A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks’ “Love Song to the Nation” trilogy.  All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in  All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal,  renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness-not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.  

As  bell  hooks  uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The  Utne Reader  declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.”  All About Love  is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.  

“Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.”  -  Maya Angelou

There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out.

Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last.

That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free.

Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered.

A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul.
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READER REVIEWS – JOIN THE ORLANDA OBSESSION:
‘Hilarious, life affirming, haunting?truly perfect in prose, plot, and concept. Just wow‘
‘A powerful novel, witty, wicked and teasing‘
‘It’s the perfect book‘
‘This is the second book I’ve read by her and it’s another masterpiece‘
‘Reading this has confirmed Jacqueline Harpman as one of my favourite writers I’ve ever encountered’

The Ladder brings together discussions between women – about work, love, growth, challenge, the big decisions and the stories of their lives.

Offering inspiration and wise counsel from some of the world’s most acclaimed and influential women, this book is an insight and a trove of solidarity, turning over ideas of change, anger, illness, imposter syndrome, self-knowledge, purpose, how to not panic in a crisis and how to stop worrying you’re boring when there isn’t one.

Amidst these pages are discussions with women who have achieved extraordinary things in their fields and pursuits, from politicians like Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Rayner to scientists like Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, activists like Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, film-makers like Waad Al-Kateab, religious leaders like Rose Hudson-Wilkin and broadcasters like Joan Bakewell.

Told through a series of absorbing vignettes spanning from her childhood days to gaining her PhD in forensic psychology, Underclass is a memoir about extraordinary strength, the complexities of belonging, and finding your power even when it feels as though the world is against you. Do you bend to fit in, or do you accept that you will always stand out? Do you run away from your roots, or love them for making you who you are? Do you fade into mediocrity, or do you change the world?

Taylor recounts with dark humour and unflinching detail the various lives she’s lived, covering the violence suffered at the hands of her abusers, the realities of becoming a mother in her teenage years, coming to terms with her sexuality, putting herself through university, and overcoming underhand discrimination at work. She poignantly delves into both the classist and misogynistic double standards that she has faced throughout her life, whether she was waking up on a roundabout by the estate or chairing a parliamentary conference. You can take the girl out of the council estate, but you can’t take the council estate out of the girl. Especially when it made her who she is today.

The result is deeply moving, searingly honest, horribly funny and, above all, unforgettable; a memoir that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

A Waterstones Best True Crime Book

Nagyrev, Hungary, 1929. Over 160 mysterious deaths. A group of local wives conspiring together, and one woman at the centre of it all?

In 1929, a dark secret at the heart of a Hungarian farming village was finally exposed. For more than 15 years, Nagyrev had harboured a group of serial killers, one of the largest murder rings ever recorded. They came to be known as The Angel Makers.

Led by a sharp-minded midwife known as Auntie Suzy, the local wives brazenly rid themselves of unwanted relatives, spooning doses of arsenic into soup and wine, stirring it into coffee and brandy. Murder was just another chore.

Over 160 mysterious deaths later, the unlikely gang of murderesses came to justice in a sensational trial reported the world over. With absorbing detail, Patti McCracken pieces together the lives of Auntie Suzy, her wide network of killers, the unsuspecting victims and the villagers who witnessed it all.

The Angel Makers is the utterly gripping account of an almost unbelievable – yet entirely true – moment in crime history.

‘Stunning . . . Built like a thriller, moving, wise and illuminated on every page with love’ – Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat

When Carolyn Hays’s child made clear to the family that they were all wrong, he was not a boy, but, in fact, a girl, the Hays shifted pronouns, adopted a nickname and encouraged her to dress as she felt comfortable.

One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on their door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this threat that instilled in them a deep-seated fear for their child’s safety in the Republican state they called home. And so they uprooted their lives to the more trans-accepting Northeast United States, though they were never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core.

Intimate and thought-provoking, A Letter to My Transgender Daughter is an ode to Hays’s brilliant, brave child, as well as a cathartic revisit of the pain of the past. It tells of the brutal truths of being trans, of the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and of the lengths a family will go to shield their youngest from the cruel realities of the world. Hays asks us all to love better, for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves.

A Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a celebration of difference, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future, but moreover, it is a love letter to a child who has always known herself and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Originally published as A Girlhood: A Letter to My Transgender Daughter

Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are-gasp-fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point?

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, from Samantha Jones as “The Slut” in Sex and the City to the iconic Mean Girl, Regina George, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture-and society-is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

In 1931, Gregory Hemingway’s life begins in Kansas City, Missouri. The third and favourite child of an overbearing father, Greg is a paragon: a star athlete, a crack shot, bright and handsome and built like a pocket battleship.

In 2001, Gloria Hemingway’s life ends in a Miami women’s correctional institution. Complex and contradictory, radiant and resilient, it is a life that has flourished against the odds and been lived to the full.

Inspired by true events and spanning seventy years of the last century, this is the story of a miraculous existence, told with beauty and compassion. Transporting the reader back and forth in time, from Cuba to New York and Montana to Florida, The Broken Places explores what it means to grow up in the shadow of a man famous for his masculinity, to bear the weight of expectation and a tragic family legacy, and to finally step out into the light.

Exploring and explaining the most important ideas and events in LGBTQ+ history and culture, this book showcases the breadth of the LGBTQ+ experience. This diverse, global account explores the most important moments, movements, and phenomena, from the first known lesbian love poetry of Sappho to Kinsey’s modern sexuality studies, and features biographies of key figures from Anne Lister to Audre Lorde.

Dive deep into the pages of The LGBTQ + History book to discover:

– Thought-provoking graphics and flow-charts demystify the central concepts behind key moments in LGBTQ+ history, from eromenos and erastes in the Ancient World to political lesbianism.
– Features insightful quotes from leading historians, philosophers, cultural commentators, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, activists, and politicians.
– Includes biography boxes and directory entries on the lives of important but lesser-known individuals, alongside well-known names including Sappho, Oscar Wilde, Anne Lister, Harvey Milk, and Marsha P. Johnson.
– Global in scope with a localizable directory.

The LGBTQ+ History Book celebrates the victories and untold triumphs of LGBTQ+ people throughout history, such as the Stonewall Riots and first gender affirmation surgeries, as well as commemorating moments of tragedy and persecution, from the Renaissance Italian “Night Police” to the 20th century “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. The book also includes major cultural cornerstones – the secret language of polari, Black and Latine ballroom culture, and the many flags of the community – and the history of LGBTQ+ spaces, from 18th-century “molly houses” to modern “gaybourhoods”.

The LGBTQ+ History Book celebrates the long, proud – and often hidden – history of LGBTQ+ people, cultures, and places from around the world.