Discover Caroline’s 10 Titles not to miss overleaf (p12-13)


shining a light into all its dark corners, sparked by her “day” job of reviewing theatre. And in my Book of the Month, The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North (Sceptre) by Jenn Ashworth, I admired the magnificent, multi- strata meditation on which she takes the reader while putting one foot in front of the other for 190 north-country miles. Admiration – and not a little


mortification – resulted from reading the brilliant Reframing Blackness: What’s Black About “History of Art” (Merky Books) by Alayo Akinkugbe. It takes the majority of us to task for not questioning where all the Black artists are in the overwhelm- ingly white art canon typically presented to us.


Non-fiction Book of the Month


but a reminder that books are not merely abstract objects that deco- rate our shelves. Real human beings create what is inside, in good faith and in the hope of being paid at least something for their ideas and hard graft.


L


I admired the magnificent, multi-strata meditation she takes the reader on while putting one foot in front of the other for 190 north-country miles


And while I initially didn’t much


want to read it, preferring to stick my head in books that don’t worry me about what might have happened to all the former Soviet Union’s biological weapons, I did ultimately much enjoy The Anti-Catastrophe League: The Pioneers and Visionaries on a Quest to Save the World (Mudlark) by Tom Ough because a) it’s entertaining, and b) I realised that at least some people are trying to put the brakes on planetary destruction. And if you think planetary


destruction is serious, get this. I too have a new book out this month – Listen with Father (Unbound). This isn’t just a plug,


Upcoming Previews


Biography


Jenn Ashworth The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North


Sceptre, 17th, HB, £20, 9781399725057


“I’ve decided this is my mid-life crisis. Shirley Valentine in a North Face jacket.” Jenn Ashworth, the acclaimed author of novels including A Kind of Intimacy and The Friday Gospels emerged from lockdown with a compulsive need to get out and walk; not in the short, circular, close-to-home manner permitted during lockdown, but in a long, epic, straight line. So she set her map and began walking across the north of England, solo, from west to east via Alfred Wainwright’s celebrated Coast to Coast route – his “determined beeline slicing its way through the entire North of England”, as she dubs it. She was guided along the way, not only by Wainwright’s somewhat cantankerous instructions, but by bolstering daily letters from her friend Clive, facing an epic journey of his own after a terminal cancer diagnosis. However, this blend of memoir and


travelogue is more than the story of Ashworth’s walk through the north-country landscapes through which she passes. It also becomes a pilgrimage inwards as Ashworth reflects on life, death, bereavement, motherhood, being a northerner, friendship, what it means to care for someone and be cared for in turn, the limitations of one body and a single lifespan. I felt I was walking with her, stride for stride.


ast month, the Atlantic revealed that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years have been


used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, publish- ing a searchable database of affected books so authors could check whether ours were among them. Hundreds of us did, and they were. This must change. Publishers can certainly do


better in centring and supporting the humans without whom they would not be in business. For example, this month – as every month – I received quite a few submissions where the translator of the work was not credited. This too must change. The other weekend I went to the


theatre, to see the excellent and innovative production of The Seagull at the Barbican in London, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier. The characters in Chekhov’s play are anguished by a lot of things, although AI is not one of them. When famous fictional novelist Trigorin ques- tions the point of writers in our mess of a world, Nina responds: “Without reading my life would be unliveable.” A line to quote at myself if I ever feel that I have too much of it to do.


Submissions


New Titles: Non-fiction submissions should be sent to Caroline at St Ives, Frome Park Road, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 3LF. For submission deadlines, see thebookseller.com/publishingcalendar


For submission information and deadlines, visit thebookseller.com/ publishingcalendar


25th


April


Children’s Previews Covering titles published in July 2025.


25th


April


Paperback Preview Covering titles published in July 2025.


2nd


May


New Titles: Fiction Covering titles published in August 2025.


9th


May


New Titles: Non-Fiction Covering titles published in August 2025.


16th


May


Discover Covering titles published in June 2025.


11


Books New Titles: Non-Fiction


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