Fern Press – serie

FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2026'Remarkable' GUARDIAN'Anyone disturbed and frightened by our current moral and intellectual morass should read it' PANKAJ MISHRAA leading genocide scholar explores the history of Zionism, Israel’s lurch towards extreme oppression and violence, and why it stands accused of crimes against humanityProfessor Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment in 1948 received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide.What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism, genocide, and the future of Israel with rigour and depth.

Change the way you see the world - and our place in it'Absolutely enthralling' BILL BRYSON'Stunning' GUARDIAN'Beautifully written and meticulously researched . . . Vivid and powerful' RICHARD DAWKINS'The revelations in this book made me rethink the world' CHRIS PACKHAMFrom evolution to capitalism, ‘survival of the fittest’ has shaped our view of the world. But we got it wrong – and our mistake has brought us to the brink.For the history of life on Earth is much more than a story of competition. The natural world has been forged and sustained by small miracles of co-operation between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria – these partnerships are ubiquitous, lifelong and an essential guide for a better future.In Togetherness, Rowan Hooper reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through these remarkable stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, he explores how co-operation is fundamental to life itself and to protecting our shared future.Togetherness will change the way you see the world, our place in it and our obligation to its hidden wonders.

A Sunday Times Best Book of the Year'A welcome antidote to the dangerous cult of overdiagnosis and the commodification of normal distress' PHILIPPA PERRYHow can we reconsider the way in which we think about, treat and care for those in distress?More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism.More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders.Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment.So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?In Searching for Normal, Sami Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and presents a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

A TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and WASHINGTON POST Book of the Year'Absolutely gripping' GUARDIAN'A marvel' SUNDAY TIMES'Magisterial' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'Extraordinary and generous' WASHINGTON POST'A gripping testimony of terror and loss' OBSERVERA moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading non-fiction writerOn 13 November 2015, nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War. V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of those who helped to carry out these attacks. Lasting nine months, from September 2021 to June 2022, it consisted of 14 defendants, 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a file 53 metres high.In V13, Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day to its last, taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers, survivors, family members and the defendants. He assembles, in painstaking and subtle detail, a human portrait of the crime – a study of good and evil, and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two.Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre, fusing passion, curiosity and a profoundly humane intellect, making him one of the most distinctive and important literary voices today.

'Profound and timely' Tony Juniper'A tour de force' Lorna GibbA panoramic history of life, revealing the forces that have shaped our world – and could shape it againLife evolved in two phases. First as organic life – from single cells to the astonishing diversity of the natural world. Then as human culture – from hunter-gatherers to cities, empires and civilisations.In this sweeping and original work, Jonathan Loh reveals a radical idea: culture as a form of life. Unfolding across deep time – from the earliest organisms to the rise of Homo sapiens, from foragers to farmers, from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution – Life Story uncovers the hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse. One species has come to dominate the Earth. Yet as machine intelligence gathers pace, Loh asks whether human supremacy is only a phase in life’s longer story.What can we learn from our past?And what might this mean for our future?

AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024'A masterclass in masterpieces' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty' JOSHUA COHEN'Sizzles with passion' TOM McCARTHYFor more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor’s survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel.Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Also included are Japan's Natsume Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, as well as Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and WG Sebald.Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.

'A miracle of a book' CELIA PAULA stunning meditation on how the physical world can bring us back to earth from the edge of griefIn the aftermath of catastrophic loss, a mother and her young son cross the Atlantic, taking refuge in a wooden house on a remote strip of land. Viewed from the shore, where land meets sea, the horizon is a line that holds their attention and draws them in. Camera in hand, she charts their progress and starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family.Writing with precision and clarity, Coutts combines the real with the fictional, thinking through art, poetry, geology, maps and Minecraft to present a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, the visible and the invisible and the fragility and strangeness of the ocean and its borders.

A WASHINGTON POST, TIME and SLATE Book of the Year'A stunning debut' GUARDIAN'Stylish and unsettling' OBSERVER'A true original' PAUL MURRAY'Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling' LAUREN GROFF‘There is no other writer like him’ MAGGIE NELSONA strange and brilliant teenager’s first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel about the joy and anxiety of youth by the acclaimed memoirist and cult writerNicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable. He’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his mostly absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs and an outsider at school. Then, one day, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be psychiatric: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.As the paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas and his friends hunt for answers why – in art, music and literature – as they reach for a life beyond the confines of where they’ve grown up and what’s expected of them.Thrilling, surprising and startlingly funny, Pan takes us inside the human psyche, where we might just discover that the forces controlling our inner lives are more alien than we want to believe.'I didn't want the book to end' BLAKE BUTLER'Tender and searching, an addictive philosophical quest' CHETNA MAROO‘I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune’ BEN LERNER

A sexy, daring and darkly comic odyssey: a young woman rails against conformity to create a life outside the social order by Prix Goncourt winning poet Laura Vazquez'Unique, poetic, and radical – witty and so beautiful it brings tears to your eyes.' Édouard Louis‘Her prose has a marked propulsive power… There is a dreamlike quality to her writing, reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and Dostoevsky’ TLSWinner of the Prix DécembreThe Forces follows an unnamed narrator on an intoxicating journey through an unnamed French city from scenes of childhood to city streets, an underground cult, a lesbian bar, a drug den, through screens and memories, and into the wilderness until she ultimately discovers her vocation as a writer.Laura Vazquez writes with a raw, vital and poetic force, dissecting everyday life and the violence of politeness with radical lucidity, exploring language, labour, desire, bodies, capitalism, belief, love. She asks what it means to live truthfully in a world structured by lies, and whether tenderness, attention or language itself might offer a form of salvation.Bold, unsettling and original, The Forces is one of those rare novels that invents a new way of seeing the world and will leave you irrevocably altered.

For more than two decades, Marwan Barghouti has been held in an Israeli prison cell, much of that time in total isolation. Yet his voice has never been forgotten.Described by the Economist as ‘the world’s most important prisoner’ and often referred to as Palestine’s Mandela, Barghouti remains the most widely supported Palestinian political leader. As a long-standing advocate of peace grounded in justice and equality, he has become an enduring symbol of unity and hope – even from behind bars.Unbroken brings together, for the first time, a powerful and intimate portrait of Barghouti’s life and struggle for a free Palestine: private letters to his family, personal writings, correspondence with global public figures, press interviews, public statements and rare personal photographs.This is his story, in his own words. Unsilenced, unbroken.

**Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025**The joyous and electric memoir from beloved music icon Neneh CherryA SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, EVENING STANDARD, UNCUT AND ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024‘Intoxicating . . . Seductive’ SUNDAY TIMES‘Fabulous’ VOGUETop of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry.But navigating fame and family wasn't always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy.Musician. Songwriter. Collaborator. Activist. Mother. Daughter. Lover. Friend. Icon. This is her story.'I loved it' ZADIE SMITH'Enthralling' BERNARDINE EVARISTO'Thrums with life' GUARDIAN'A living testament to artistic invention' OBSERVER