.In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the ‘coup that was not a coup’, the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women – her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.

How do you live with a history you can’t escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago? And what is it like today? These are the questions at the heart of Sanderling, a classic work of literary inquiry by Anne Weber, one of Germany’s leading contemporary authors. Weber embarks on a personal journey into the past to uncover the life of her great-grandfather Florens Christian Rang (1864–1924), whom she nicknames Sanderling after the darting shorebird. A Protestant pastor in Prussian-ruled Poland, Rang served a church whose mission to "Germanise" the local population would later be echoed in the murderous ambitions of the Third Reich. After leaving the church, Sanderling moved in the circles of Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Buber. He joined a group of writers, artists, and philosophers who dreamed of a utopian society, even as one of his sons, Weber’s grandfather, would go on to become a Nazi. By deciphering his letters and diaries, and travelling in his footsteps to Poland, Weber traces the contradictions and crises, the reckonings and departures of a complex legacy. With literary and philosophical references including Sontag, Sebald and Nietzsche, Weber combines her family history with a broader examination of ethics and morality to create a travel diary through time, reaching back to understand her ancestors.

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. When tragedy strikes her friend group. As more friends slip away and her family fractures, Gaia vows to make the world pay for all the things it has denied her.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.

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?

A compulsive saga of three generations of women and the ghost of a man cut in two on a train track, spanning Calcutta, London and New York.Chatterjee Mansion is a 1940s art-deco house in Calcutta with floors of polished marble and rooms filled with lies and omissions. In this house, late on a rain-soaked night, the turn of a single key unlocks a story that throws its women on a journey across the worlds of the living and the dead, and shatters all they know to be true.And I Am The Arrow is a kaleidoscopic tale of flight and survival, of forbidden love and wasted ambition, and secrets that hide in plain sight. Trying to make sense of this world is Mishu, a young woman recently returned to India, just as Niyoti, her grandmother and the family matriarch, falls into a coma. As Mishu, her mother Ira, and their servant Bani wait to see if Niyoti wakes or leaves them forever, long-buried truths come to the surface, revealing a rich and dramatic story of India’s social and political struggles entwined with the family’s gains and sacrifices.Narrated by the women and the ghost who haunts them all, And I Am The Arrow is an exploration of death and grief, of memory and reality, and of the ways we love and bruise each other.

How do you imagine the future when your story traps you in the past?Harare, 2000. Gabrielle is a newly-qualified lawyer, fighting for justice for a young girl. Ben is an urbane and charismatic junior diplomat, attached to Harare with the American embassy. With high-level pressure on Gabrielle to drop her case, and Robert Mugabe’s youth wing terrorising his political opponents as he tightens his grip on power, they begin a tentative love affair. But when they fall victim to a shocking attack, their lives splinter across continents and their stories diverge, forcing Gabrielle on a painful journey towards self-realisation.Irene Sabatini, Winner of the 2010 Orange Award for New Writers, navigates Zimbabwe’s unfolding political crises, showing how the dehumanising effects of political violence can shape and remake a life. An Act of Defiance is a sweeping political drama about a young woman’s fight for love and agency in troubled times.

The environmental emergency is the greatest threat we face. Preventing it will require an unprecedented political and social response. And yet, there is still hope.Academic, physicist, environmental expert and award-winning science communicator Paul Behrens presents a radical dual analysis of a civilisation on the brink of catastrophe.Setting out the pressing existential threats we face, he writes, in alternating chapters, of what the future could look like, at its most optimistic and pessimistic, and details the steps we can take to ensure our survival. In lucid and clear-sighted prose, Behrens argues that structural problems need structural solutions, and examines critical areas in which political will is necessary, including women’s education, food and energy security, biodiversity and economics.

AI has unparalleled transformative potential to reshape society but without legal scrutiny, international oversight and public debate, we are sleepwalking into a future written by algorithms which encode regressive biases into our daily lives. As governments and corporations worldwide embrace AI technologies in pursuit of efficiency and profit, we are at risk of losing our common humanity: an attack that is as insidious as it is pervasive.Leading privacy expert Ivana Bartoletti exposes the reality behind the AI revolution, from the low-paid workers who train algorithms to recognise cancerous polyps, to the rise of data violence and the symbiotic relationship between AI and right-wing populism. Impassioned and timely, An Artificial Revolution is an essential primer to understand the intersection of technology and geopolitical forces shaping the future of civilisation, and the political response that will be required to ensure the protection of democracy and human rights.

Everybody knows a Chauvo-Feminist…The 2017 #MeToo movement was a flagship moment, a time which empowered women to share their stories of sexual harassment and abuse in a spirit of solidarity and in demand of change. But have some men simply changed tactics?Acclaimed author Sam Mills investigates the phenomenon of the chauvo-feminist, the man whose public feminism works to advance his career, whilst his private self exhibits age-old chauvinistic tactics. Through testimonies and her own experience, Mills examines the psychological underpinnings of the chauvo-feminist, exploring questions of modern relationships, consent, and emotional abuse and asks how we might move beyond ‘trial by Twitter’ to encourage an honest and productive dialogue between men and women.Sam Mills is the author of numerous books, including The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair, 2013), and recent memoir of love, madness and caring The Fragments of My Father (Fourth Estate, 2020).

