GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS – serie

GOD IS DEAD, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew. In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength - and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. If only Nathan can discover how to use it. So it is that the Master begins to scheme against him - and Nathan has to fight his way through the betrayals, secrets, and vendettas of the city where God was murdered, and darkness reigns... WELCOME TO MORDEW - THE FIRST IN A MONUMENTAL NEW TRILOGY FROM THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR, ALEX PHEBY

In her debut collection of short stories, the prize-winning author Uschi Gatward takes us on a tour of an England simultaneously domestic and wild, familiar and strange, real and imagined. Coupling the past and the present, merging the surreal and the mundane, English Magic is a collection full of humour and warmth, subversion and intoxication - and announcing the arrival of a shining new talent.

THINGS ARE AGAINST US is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Lucy Ellmann. Provocative, smart, angry, wise, and very, very funny, the essays in Things Are Against Us cover everything - from feminism to environmental catastrophe; labour strikes to sex strikes; Little House On The Prairie to Donald Trump. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket.

The Book of Desire is the award-winning (and Women's Prize-shortlisted) writer Meena Kandasamy's luminous translation of the Kamattu-p-pal, a 2000-year-old song of love and pleasure and the third part of the Thirukkural - one of the most important texts in Tamil literature. Written by the poet Thiruvalluvar, the Kamattu-p-pal section of the Thirukkural focuses on love and female sensuality. It is the most intimate section of this great work - and also, historically, the part that has been most heavily censored. Although hundreds of male translations of the text have been published, it has also only ever been translated by a woman once before. The Book of Desire is Meena's own feminist reclamation of the Kamattu-p-pal. With her trademark wit, lyricism and passionate insight, she weaves a magic spell: taking the reader on a journey through 250 kurals (short verses), organised under separate headings - 'The Pleasure of Sex', 'Renouncing Shame', 'The Delights of Sulking - the result is a fresh, vital, and breath-taking translation. This is a book that fizzes with energy, is full of delight - that conveys powerful messages about female sensuality, agency, and desire. It is a revolution 2000 years in the making.

It's 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her - and who she has also been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name; and her life, alongside it. 1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted... But she is sure she can sell a painting - and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered. In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller - and fuller. Sarah Bernhardt - Colette - Eleanora Duse - Lina Poletti - Josephine Baker... these are just a few of the women sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic; furious and funny; in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a novel that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past - their constant efforts to push against the boundaries of what it means, and can mean, to be a woman - that also offers hope for our present, and our futures.

Nathan's companions are scattered, making for Malarkoi, the city of the Mistress, the Master's enemy. They are hoping to find welcome there, or at least safety. They find neither - and instead become embroiled in a life and death struggle against assassins, demi-gods, and the cunning plans of the Mistress. Only Sirius, Nathan's faithful magical dog, has not forgotten the boy, and, bent on revenge, he returns to the shattered remains of Mordew. He senses something in the Manse at its pinnacle - the Master is there, grieving the loss of his manservant, Bellows - and in the ruins of the slums he finds a power capable of destroying his foe, if only he has the strength to use it. So the stage is set for battle, sacrifice, magic and treachery in the stunning sequel to Mordew... Welcome to Malarkoi.

THE DEAD ARE RISING. Nathan Treeves leads an army of ghosts from the underwater city of Waterblack, heading to the final, destructive confrontation with the forces ranged against him. But although he is more powerful than ever, he also has new challenges to face. Most notably, Sharli, an assassin whose journey we follow - from her perilous childhood in Malarkoi, to slavery in Mordew, working in a nail factory, to making murder her trade under the ever watchful eye of the terrifying Mr Padge, and on to the final climactic encounter between Nathan, The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade In this, the monumental conclusion to the Cities of the Weft trilogy, Waterblack pushes the boundaries and possibilities of the fantasy genre further than ever, with more style than ever, posing vital questions about the way power can be abused, who decides who has power - and what it means to have none. It's a book that speaks to and about our own times with magnificent eloquence. And it is a book for all time.

So speaks the narrator of Muriel Spark's haunting tale, 'The Leaf-sweeper', before going on to recount the disturbing and mercilessly witty story of a certain 'madman' - Johnnie Geddes, hell-bent on outlawing Christmas - who meets the most terrifying of all apparitions: himself.

Hester, a teenage girl, is left in charge of a young child in a cold, gloomy manor house under the looming shadows of the Cumberland fells. She hears strange organ music playing, but everyone tells her it isn't happening. She is forbidden from visiting the mysterious East Wing. She is desperate to keep her young charge safe from some unknown disaster, one she feels sure is coming, and - as the terrible events that have happened in her new home become clear to her - she is increasingly unable to do so...

CHARLES DICKENS'S LAST GREAT GHOST STORY is also his most personal, inspired by a terrible accident on a train he himself was riding on. He revisited this haunting memory on the figure of a railway signalman, who hears bells ringing in his signal box when no one else does, sees a figure no one else can see... and who, following those ominous signs, always witnesses horrible incidents. 'I am troubled, sir,' he cries. 'I am troubled!' But what exactly is it that is troubling the signalman? ... And what does it want?

Told as a series of journal entries that move backwards in time, How Do People Stay The Same follows the life of Patrick Boyd - from the present-day contentment of family life and back to a darker, lonelier childhood. How Do People Stay The Same lays all of Patrick's experience before us, with the challenges of work, housing and all the other pinpricks of existence jostling with his complex inner world. It reveals a fragile man ground down by the world around him - but who might just be able to change and might just have the hope of a brighter future. Featuring the exquisite prose and lacerating wit that readers loved so much in All My Precious Madness, How Do People Stay The Same is also a deeply tender project - an exploration of family, childhood, love, and the personal bonds that tie us together.