Jonathan Cape Step Aside, Pops. A Hark! A Vagrant Collection Beaton Kate

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

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break • Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Toibin - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing • Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour

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 highly anticipated follow-up to Alexander MacLeod's critically acclaimed debut, Animal Person is a wry and perfectly-observed collection of short stories about intimacy, family and the struggle to connect • Animal Person is a collection of startling juxtapositions. Criminals and bystanders, siblings and strangers, infants, adolescents, young parents, and the elderly, mammals, reptiles and fish: unexpected encounters occur and every meeting is an opportunity for recognition or rejection • An empty-nest couple, separated after years of coexisting, find themselves pulled into the dreams of their silent, gazing rabbit; a mysterious passenger in search of his missing suitcase roams through the caverns of a 1970s LA airport; a piano recital goes wildly astray; and a great-aunt refuses to apologise as she struggles to find a place for everything in the tight space of her senior's apartment

A remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley’s home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. Now they overflow into Angel Hill, his exuberant new collection. In addition, Longley has been exploring Lochalsh in the Western Highlands where his daughter the painter Sarah Longley now lives with her family. She has opened up for him her own soul-landscape with its peculiar shapes and intense colours. In Angel Hill the imaginations of poet and painter intermingle and two exacting wildernesses productively overlap. Love poems and elegies and heart-rending reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles add further weight to Michael Longley’s outstanding eleventh collection

Discover a powerful, evocative and urgent new young voice in nature writing • 'Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life.' • Meet Mya-Rose - otherwise known as 'Birdgirl'. Birder, environmentalist, diversity activist. To date she has seen over five thousand different types of bird: half the world's species • Every single bird a treasure. Each sighting a small step in her family journey - a collective moment of joy and stillness. And each helping her to find her voice • Since she was young, she has visited every continent to pursue her passion, seeing first-hand the inequality and reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And the simple, mindful act of looking for birds has made her ever-more determined to campaign for all our survival

From the Costa Award winner, a highly inventive and and humane novel about our relationship with technology and our addiction to innovation • 'Are they paying you extra for this? You'd better be getting something. For the inconvenience, I mean. Here for the whole weekend is what they said. What if we'd had guests? They never asked. And in any case what are the dangers? Being tested like lab rats, we are. Did they even try to provide any assurance it was all perfectly-' • This is the prototype. The first step to a new future • A future that will be easy and abundant. A future in which distance is no longer a barrier to human contact. And all it takes is a simple transport unit, in every home, every street, every town. Quick. Clean. Easy. A future driven by data, not emotion

The entrancing story of the Bronte sisters' childhood imaginary world, from the New York Times bestselling graphic novelist • Four children: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne have invented a world so real and vivid that they can step right into it. But can reality be enough, when fiction is so enticing? And what happens to an imaginary world when its creators grow up? • Plots are spiralling, characters are getting wildly out of hand, and a great deal of ink is being spilt • Welcome to Glass Town

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

I'm Never Coming Back is a collection of surreal, comic and mournful interweaving tales travelling across three continents. In each destination we zoom in on unusual lives and remarkable situations, each tale unknowingly impacting on the next • In Rye train station a woman impulsively buys the same ticket as the man in front of her. The accidental journey leads her to Berlin. A novel way to run away from home • At Heathrow Airport, a building perpetually busy with people coming and going, a traveller is visited by a memory that refuses to leave • A tray of Singapore rice noodles cooked up in Christchurch takes on a life of its own • Winchelsea. A lone letterbox in Britain's only desert is central to a friendship between a travelling chef and a deep-sea diver

In his daily cartoon for the Guardian and his long-running strip, IF, in the same paper, Steve Bell has proved that he is without equal in Britain as political cartoonist. Savage, funny, rude, constantly transgressing the rules of good taste, and of course beautifully drawn his cartoons are hated by those they lampoon and loved by everyone who likes to see authority subverted. In his new collection he covers the years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, 2010-2015, fertile ground for Bell’s genius. From George Osborne in his bondage gear, the ‘Quiet Man’ zombie Ian Duncan Smith, Cable the elephant, Cameron the talking condom and Clegg the butler to Kipling and the IF penguins, every awful moment of the coalition years is re-run before your eyes … but Steve Bell style: ‘outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really)’ to quote John Pilger

The Bind charts the rise and fall of Egret Bindings, once the most prestigious firm of bookbinders in London • In 1910 brothers Guy and Victor Egret take on an ambitious commission: a deluxe, jewelled binding of a collection of poems, A Moonless Land. It proves to be a moment of hubris. The work triggers their ruin, watched by the disapproving spirit of their father, Garrison Egret • A darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and creative one-upmanship, The Bind shows once again that William Goldsmith is an incomparable storyteller and a marvellously inventive artist