‘Remarkable . . . a work of real power and beauty’ AMIA SRINIVASAN, author of The Right to Sex
‘Intimate and epic’ SATHNAM SANGHERA, author of Empireland

In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’.

Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up he heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as a student before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerilla, and how his mother had thrown off the strictures of the past to build a successful career helping other women do the same. Yet Simukai’s early life was also steeped in British tradition. With his classmates he sang English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket.

Then, in 2002, he was one of thousands to leave the country as it descended into political violence and economic collapse. His new home: a boarding school in the north of England. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself.

Chasing Freedom is his profound and remarkably moving story – that of a boy shaped through his parents’ buried trauma by the great currents of late-twentieth century history. It is the story of a family haunted by the cause of liberation, and of a new generation, still searching for their promised freedom.

‘Utterly captivating . . . told with such clarity and precision that I forgot I was reading’ DINA NAYERI, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

‘Will teach you more about the legacies of colonialism than a hundred op-eds or a dozen textbooks’ SATHNAM SANGHERA, author of Empireland

‘Simukai Chigudu writes compellingly, lucidly and beautifully . . . an eye-opener’ ZEINAB BADAWI, author of An African History of Africa

Why do so many Black Americans-whether privileged or poor, urban or suburban, young or old-live in a state of chronic anxiety, fear, and shame? Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem breaks through collective denial and dares to imagine a more liberatory framework for understanding “self and identity in a world where loss is commonplace.”

With visionary insight, hooks exposes the underlying reality that it has been difficult-if not impossible-for our nation to create a culture that promotes and sustains healthy self-esteem. Without self-esteem people begin to lose their sense of agency. They feel powerless. But it is never too late for any of us to acquire the healthy self-esteem that is needed for a fulfilling life.

While originally written in 2002, hooks’ insights into the heart and soul of the Black American identity crisis continue to ring true. Through history, pop culture criticism, and hard-won wisdom, hooks writes about what it takes to heal the scars of the past, promote and maintain self-esteem, and lay down the roots for a truly grounded sense of community and collectivity.

Moving beyond the ways historical racial justice movements have failed, hooks also identifies diverse psychological barriers and collective traumas keeping us from well-being. In highlighting the roles of desegregation, education, the absence of progressive parenting, spiritual crisis, or fundamental breakdowns in communication between Black women and men, bell hooks identifies mental health as a revolutionary frontier-and provides guidance for healing within the Black community.

“Characters so vividly drawn that their raucous voices seem to echo long after they have vanished from sight.” – Wall Street Journal

Growing up in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early twentieth century, Banine had an ‘odd, rich, exotic’ childhood that left her continually caught between East and West, tradition and modernity.

She remembers her luxurious home, with endless feasts of sweets and fruit; her beloved, flaxen-haired German governess; her imperious, swearing, strict Muslim grandmother; her bickering, poker-playing, chain-smoking relatives. She recalls how the Bolsheviks came, and they lost everything. How, amid revolution and bloodshed, she fell passionately in love, only to be forced into marriage with a man she loathed – until the chance of escape arrived.

By turns gossipy and romantic, wry and moving, Days in the Caucasus is a coming-of-age story and a portrait of a vanished world, and of how the past haunts us. Banine’s gripping memoir provides fascinating insight into the history of the little-known and understood Caucasus region. It tells the poignant story of how, having grown up in Azerbaijan, Banine is forced to flee her home-country following the Russian Revolution, carrying with her the memories of a life that would never be the same again.

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison’s literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison’s remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.

Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams’s work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book’s title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.

‘A sparkling debut. Bold, eloquent, personal and clear-eyed, Alayo Akinkugbe is a major new voice in writing about art, museums and culture. This book will shift your frames of reference, expand your canvas, and give you hope for the future – changing how you look at art while also making you look again at your ways of seeing’ Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums

‘Thorough, accessible, essential’ Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art without Men

‘To explore a history of Black communities across centuries of art is a love letter to the practice, a gift of knowledge and an ode to those who’s creative expressions give us much to be inspired by today’ Sofia Akel, cultural historian and founder

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored.

In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void.

Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, as well as Blackness in museums, in feminist art movements and in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history.

Refreshing and accessible, this promises to start a much-needed conversation in culture and education.

Told in the form of two intensely personal ‘letters’, The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America.

In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for  how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?

With  Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World-and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems-like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more-she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.

This book aims to not only be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action.  Be A Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with human populations around the globe, Herman Pontzer has conducted research that reveals the wonder of our biological diversity, documenting the connections between lifestyle, landscape, local adaptations and health. In this book, he takes us on a tour of the human body and the surprising ways in which it survives in an uncertain world: from the Andean groups who have developed increased lung capacity to the Sama divers who have larger spleens.

With so much variation that can be handed down genetically, for better or worse, the way we understand our biology and its interplay with our cultural environments holds huge importance for how we understand our world and one another, including the biggest questions of our day, such as the health impact of social inequality. Eye-opening and profound, Adaptable is a revolutionary reappraisal of an overlooked science.

The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.

Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.

Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world.

The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.