BOOKS: Culture

In 1946, Orwell arrived at his isolated home of Barnhill as a grieving widower living in the shadow of war and the nuclear threat. It was there he wrote his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Beyond the writing desk, he was transformed: his new life was one of natural beauty and tight-knit community – and he grew to love a corner of the world he had once dismissed. Orwell’s Island casts important new light on a great modern thinker and author. No previous biography has revealed so much about Orwell’s later years or his time on Jura, despite this being where he created Big Brother, the Thought Police and Room 101—creations still in common currency today.

Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body. Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.

For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,” observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment. In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts.

Climbing is a sport of perception, and our level of attainment is a matter of mind as much as body. Written by philosopher, essayist, and lifelong climber Francis Sanzaro, The Zen of Climbing explores the fundamentals of successful climbing, delving into sports psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and Taoism. Awareness, he argues, is the foundation of climbing, allowing us to merge mental and physical attributes in one embodied whole. Written by the author of the classic The Boulder: A Philosophy of Bouldering, this book puts the climber’s mind at the forefront of practice.

Winner of the NorthBound Book Award 2021 | Cold Fish Soup is a memoir in essays, a series of funny, insightful meditations about life and death in a declining Yorkshire coastal town. The stories range across the pull of family, a compulsion towards the sea, male mental health, and how we can find sanctuary, humanity and humour in the most unexpected places.

Shortlisted for the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland's Book of the Year Awards 2022 | In this searing, frank, and funny memoir by the author of When I Had a Little Sister ("A superb memoir" Sunday Times), a crisis causes Catherine Simpson to reflect—and to see how her body tells the story of her life.

Everybody knows Charlotte Brontë. World-famous for her novel Jane Eyre, she’s a giant of literature and has been written about in reverential tones in scores of textbooks over the years. But what do we really know about Charlotte? Charlotte Brontë Revisited looks at Charlotte through 21st-century eyes. Discover her private world of convention, rebellion and imagination, and how they shaped her life, writing and obsessions – including the paranormal, nature, feminism and politics. It’s a celebration of all things Charlotte, and emphatically shows why she’s as relevant today as she ever was.