canongatebooks

Writers: please be aware of scammers impersonating Canongate editors https://canongate.co.uk/news/writers-please-be-aware-of-scammers-impersonating-canongate-editors/

Congratulations to the wonderful Katie Goh, whose fascinating and idiosyncratic (in the best possible way) Foreign Fruit – a personal history of the orange – has been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize.

'A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it' Katherine May

Available now in bookshops and online: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/415/9781837261178

A public service announcement for writers: please be very wary of scams. Canongate editors use email addresses from @canongate.co.uk and will not email you from other accounts.

We have heard several accounts recently of people who have been contacted by malicious actors claiming to be real Canongate editors. The scammers have expressed enthusiasm for the writer’s work and led them on with the ultimate goal of extracting money from them. This has even involved including other seemingly legitimate ‘people’ in email chains.

Double check any email purporting to be from a Canongate editor comes from @canongate.co.uk. If you are not 100% sure feel free to email info@canongate.co.uk and we can tell you if an editor has been in touch with you.

The same is true for approaches from other publishers: verify the domain. Double check with a known email address if necessary.

International bestseller Robert Seethaler returns with THE CAFÉ WITH NO NAME, a captivating historical tale set in 1960s Vienna, and THE LAST MOVEMENT, a moving portrait of an artist at the end of his life aboard a ship from New York to Europe. Plus, his Man Booker International shortlisted A WHOLE LIFE. “Seethaler is in his very own league” Elizabeth Strout

FOREIGN FRUIT by Katie Goh is a hauntingly beautiful hybrid memoir that uses the cultivation of the orange to explore identity. “A deeply thoughtful, funny and moving treatise on identity and the myriad factors that go into influencing it. A sharp and exhilarating read from start to finish. You will never look at oranges in your fruit bowl the same way again” Big Issue

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, NATURE’S GENIUS by David Farrier is a mind-expanding account of how we shape the lives of animals and plants – and how they shape us. “Nature's Genius is a superb book: subtle, sharp-eyed and fascinating. Here, everyday beings and objects – dogs, buildings, spiders, clocks – are lit anew; thrown into surprising configurations and relationships. Damage and disorder are faced with clear eyes, but hope is also found in unexpected places” Robert Macfarlane

FOOD FIGHT by Stuart Gillespie follows a veteran of four decades at the frontline of global food policy, exposing how malnutrition is enmeshed with other crises and what we can all do to change it. “This isn't just a good read, it's an essential reference. Scholarly, literate and deeply moving – Food Fight is the essential food book of this year and years to come” Chris Van Tulleken

LONELY CROWDS by Stephanie Wambugu is a piercing debut set in the glamorous 90s NYC art scene, centring on a friendship teetering on the obsessive. “The best novel about friendship I have read for years, the writing precise, the feelings volcanic. The ecstasies of friendship and its mayhem are laid bare” Susie Boyt

In THE GREAT GOOD PLACES, literary giant Margaret Drabble delivers a luminous hybrid of short fiction, essays and memoir. “Wonderful… There aren't many chroniclers of our older years who do it so well, with such wit and realism and intelligence” Tessa Hadley

IF THIS BE MAGIC is a fascinating exploration of translation and Shakespeare from award-winning translator Daniel Hahn. “A distillation of knowledge of a depth and breadth that makes you boggle anew at what one book can do” Guardian

We’re publishing so many great books today that this isn’t even the full lot (there’s also three other books by Margaret Drabble joining our Canons list)!

Happy publication day to them all!

Available in your friendly neighbourhood bookshop and online: https://bookshop.org/lists/out-today

A Whole Life – Robert Seethaler
The Last Movement – Robert Seethaler
The Café with No Name – Robert Seethaler
Foreign Fruit – Katie Goh
Nature's Genius – David Farrier
Food Fight – Stuart Gillespie
Lonely Crowds – Stephanie Wambugu
The Great Good Places – Margaret Drabble
If This Be Magic – Daniel Hahn

Get it now from your friendly local bookshop or online: https://buythebook.online/son-of-nobody

Out today! SON OF NOBODY, the brand new novel from Yann Martel, Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi.

'A meditation on mythmaking, homemaking and storytelling' Guardian

'Martel is an original, strange and subtle thinker' Ursula K. Le Guin

Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.

In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.

As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.

In this masterpiece of myth and history, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.

Congratulations to Charlotte McConaghy on WILD DARK SHORE which is longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction!

A spectacularly choreographed eco-thriller traversing nature and human frailty – full of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty and ferocious love, WILD DARK SHORE is a novel not to be missed

‘I am in awe. I am in love. I am heartbroken. All of it possible, all at once, after a book as extraordinary as this one’ CLARE DAVERLEY
‘Breathtaking’ HANNAH KENT
‘Spellbinding’ Washington Post
‘Had me gripped from the very first page’ RACHEL JOYCE

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.

Thanks to the Women's Prize team, and sponsors Baileys and Audible!

You can read Wild Dark Shore now, available at your favourite local bookshop and online: https://buythebook.online/wild-dark-shore

We're thrilled to announce Lily King‘ HEART THE LOVER has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction!

Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.

'Touching, thoughtful, a deeply affecting love story about time and regret' DAVID NICHOLLS
'Steeped in yearning, melancholy and the reckoning with mortality that must come to us all . . . King’s writing still pierces you’ The Times
'Exploring how first love shapes a lifetime, here is a novel of piercing clarity' Independent
'Beautifully written . . . I was hooked from the first page' Daily Mail

'You knew I’d write a book about you someday'

Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.

She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.

Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.

Thanks to the Women's Prize team, and sponsors Baileys and Audible!

You can read Heart the Lover now, available in your favourite local bookshop & online: https://buythebook.online/heart-the-lover-by-lily-king

@ultrazool@mastodon.scot there's always next year! (And plenty of time to get the tattoo in the meantime...)

In the Oran Mor

Https://GrayDay.info

Happy Gray Day to all that celebrate! (And all should celebrate.) Delighted to be in Glasgow for the 6th annual celebration of the work of writer and artist Alasdair Gray.

We publish today, for the first time, an unabridged audiobook of his debut and one of a good handful of masterpieces he can claim, the epic, mad miraculous Lanark.

Narrated by Alan Cumming, with contributions from Angus King and archive audio of Alasdair himself

@LittleTollerBooks@zirk.us Hello! and you too!

@Bakerpictures@mastodonapp.uk Ah yes, of course it has! And wonderful to see that book living on & being an inspiration!

@magicfab@mastodon.social Thank you!

@sheilamaverbuch@mstdn.social oh, interesting, thank you :)

@sheilamaverbuch@mstdn.social Hello! And we'll follow you there too!

@vier@disabled.social We love to hear it!

Our #introduction to #bookstodon!

Hello, we are Canongate Books, an independent #publisher of an eclectic mix of #authors for an eclectic and discerning audience of readers. You might know us from the spines of:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
& many, many more.

We're based in Edinburgh and London, and next year we'll be 50. Hello!