Playfully blending personal memoir, criticism and candid new interviews with filmmakers from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, Ryan Gilbey’s engaging and dynamic book is a non-chronological treasure-hunt through queer cinema past and present. Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass) are among the directors who reveal how queer artists use film to express their most personal truths-and to challenge, defy and outrage a world that would rather they didn’t exist. That world might look rainbow-coloured from some angles, with the likes of Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight and Portrait of a Lady on Fire winning awards and acclaim.

It Used to be Witches : A Journey Through Queer Cinema – Ryan Gilbey – 9780571381531

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As Indigenous scientist  Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most?

Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude.

The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, an inspiring vision of how to reorient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity and community

The Serviceberry : An Economy of Gifts and Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer –  Illustrated by John Burgoyne – 9781802067460

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How do we experience attraction?

What does love mean to us?When did you realise you were ace?

This is the ace community in their own words. Drawing upon interviews with a wide range of people across the asexual spectrum, Eris Young is here to take you on an empowering, enriching journey through the rich multitudes of asexual life. With chapters spanning everything from dating, relationships and sex, to mental and emotional health, family, community and joy, the inspirational stories and personal experiences within these pages speak to aces living and loving in unique ways.

Find support amongst the diverse narratives of aces sex-repulsed and sex-favourable, alongside voices exploring what it means to be black and ace, to be queer and ace, or ace and multi-partnered – and use it as a springboard for your own ace growth. Do you see a story like your own?

Ace Voices : What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace – Eris Young – 9781787756984

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Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’. Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write this memoir. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, this memoir is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

Mother Mary Comes To Me – Arundhati Roy – 9781405978477

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The kitchen has always been a complex space for women. It is a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself?

Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships. What it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. How does this shape your mealtimes? The way you shop for food? The kitchen equipment you use? And your relationship to cleaning up and looking after yourself?

With warmth, humour and insight, The Spinster Cookbook explores shopping and leftovers, solo meals and dinner parties for one. And the joy and grief and the politics of living on your own. This is a book about making a home in the face of housing precarity, loneliness, heartbreak and social norms, and finding independence, pleasure and self-expression through cooking.

It’s a cookbook of sorts, and a manifesto for living differently.

The Spinster Cookbook : Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen – Eli Davies – 9781911648994

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Over Iran, the sky is falling in. The US-Israeli bombardment has begun: there are bodies beneath the rubble. The Ayatollah is dead. The guards have abandoned the prisons. The rain is black with fuel; it burns the skin and the streets. In this searing and contemplative work, writer, academic and Tehran resident Raha Nik-Andish documents life in the Islamic Republic in the days and months leading up to « Operation Epic Fury. » In a rarely-seen portrait of a regime in freefall, this is Tehran on the brink; the crushed protests over the collapse of the currency; the taxicabs circling the city for work; the burned out garbage cans and the taped-up windows.

Piercing, poignant and delicately observed, this is the vital story of a city at the end of the world – and an act of witness against darkness.

Tehran Diaries : Dispatches from Iran under Siege – Raha Nik-Andish – 9781806491582

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A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities. And one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums. Including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford. Revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture. And how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past.

Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change. The book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Every Monument Will Fall : A Story of Remembering and Forgetting – Dan Hicks – 9781804950005

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Golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth: Ancient Greece gave us democracy and the rule of the law; out of Abbasid Baghdad came algebra and modern medicine, and the Dutch Republic furnished us with Europe’s greatest artistic movements. As such, each has unique lessons to teach us about the world we live in today. But, all previous golden ages have proven finite, whether through external pressures or internal fracturing.

Peak Human : What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages – Johan Norberg – 9781838957315

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In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a bombing, the book’s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans.

That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and mechanisms of cruelty that defy comprehension. In gathering these testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and the survivors’ determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.

Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life : Voices from Gaza – Samar Yazbek – 9781804272411

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Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.

Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor. Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west.

Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen? In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush.

We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings. The ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.

Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

Proto : How One Ancient Language Went Global – Laura Spinney – 9780008626563

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