Tesya has reasons to feel hopeful after leaving her last job, where she was subjected to a series of anonymous hate crimes. Now she is back home in London to start a new lecturing position, and has begun an exciting, if tumultuous, love affair with the enigmatic Holly. But this idyllic new start quickly sours.Tesya finds herself victimized again at work by an unknown assailant, who subjects her to an insidious, sustained race hate crime. As her paranoia mounts, Tesya finds herself yearning for the most elemental desires: love, acceptance, and sanctuary. Her assailant, meanwhile, is recording his manifesto, and plotting his next steps.Inspired by the author’s personal experiences of hate crime and bookended with essays which contextualise the story within a lifetime of microaggressions, Lessons in Love and Other Crimes is a heart-breaking, hopeful, and compulsively readable novel about the most quotidian of crimes.

Walking on Cowrie Shells focuses on the lives of hyphenated-Americans with a multi-cultural heritage in the United States and Africa. The book spans genres – literary realism, horror, mystery, YA, science fiction – and features complex, fully-embodied characters: tongue-tied linguistic anthropologists, comic book enthusiasts and even water goddesses. The author hopes her stories entertain readers while also offering them a counterpoint to prevalent “heart of darkness” writing that too often depicts a singular “African” experience plagued by locusts, hunger, and tribal in-fighting.

Two schoolgirls in Bolton take acid just before their English class. A film journalist shares tea and a Kitkat with Marcel Proust, more or less, during a long train journey. An afterparty turns into a crime scene. Colleagues, maybe in love, have lunch and don’t quite talk about their relationship. A woman flees to New Orleans and finds unexpected treasures there.In her electric debut, Anna Wood skips through the decades of a woman’s life, meeting friends, lovers, shapeshifters and doppelgängers along the way. Delights and regrets pile up, time becomes non-linear, characters stumble and shimmy through moments of rupture, horror and joy.Written with warmth, wit and swagger, these stories glide from acutely observed comic dialogue to giddy surrealism and quiet heartbreak, and always there is music – pop songs as tiny portals into another world. Yes Yes More More is packed with friendship, memory, pleasure and love.

Lily O’Farrell started drawing cartoons as a way of making sense of the everyday sexism she encountered as a young woman, and her Instagram feed has now grown to over 225,000 followers.In Kyle Theory, Lily addresses the pressing issues of the day through hilarious and relatable cartoons, from #MeToo and the patriarchy, to racism, internet culture and how to deal with trolls. Feminism is for everybody, and so is this book.

In Tomorrow Is Too Late, Grace Maddrell collects testimonies of activism and hope from young climate strikers, from Brazil and Burundi to Pakistan and Palestine. These youth activists are experiencing the reality of the climate crisis, including typhoons, drought, flood, fire, crop failure and ecological degradation, and are all engaged in the struggle to bring these issues to the centre of the world stage. Their strength and determination show the urgency of their cause, and their understanding that the generations above them have failed to safeguard their environment.  With contributors aged between eight and twenty-five, this is an inspiring collection of essays from the most vital generation of voices in the global struggle for climate justice, and offers a manifesto for how you can engage, educate, and inspire change for a more hopeful future.

Arrival is an exploration of the ripple effects of domestic abuse. The story follows a young woman fleeing her home country and trying to rebuild her life abroad, after she has suffered violence at the hands of an alcoholic father.Prompted by her therapist, the unnamed protagonist starts processing the abuse experienced in her childhood while also pondering what it means to be a mother when consumed by trauma. The novel bends form to accommodate the narrator’s scattered mind and her attempt to assemble a version of herself through fragments and stitches of memories, borrowed conversations and minutiae that linger and haunt.Despite grappling with heavy themes – trauma, rejection, cultural identity – the narrative is infused with love and determination and interwoven with folk tales and rituals. It depicts the ways in which we are resilient, capable of carving our own paths and reimagining our lives.

From Richard Seymour, one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals, comes a characteristic blend of forensic insight and analysis, personal journey, and a vivid respect for the natural world. A planetary fever-dream. An environmental awakening that is also a sleep-walking, unsteadily weaving between history, earth science, psychoanalysis, evolution, biology, art and politics. A search for transcendence, beyond the illusory eternal present. These essays chronicle the kindling of ecological consciousness in a confessed ignoramus. They track the first enchantment of the author, his striving to comprehend the coming catastrophe, and his attempt to formulate a new global sensibility in which we value anew what unconditionally matters.

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with unforgettable anecdotes and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxieties.Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.

Shimmering writing depicting California’s Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but were regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families.The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters—straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old—are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve the men they love who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently—perhaps literally— haunted.In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It’s a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family. Just across the road from the slums where she grew up, she encounters a world that is starkly different from her own – yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her. Within Noemi’s lament is also the herstory of Mauritius; the story of women who have resisted arrest, of teachers who care for their poorest pupils and encourage them to challenge traditional narratives, of a flawed Paradise undergoing slow but unstoppable change.In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

Should we become parents? This question forces us to reckon with what we love and fear most in ourselves, in our relationships, and in the world.When Gina Rushton considered this decision, the choice was less straightforward than she had assumed. Her search for an answer only uncovered more complexity. How do race, gender and class affect our experiences of pregnancy, birth, and parenthood? How do we address the paradox of creating new life on a planet facing catastrophic climate change? How do we navigate uncompromising workplace cultures and the pitfalls of excessive emotional labour? How does our own childhood impact how we choose to parent, if we do so at all?Drawing on a depth of knowledge gained through her extraordinary work as an award-winning journalist, as well as her personal experiences, Rushton wrote the book she and others needed to transform the discourse around the parenthood dilemma.