Jonathan Cape Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis Crumb Robert

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

A howling wind, a thunderstorm, the beating sun – it’s with the elements that nature shows its true force and wonder • In Thunder and Lightning, Guggenheim fellow and Pulitzer nominee Lauren Redniss draws a new account of the weather. She has travelled from the frozen archipelagos of the Arctic Ocean to the ‘absolute desert’ of Atacoma, Chile, to show us the elements at their most extreme. Along the way, through interviews and research, she has unearthed curious stories of exploration, savagery and coincidence – stories which show us how weather has shaped humanity, intervened in the course of history, and how mankind, in turn, has tried to bend the weather to its ends • A book of exquisite beauty, with each illustration etched and coloured by hand, Thunder and Lightning informs, charms and transports

A series of engrossing one page comics that tells the same story ninety nine different ways Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of one-page comics that tell the same story in a variety of ways • Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 work of the same title, which told a simple story in ninety-nine different styles and genres - haiku, sonnet, book jacket blurb - Madden does the same but in different styles of comics - Marvel superhero, R. Crumb, Herge, even as a map or the Bayeux Tapestry. Or he uses varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, even radical reshuffling of the elements of the story. The result is funny, inspiring, and genuinely clever

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

The Quentin Blake Treasury contains • All Join In * Quentin Blake’s Nursery Rhyme Book * Patrick * Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets * Mister Magnolia * Quentin Blake’s ABC * Cockatoos * Angel Pavement * Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road • Meet Mister Magnolia, with only one boot! Peer into Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets! Set off with Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road, be whisked away by the music of the extraordinary Patrick and soar into the air on the wings of Angel Pavement. Discover the crazy counting of the mischievous Cockatoos and the most enjoyable alphabet ever in Quentin Blake’s ABC. And finally, join in at the top of your voice with the verse and songs of Quentin Blake’s Nursery Rhyme Book and All Join In! • From Quentin’s very first picture book to his most recent adventures, this collection spans and celebrates his astonishing career

Winner of the Best Book Award at the 2014 British Comic Awards • Readers! This book is not a real encyclopedia! • It is an epic work of fiction, detailing the many tales and adventures of one lonely storyteller, on a quest for Enlightenment and True Love. This book contains many stories, big and small, about and pertaining to the following things: Gods, monsters, mad kings, wise old crones, shamans, medicine men, brothers and sisters, strife, mystery, bad science, worse geography, and did we already mention true love? • Critics are saying it is probably the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe even since bread knives

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

Five Artists. Five Styles. All Written by One Author • On 13 August 2013 graphic novelist Karrie Fransman invited four old friends from university to an isolated cottage on the misty moors of the Peak District to join her for a week of hedonism and creativity. Like Shelley and Byron before them, they would use the retreat to tell stories. Except these would be comics, collected together in this very book. The theme? The Death of the Artist • None of the five friends realised how appropriate this theme would become • The book weaves a single narrative across watercolour, digital art, photography, collage and illustration, exploring the themes of creation, destruction, and how we kill our inner artists as we grow up. It takes the graphic novel into entirely new realms

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

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess • In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam • Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word

Eating to Extinction is an astonishing journey through the past, present and future of food, a love letter to the diversity of global food cultures, and a work of great urgency and hope • From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to great chunks of fermented sheep meat in the Faroe Islands to an exploding corn in Mexico that might just hold the key to the future of food - these are just some of the thousands of foods around the world today that are at risk of being lost for ever • In this captivating and wide-ranging book, Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover the stories of these foods. He meets the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are preserving food traditions and fighting for change

Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief • Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken