‘This exceptional book, written with a mother’s love for her seven creative children, sensitively offers profound and original insights and perspectives that enrich our culture. I feel so much wiser for reading it.‘ Bernardine Evaristo

When Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s eldest daughter, Isata, made her solo debut at the BBC Proms in 2023, she could not have been prouder. Watching years of hard work transform into a transcendent performance was profoundly moving, both as music-lover and parent.

All fractured when her younger daughter turned to her in tears a few days later, having read online abuse about her sister. Isata, it was declared, did not deserve to be there. How do you prepare your child for the fact that no matter their talent, technique or dedication, they will be told they do not belong?

Through conversations with her extraordinarily gifted family, Kanneh-Mason explores what it’s like to come of age in these turbulent times, when Black artistic self-expression is so often met with disparagement and abuse online – and offers a hopeful, powerful way through.

‘A fantastic, shimmering work. Ysra Daley-Ward’s rich exploration of Black womanhood and familial complexities is a must read.’ Irenosen Okojie

‘From one of my favourite living writers, The Catch is a slippery shape-shifting delight. Yrsa’s novel is fluorescently dark and winding; brilliant in its investigation of refractions and meaning.’
Eloghosa Osunde, author of VAGABONDS!

‘Yrsa’s work is like holding the truth in your hands. A glorious living thing’ FLORENCE WELCH

A darkly whimsical debut about women daring to live and create with impunity.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.

Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts–together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

In the 1950s and 1960s one man dominated rugby coaching like no other: Roy Francis. He led teams to championships and Wembley finals, revolutionised the art of coaching and inspired his players to incredible achievements. But even more amazingly for those times, he was a Black man in a white world.

As the illegitimate child of a mixed-race couple who gave him up for adoption, his story recounts his upbringing in a Black family living in the Welsh coalfields, a childhood shaped by memories of the 1919 Welsh race riots and, foremost, his gift for rugby. Aged just seventeen, Roy played for Wigan and, despite facing racism, became the first Black player to play for Great Britain in either rugby codes.

Roy Francis became Hull rugby league club coach in 1951 where he introduced video-analysis, sports psychology and personalised training – revolutionary methods which turned a mediocre team into championship winners. His crowning glory came when his Leeds team triumphed in the famous 1968 ‘Watersplash’ Wembley Cup Final, before he headed Down Under as North Sydney Bears club coach.

Through archives, family members’ accounts and former players’ memories, Roy Francis tells the story of a family’s journey from slavery to sporting success, and of a remarkable man who defied prejudice to reach the pinnacle of rugby as a player, coach and leader.

‘What’s past is prologue?’

First published in the year 2000, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was one of the most celebrated novels of the new millennium. Adored by critics and readers alike, it remains a perennial bestseller, which still delights with the audacity of its scope and vision, its fresh-minted style, and the wit and warmth of its voice.

Funny, generous and big-hearted, it deals – among many other things – with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle.

A life affirming, riotous must-read of a book, it won the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.

‘Curl up with it, savour every sentence, then turn around and reread’ The Times

‘The outstanding debut of the new millennium’ Observer

Eight Weeks is a deeply moving and inspiring memoir that tells the remarkable life story of Baroness Young of Hornsey, from her childhood in foster care, to becoming one of the first Black women in the House of Lords.

Lola Young has been an actress, an academic, an activist and campaigner for social justice, and a crossbench peer. But from the age of eight weeks to eighteen years, she was moved between foster care placements and children’s homes in North London. It would take many decades before she was able to begin the search for answers to the long-standing questions that would help her make sense of her childhood.

In Eight Weeks, through her care records, fragments of memory, and her imagination where parts of her story are missing, Lola assembles the pieces of her past into a portrait of a childhood in a system that often made her feel invisible and unwanted. Alongside glimpses into her life as a peer, activist, and campaigner it tells the powerful story of her determination to defy the odds.

Eight Weeks is a spirited, eye-opening and beautifully written account of being a child in care and a Black child in a white family and is a vital part of contemporary Black British history.

‘A remarkable account of rejection, resilience and resolve’ MICHELLE GAYLE
‘Beautiful and harrowing, deeply unsettling and profoundly life-affirming’ JOHN AKOMFRAH
‘Superb, moving’ HELENA KENNEDY LT KC
‘An inspiring story from an inspirational storyteller’ GARY YOUNGE

In 2016, Marvin Rees was elected as Mayor of Bristol, the first time a major European city had elected a mayor of Black African heritage. Re-elected in 2021, his eight-year tenure has taken the city through everything from Brexit to Covid, the cost of living crisis to the fall of the Colston statue. With the eyes of the world on Bristol, Rees navigated a high-stakes balancing act to keep the city together – all the while dealing with racist abuse and personal threats.

His rise to political leadership was anything but straightforward. The mixed-race son of a Jamaican father and white single mother, he grew up in a household where money was tight and opportunity lacking. He first found purpose in the boxing ring, then, while at university studying history and politics, he passed the interview board for the Royal Marines, but failed the medical. Instead of the armed forces, he joined an international development agency, before becoming a broadcast journalist at the BBC. However, politics beckoned and, after winning a place at Yale’s prestigious World Fellows Program for rising global leaders, he was selected as the Labour Party candidate for Bristol’s first mayoral election in 2012. And lost.

Let’s See What Happens chronicles Marvin Rees’s fall and rise to political success – and how the failures along the way ultimately proved a blessing in what he learned about life. He describes both the challenges and opportunities he faced as a man and as mayor, helping his home city grow to national and international prominence.

Thoughtful, straight-talking, passionate, this is the fascinating memoir of one of the most charismatic leaders in British politics today.

‘Powerful and illuminating’  James Shapiro, author of  1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford ‘Winner of Winners’ 2023

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ‘snowy dove’ essential to Juliet’s beauty?

Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.

If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.

***

A  TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

‘Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.’  ADRIAN LESTER, CBE

‘Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed… A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.’ ADJOA ANDOH

‘Vivid? a thorough analysis but also a kind of love letter? Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise? Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.’  GUARDIAN

‘There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we’ve (most of us) never been willing to see him – and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.’  EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OF  PORTABLE MAGIC

My Story:  Mary Prince  – the thrilling story of the former slave and abolitionist.

Born in enslavement in Bermuda, Mary Prince travelled to England, escaped slavery and became a prominent abolitionist whose life story was the first of a Black woman’s to be published in Britain.    

Explore Mary’s incredible life with My Story.

• Perfect for any child wanting to learn more about  history’s untold stories
• Great background reading for Key Stage 2 & 3
• My Story: exciting stories with reliable and accurate historical detail  
• Experience history first-hand with My Story.