Jonathan Cape Literary Life Revisited Simmonds Posy

Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth ?7 million • She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body' • But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body . . . Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life

The second book from the "exact and poetic" (New York Times) author of critical smash Young Skins, winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, Homesickness is an emotionally resonant and wonderfully wry collection that follows the lives of outcasts, misfits, and malcontents from County Mayo to Canada • When Colin Barrett's debut Young Skins published, it swept up several major literary awards, and, in both its linguistic originality and sharply drawn portraits of working-class Ireland, earned Barrett comparisons to Faulkner, Hardy, and Musil. Now, in a blistering follow-up collection, Barrett brings together eight character-driven stories, each showcasing his inimitably observant eye and darkly funny style • A quiet night in a local pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive; a funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts simply won't lay in wake; a shooting sees a veteran policewoman confront the banality of her own existence; and an aspiring writer grapples with his father's cancer diagnosis and in his despair wreaks havoc on his mentor's life

First published in 1980, two years after The Snowman, Gentleman Jim has been unavailable for many years. We are delighted to bring it back into print as the first book in an occasional series, Cape Graphic Classics • Gentleman Jim is the story of Jim Bloggs, a lavatory attendant who, dissatisfied with his station in life, devotes his time to envisioning a world beyond it. His walls are lined with books like Out in the Silver West, the Boys' Book of Pirates and Executive Opportunities, which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. Encouraged by his wife, Hilda, also eager to incorporate more adventure into her life, Jim sets out to bring these dreams to fruition by accumulating various accoutrements, only to discover that the life of an executive, an artist or a cowboy is more complicated and costly than it appears

Is it possible life without romantic love isn't so bad? • An essential memoir about building life on your own terms • When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love • Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed

In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul • As the days pass and Nasser Ali Khan grows weaker, those who love him - his wife, his children, his siblings - gather round, incredulous, to try to comfort him. Every visitor stirs up a memory, and in the course of this week Nasser Ali Khan revisits his entire life, a life defined by three relationships in particular. He remembers his late mother, who sacrificed everything for his revolutionary brother, but who also, in the last week of her life, found solace only in smoking and listening to him play his tar; his angry wife, who can't forgive him his melancholy and irresponsibility; and Irane, his first love, whose father forbade her to marry a poor musician and inflicted the wound that fuelled his music

Edited by the finest British poet Alice Oswald and the celebrated anthologist Paul Keegan, a groundbreaking gathering of writing about nature's most dramatic spectacle: the weather • 'It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 • This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather - Homer's winds, Ovid's flood - to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting - weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters - to the drama unfolding above our heads • The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again

Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more • Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring

Jimmy Corrigan has rightly been hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever to be published. It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize • It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who abandoned him as a child. With a subtle, complex and moving story and the drawings that are as simple and original as they are strikingly beautiful, Jimmy Corrigan is a book unlike any other and certainly not to be missed

A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending short stories • Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone • In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret • Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism • The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line • Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living

A taut, groundbreaking new novel about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother - and about the very nature of writing • Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed • The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary - her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties - and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured

From the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice comes a major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times • The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming