Adam Bayfield


after all – they might be able to help and heal each other.


The Rose Field Philip Pullman ( 6) Penguin & David Fickling Books It doesn’t get much bigger than this. The third and final volume of The Book of Dust, 30 years after Northern Lights first introduced readers to Lyra, daemons and Philip Pullman’s sprawling imaginary universe. His Dark Materials is up there with my favourite ever works of fiction, and I loved the first two volumes of The Book of Dust, too. It has been a long wait between books two and three – six years since readers left Lyra alone in the ruins of a deserted city, with her beloved daemon, Pantalaimon, parted from her. I can’t wait.


What We Can Know Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape A new Ian McEwan novel will always cause a stir at our library – we’re gearing up for a run on reservations. What We Can Know follows Tom Metcalfe, an academic in the Britain of 2119, where rising seas have submerged vast areas and those who survive live in the shadow of the world that has been lost. When Tom uncovers a clue to a great lost poem from a century earlier, it upends everything he thought he knew about the people closest to him.


The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park Michiko Aoyama, Takami Nieda (trans) Doubleday Japanese author Michiko Aoyama is best known for her hit 2020 novel What You Are Looking For Is in the Library – a title we can all get behind. Her new novel sounds even more whimsical, but no less affecting. In a children’s playground underneath a five-storey apartment block, there’s a hippo ride which – according to urban legend – can help you recover from physical and emotional pain. Five strangers seek out the magical hippo and discover that, with a bit of kindness and understanding, they might not need the hippo


Katabasis RF Kuang ( 3) HarperVoyager Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: the story of a hero’s descent to the underworld. Graduate student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice is going after him. This is RF Kuang’s first


novel since Yellowface, which was a huge hit in 2023, and is one of the most gripping books I’ve read in recent years. Katabasis sounds, frankly, a little bit bonkers, but I trust the author to make it work – and I’m excited to get stuck in.


The Land of Sweet Forever Harper Lee Hutchinson Heinemann You don’t expect to see a new book by Harper Lee on a list like this – for a long time, she was known for only writing one (incredibly famous) novel, plus of course she is sadly no longer with us. This posthumous release is a collection of short stories and essays, spanning the Alabama schoolyards of her youth to the To Kill a Mockingbird film set. The publication of Go


Set a Watchman in 2015 proved controversial, with some readers arguing it was wrong to release a manuscript that was never meant to be published. This volume is different in that much of the material has seen the light before, though I will nonetheless read it with a degree of trepidation. But read it I shall. It’s Harper Lee – how could you not?


Adam Bayfield is head of marketing and customer services at Guille-Allès Library


Stu Hennigan


Simon Price’s Curepedia, recently out in paperback, for a great example; in this one, Cameron tackles the band’s vast history in a way that makes the most sense – a track-by-track trawl through their archives of pain.


5 Charlotte Geater


published in 2016, The Book of Jonah – incredibly, his debut with a major publisher – promises to be another irreverent, absurd, funny and unmissable response to the Old Testament. His first collection since Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward Prize.


Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History Emma Warren ( 2) Faber Youth clubs are an important part of the social fabric and history of different communities in Hackney, as they are around the UK. This new deep dive into their history and look at how their numbers are dwindling looks really interesting and important, especially in our current climate of cuts and resurgent austerity.


The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver Rafael Torrubia Gollancz Fantasy books are more popular than ever with the rise of romantasy, but that genre can be very straight. I’m looking forward to this new epic queer fantasy, which promises to be goth and weird and apocalyptic and very romantic. “Love that can survive the end of the world”? Sounds necessary to me.


4


The Book of Jonah Luke Kennard Picador The long-awaited follow-up to Kennard’s book Cain, which


Palestine Is Everywhere Skye Arundhati Thomas (ed) Silver Press Readers in Hackney (and across the country) are deeply concerned with the genocide that is happening in Gaza. This new anthology promises writing by many different Palestinian writers, with dispatches from Gaza and the diaspora, looking at the struggle for Palestinian liberation and how it maps across the globe.


The Fire Within Touhfat Mouhtare, Rachael McGill (trans) Dedalus Books A lyrical, reality-twisting book from Comorian writer Touhfat Mouhtare, full of parallel realities and shape-shifting? Described as both erotic and magical? This one sounds like so much fun. Mouhtare is the second woman writer from Comoros to be published, and it is wonderful to see her being translated into English.


Charlotte Geater is marketing and events officer at Hackney Libraries


Greyhound Joanna Pocock ( 4) Fitzcarraldo Editions In which the writer repeats a trip she took 17 years previously from Detroit to LA using a form of public transport which is almost metonymic for a certain stratum of American society and its culture. If her first book, Surrender, a Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize winner and one of my favourite non-fiction works of recent times is anything to go by, expect an effortless Solnit-style blend of literary criticism, memoir, theory and nature writing woven together with what’s sure to be an acutely observed and beautifully written travelogue.


Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters Joanna Walsh Verso For someone who hates gadgets and is suspicious of tech in general, I read an awful lot of books about it and, having lived online for the fat end of 20 years, I am fascinated by the history of the internet, its (emoti) iconography and the many subcultures it has created. For this kind of book it’s hard to imagine a better combination than Verso – which is always on point – and writer/critic/ activist/force of nature Joanna Walsh, whose blend of savagely astute analytical thinking and quality narrative chops never fails to enlighten, inform and provoke, whatever her choice of subject may be.


168 Songs of Hatred and Failure Keith Cameron White Rabbit Books I was obsessed with the Manic Street Preachers in the early- to mid-90s, a band whose literary influence on me persists to this day. Back then, before it tanked with the onset of the digital age - Keith Cameron was one of NME’s last cohort of great writers so this is hugely exciting. White Rabbit’s peerlessly curated titles often take an inventive approach to their subject – see


Loren Ipsum Andrew Gallix Dodo Ink Andrew Gallix is one of the great unsung heroes of the UK literary scene, through his almost two decades fearlessly and tirelessly platforming bleeding-edge new writing as editor of the legendary 3:AM Magazine, and his reputation as an astute, perceptive and incisive critic (as collected in last year’s Unwords). His debut novel is a wild literary thriller in which “the death of the author” is repeatedly taken too literally, as a nihilistic terrorist group slaughters the writers of France for reasons obscure, and a British journalist, Loren Ipsum, becomes embroiled. You’ll need to be on your toes to keep up with this one.


Ghost Driver Nell Osborne Moist Books This slim volume contains multitudes and is a complete gem. The narrator, Malory, is a young woman living in a nebulous and vague dystopia, oppressive in its non-descript blandness, who experiences a period of mental ill-health verging on psychosis, leading to her losing her job for the ultimate transgression, antisociability at work. The voice is fresh and urgent, acutely self-aware and utterly self-loathing, brimming with spite yet dripping with pathos in a way that recalls the great Eva Baltasar.


Stu Hennigan is senior librarian at Leeds Libraries


6 29


Library Focus


Librarians’ Picks


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44