THE INDIGO PRESS – serie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

A confrontation with the destruction of the Amazon by a writer who moved her life into the heart of the forest.In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from São Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to “reforest” herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies. Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Òkòtó is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them.The title Banzeiro Òkòtó features words from two cultural and linguistic traditions: banzeiro is what the Amazon people call the place where the river turns into a fearsome vortex, and òkòtó is the Yoruba word for a shell that spirals outward into infinity. Like the Xingu River, turning as it flows, this book is a fierce document of transformation arguing for the centrality of the Amazon to all our lives.

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.

An extraordinary memoir of anticipatory grief, seventy-two minutes of life and a silent maternity leave, from artist and academic Tamarin Norwood.A few months into pregnancy, Tamarin Norwood learned that the baby she was carrying would not live. Over the sleepless weeks that followed, Tamarin, her husband and their three-year-old son tried to navigate the unfamiliar waters of anticipatory sorrow and to prepare for what was to come.Written partly during pregnancy and partly during the silent maternity leave that followed, The Song of the Whole Wide World is an emergency response to grief held somewhere between the womb, the grave and the many stories that bind them: stories drawn from medical science, poetry, liturgy, vivid waking dreams of underwater life, and knowledge held deep within the body.This profoundly moving and intimate account offers a lyrical and fearless meditation on birth, death, and the possibilities of consolation.

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.

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?

A gripping literary puzzle that unwinds the private lives of ten women as they confront tragedy in a small Massachusetts town.Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town’s industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper. Some are left to pick up the pieces, while others turn their backs, and all the while, a truth about that dreadful night begins to emerge.Told through the eyes of ten local women, Grabowski’s Women and Children First is an exquisite portrait of grief and a powerful reminder of life’s interconnectedness. Touching on womanhood, class, and sexuality, ambition, disappointment, and tragedy, this novel is a stunning rendering of love and loss, and a bracing lesson from a phenomenal new literary talent that no one walks this earth alone.

Exceptional short stories featuring young millennial women, blending dark fantasy and quasi-horror with humour and intellectual dashAnnouncing the arrival of a major talent, I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY is more a warning than a wish.Photos of women eating go viral, a cookie communicates a threat, and women working dead-end jobs become entangled in the performances around them. Everyday experiences of friendship, family, dating and desire catapult the reader into a creepy vortex of horror. Characters reveal themselves in slippery glimpses, through positive affirmations, social media accounts and secret appetites.With this collection of haunting and haunted stories, Marni Appleton immerses us in a world of fleeting encounters, empty couplings, break ups, bust ups, threesomes and ghosts, giving us a kaleidoscopic overview of twenty-first century life.‘These beautifully written, female-focused stories stayed with me long past closing the cover. Sensual, alive and haunting. Dark wisps of womanhood.’ – Lucy Prebble, Executive Producer and writer on the Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning HBO drama Succession‘This collection of wry and incisive stories explores navigating the sticky, glorious and more-often-than-not absolutely horrific terrain of late girlhood and early womanhood.’ –Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author of The Centre‘Truthful, dark, and walking the line between delicious and disturbing, I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY is a rich and haunting read. Savour or gorge, this is a very special collection of deceptively cutting stories.’ – Lottie Hazell, author of Piglet‘Smart, surprising, and witty, these stories are a joy to read.’ – Naomi Booth, author of Animals at Night ‘These tense stories of the zeitgeist show how the conditions of late capitalism promise women freedom while keeping them trapped in their economic and social circumstances. Clever, convincing and wry, they bowled me over. Like Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July before her, Marni Appleton writes about how it is to live now.’ – Julia Bell, author of Hymnal and Radical Attention‘Marni Appleton writes with insight, honesty and inventiveness into the raw, brutal spaces of girlhood and early womanhood. A powerful, political collection that maps intimately the minds and bodies of its characters, these stories stayed with me long after I’d finished.’ – Fran Littlewood, author of Amazing Grace Adams‘Such a wonderful collection, the writing so sharp, witty, dark, carefully observed and full of the realities of present day life.’ – Gerard Woodward, author of Legoland and I’ll Go to Bed at Noon‘Raw, fluid, intimate and believable.’ – Mariel Franklin, author of Bonding‘Deliciously dark, incisive and original, Marni Appleton has clearly mastered the short story, but more than that, she has mastered the art of winding her readers in ribbons of mess and mundanity that make up both fantastical and real life in a truly compelling collection.’ – Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us‘Glittering behind every fixed-on smile in this collection is a crystallised seam of horror. An illegally acquired cocktail of weirdness, body laughs, love and spite. I could not have liked it more.’ – Ben Pester, author of Am I in the Right Place?‘Tender, skewed and affecting stories told with a keen eye for the absurd and unsettling nature of being alive. A bewitching and twisted kaleidoscope of stories.’ – Isy Suttie, award-winning comedian and writer‘Appleton knows all the ways that women are seen, surveilled, and regarded. These excellent stories stare right back, and they brim over with insight and sharp intelligence.’ – Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences‘Marni Appleton’s debut collection of short stories is like a shot fired across the bow of contemporary feminism. Prophetic and profound at once, her stories are oblique glimpses of girls’ and womens’ lives in the age of Instagram, anxiety and heightened scrutiny of women – and especially of their bodies. Fresh, surprising and invigorating, Appleton’s stories resonate long after finishing them with a restless energy and a humane heart.’ – Jean McNeil, author of Day for Night: A Novel

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.

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 Tōru 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.

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing.To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.What she finds in the jungle is not only relentless oppression, but a deep longing for answers to an unsolved crime from her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women on a path of revenge and recovers the painful details of her mother’s death. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a psychological trip with a twist. It’s about the strength of individuals in the face of overwhelming violence, the problem of femicide in Brazil, and the haunting of a cold case.

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.

Coming of age in the early 1980s, Alison Hastie always knew she was different from the conventional young people around her. One night a voice spoke to her in a dream, telling her to ‘make shoes’, and this is how she spent forty years of her working life.Living on Dartmoor, travelling between the countercultural town of Totnes and the surrounding villages, Alison made a home and a life for herself based on the principles of second-wave feminism, the idea that small is beautiful, and a deep immersive commitment to craft. Her company, Green Shoes, was featured in the national and international press, and making shoes took her travelling as far as the north of Finland, but she remained rooted in her environment, family and the women’s collective which, like the Ship of Theseus, was consistent in its values despite many changes of personnel.Through personal tragedies, romantic relationships, motherhood, friendship, fire, flood and professional highs and lows, Alison describes her place in the long line of West Country radicals, teaches us how to hand-make a shoe, traces the history of shoemaking in politics and religion, and above all shows us the importance of being centred in place, time and community.

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.

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.

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.