Over the past six years Butcher has relentlessly pursued the logic of this enquiry, destroying his own work in the process and re-presenting the fragments of paint sandwiched between sheets of glass like specimens; a ‘natural history’ of his creative past.

Sumptuously documented by photographer Peter Abrahams with a fascinating essay by Jonathan Watkins and a revelling ‘in conversation’ between Eric Butcher and artist/write David Batchelor, Trace Elements chronicles this unique and compelling on-going project.

‘Strikingly accomplished . . . utterly compelling.’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A masterpiece of biography.’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘A total joy to read.’ SARAH BAKEWELL
‘I feel like I’ve been waiting for this book my whole life.’ SHEILA HETI

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN:
THE GUARDIAN
THE SPECTATOR
THE TELEGRAPH
THE INDEPENDENT
ARTFORUM
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
NPR’S FRESH AIR

From the celebrated author of Square Haunting comes a biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells.

‘Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me,’ wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding – and contested – writers of the twentieth century.

In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso’s portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography – a veritable celebrity.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas’s turn to tell the stories – especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible.

This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human.

‘The Island makes an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of both Auden’s intentions and his achievement in the first part of his writing life.’ Andrew Motion, New Statesman

‘Jenkins, miner-like, digs down into the verse and brings every influence up to the surface . . . a richly striated landscape, not only in complexity of mood, but also courtesy of its cast of strange, dazzling and sometimes highly dubious characters.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island is daring in its ideas, written with loving tenderness and implacably true in its revisionism. Jenkins shows Auden’s mentality to have been graven by the Great War, proves his youthful aspiration to become an English national poet and renews our sense of the numinous.’ Richard Davenport-Hines, TLS, Books of the Year

‘[The Island is] a dense, detailed and hugely rewarding account of the making of this very English poet before he became an American one.’ Peter Parker, TLS Books of the Year

‘In The Island (Faber, £25), an epic study of the young W.H. Auden, Nicholas Jenkins brilliantly scales up fine-grained literary criticism into wide-angled cultural history.’ Boyd Tonkin, Spectator

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.

W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling ‘secrets’ of Auden’s early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art.

In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man.

The Island considers, as well, Auden’s imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden’s disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left ‘the island’.

Auden’s preoccupations – with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity – are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today.

‘A superb, deeply researched study of Auden’s early work and identity. Jenkins’s understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War – assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers – is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.’
Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

‘Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer’s ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.’
Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover

‘The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden’s early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden’s ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.’
Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden

Kate Evans’s art style – which takes inspiration from James Gillray, Raymond Briggs, Quentin Blake and Beatrix Potter – and her incredible eye for historical detail, costume, architecture, even the fonts on the page, add up to a quintessentially English vision of Austen’s world. There is even an embroidered chapter, where the artwork is created in thread paintings. The whole combines to create a unique and original work of biographical scholarship which gives fresh insights into the impact of the events of Austen’s life on her work.

Including fun additional features on cats in bookshops, libraries and hotels, and illustrated with charming line drawings, this is a perfect gift for cat-lovers everywhere.

From the celebrated author of Square Haunting comes a biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells.

‘Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,’ wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding – and contested – writers of the twentieth century.

In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso’s portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography – a veritable celebrity.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas’s turn to tell the stories – especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible.

This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human.

‘Inspiring’ – Cathy Rentzenbrink

‘Fascinating’ – Joe Moran

‘A very lovely book’ – Kate Mosse

Bestselling and award-winning authors share the secrets to their success, and the hard lessons they have learnt along the way.

Where do the best ideas come from? How do you stay motivated? What does it take to become a published author? And how do you actually make money from your writing? For over five years the hosts of Always Take Notes podcast have posed their nosiest questions to some of the world’s greatest writers. The result is a compendium of frank and frequently entertaining guidance for living a creative life.

FEATURING Alexander McCall Smith, Anne Enright, Candice Carty-Williams, Christina Lamb, Colin Thubron, Colum McCann, David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, George Packer, Hadley Freeman, Hollie McNish, Ian McEwan, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Jeffrey Archer, Joanne Harris, Kate Mosse, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Kit de Waal, Louise Doughty, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Maggie Fergusson, Mark Haddon, Marlon James, Max Hastings, May Jeong, Merve Emre, Monica Ali, Niall Ferguson, Nikesh Shukla, Oliver Bullough, Orlando Figes, Patrick Kingsley, Rory Stewart, Rosie Nixon, Ruth Ozeki, Ruth Padel, Sam Knight, Samanth Subramanian, Samira Shackle, Sara Baume, Sebastian Junger, Simon Lancaster, Simon Scarrow, Stig Abell, Terri White, Tessa Hadley, Tim Rice, Toby Young, Tracy Chevalier, William Boyd, William Dalrymple and many more …

PLUS BRAND NEW BONUS INTERVIEWS WITH Harlan Coben, Victoria Hislop, Lee Child, Megan Nolan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Philippa Gregory, Jo Nesb ¢, Paul Theroux, Hisham Matar, Bettany Hughes.

Almost everything you’re familiar with was first mentioned in an authorised biography written by Dickens’ close friend John Forster 150 years ago. It’s the version of events that Dickens himself chose to make public, and newly accessible archives reveal that it’s crammed with gaps, inconsistencies, and outright lies.

There’s the sister whose existence Dickens kept secret and the Jewish relations whose faith he strove to conceal. There’s plagiarism, fraud, and suicide.

And that’s only for starters.

Helena Kelly, author of the acclaimed Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, retells Dickens’ story from his childhood to his deathbed, uncovers the truths he tried to keep hidden, and offers a fresh – and deeply troubling – perspective on the man who remains one of Britain’s best-known novelists.

You won’t be able to look at him – or his work – in the same way again.