Naomi Westerman
Naomi Westerman is a playwright and former anthropolo- gist. As an anthropologist, Naomi studied death rituals around the world, also working on mental health and gender. She is a recipient of the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary, the Derby Theatre / In Good Co Mid-Career Commission Award, and was a finalist for the Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award at the Young Vic. Happy Death Club is her first non-fiction book.
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Buy Happy Death Club
Anthropologist Naomi Westerman was studying death rituals around the world—when her whole family died.
Upon losing those closest to her, Naomi Westerman saw that death was more than just an abstract academic concept; it was a deeply painful and personal experience. She became fascinated by loss and grief, and hoped to cope and demystify death by turning to history, art, and pop culture.
Happy Death Club examines the many faces of death and grief in cultures around the world. From expensive coffins and unconventional burials to horror films and true crime, what does our treatment of death have to tell us about how we live our lives? What makes a “good death”? And who owns our bodies before and after we die?
Both meaningful and darkly humorous, this is a frank, curious look at a universal human experience—one we’re often too afraid to talk about—and at what lies beyond.
Jean Menzies
Jean Menzies is an ancient historian and author from Scotland. Jean completed her PhD in classics at the University of Roe- hampton in 2022, with a focus on gender, myth, and rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Meanwhile, her first novel, The Flames of Albiyon, is a sapphic adult fantasy about dragons and found family. She can usually be found online harping on about queer literature and ancient history over on her YouTube channel Jean’s Thoughts.
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Buy All the Violet Tiaras
Ancient Greece was rich with stories of queer love and gender- fluid identity—but what can these ancient stories tell us about our contemporary world?
Tales as old as antiquity – whether the love affair of Achilles and Patroclus, the genderfluid Tiresias, or the infamous Heracles – are still capturing our imaginations thousands of years later. But was antiquity’s relationship with queer folk more complicated than we now imagine? Historian Jean Menzies dives into the world of queer readings and retellings of Greek mythology, inviting readers to discover the power to be found in remaking these narratives.
From explorations of gender and identity across millennia, to celebrating queer love in its many forms, All the Violet Tiaras carves a space for queer stories to be told with all the complexity and tenderness they deserve—and a goddess or two thrown in for good measure.
Casci Ritchie
Dr Casci Ritchie is a fashion and culture historian, writer, and educator based in Scotland. Her doctoral research explored the origins, materiality and afterlives of Prince’s dress. She has published widely in journals including Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion and Queer Studies in Popular Culture and serves on the board of the International Centre 4 Prince Studies. Alongside her research, Casci is a public speaker and workshop facilitator, working at institutions including Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Paisley Book Festival, Glasgow Film Theatre, and a number of film festivals.
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Buy On His Royal Badness
A garment-by-garment exploration of Prince’s singular style and continued influence on contemporary fashion.
Not only was Prince a musical genius and one of the greatest artists of all time, he was a fashion icon, a trailblazer devoted to the art of dressing. Lifelong fan and fashion historian Casci Ritchie assembles a greatest-hits compilation of the best pieces in Prince’s wardrobe—from ornate ear cuff down to bespoke heel—telling each garment’s incredible origin story and showing how his tastes disrupted hegemonic, het- eronormative, and Black masculinities.
On His Royal Badness considers Prince as a visionary artist and fearless provocateur who revered fashion and self-expression, and whose sartorial brilliance continues to shape contempo- rary culture.
Unaffiliated with the Prince Estate.
Catherine Simpson
Catherine Simpson is a novelist and memoir writer based in Edinburgh. Her memoir One Body was published by Saraband in 2022 and was selected for World Book Night in 2023 and shortlisted in the Scottish Book Awards. This followed her 2019 memoir When I Had a Little Sister which was published to great critical acclaim: ‘superb’ (Sunday Times) ‘riveting’ (Observer). Her debut novel Truestory was published in 2015 and won her a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.
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Buy Sandwiched
Catherine Simpson believed the hardest chapters of her life were behind her. She had raised two children – one of them autistic – and survived both a family suicide and her own cancer treatment. In her fifties, it was time to enjoy restoring her health, reducing work commitments, hanging out with friends and relaxing with her husband in their empty nest.
But when the global pandemic shut the world down, Catherine’s nonagenarian father’s independence began to slip away just as her adult daughter’s mental health spiralled into crisis.
Sandwiched is a candid memoir about being trapped in a high- pressure, intergenerational squeeze. It is a story of letting go of the superwoman myth, confronting the limits of control and responsibility, and trying to avoid unsafe speeding on the motorway – yet still providing loving care.
Olga Wojtas
Olga Wojtas is an unconventional – and witty – writer of cosy crime fiction whose surrealist humour has been compared to the likes of P.G. Wodehouse, Jasper Fforde, Blackadder and the Marx Brothers. She was born and brought up in Edinburgh, where she attended James Gillespie’s High School – the model for the Marcia Blaine School for Girls (in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). Olga won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2014, and has amassed an impressive following for the Miss Blaine’s Prefect series, as well as several award nominations. A journalist for more than 30 years, Olga was Scottish editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement before she began adding creative writing to her portfolio.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Parcel of Rogues
by Olga Wojtas
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Buy Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Parcel of Rogues
Fifty-something librarian Shona McMonagle is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls with a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name.
It’s 1788, and Shona has travelled back in time and turned up in the Assembly Rooms. Edinburgh society is lionising Burns on his second visit to the capital. He’d rather be in Ayrshire with Jean, but his publisher has made him go on tour, and his supposed muse, Nancy McLehose, has told him to adopt the persona of A Lad to boost reader interest.
Shona also finds herself helping Burns’s greatest fan, the teenage Walter Scott, and being welcomed into a group of female intellectuals. But when she is framed for the capital crime of housebreaking and condemned to the Tolbooth, who can help her? As the plot continues to thicken, what will happen to the Enlightenment and these resourceful women?
Claire O’Callaghan
Dr Claire O’Callaghan is a literary scholar and cultural historian, specialising in Victorian literature and culture, with a particular focus on the Brontës. Her research explores themes of gender, sexuality, and violence, health and the body. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society, and works closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University and a regular contributor to television and radio. Her work has featured in The Guardian, History Today, and BBC History online.
Claire O’Callaghan’s Emily Brontë Reappraised – the only new biography of Emily to be published during the last twenty years – returns in this expanded edition, bringing new insight into how we read and remember one of literature’s most enigmatic writers. Blending biography, feminist criticism, and cultural history, O’Callaghan dismantles the myths that have long obscured Brontë’s life and art, revealing a bold, passionate, and politically attuned writer whose work still resonates today.
This updated edition includes fresh analysis covering new scholarship and popular depictions and adaptations, including the 2026 film Wuthering Heights, tracing how modern interpretations continue to reinvent Brontë’s vision of love, freedom, and the wild northern landscape that shaped her imagination. Both accessible and deeply researched, this edition invites readers—new and returning alike— to rediscover Emily Brontë for our times.
Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. Her poetry collections are Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017), Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and Emergency Dream (Seren: 2026). Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023 and Unnamed: 2024), and The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson: 2024 and Milkweed: 2026). She works as a freelancer from her home in Grasmere, where she co-owns Sam Read Bookseller.
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Buy Swimming the Seasons
To swim is an act of attention: to the self, and to everything beyond it.
Follow poet and nature writer Polly Atkin as she swims through the turning year in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the English Lake District, in this lyrical ode to the uplifting power of water. This is a love story between a person and a place. It is a story of acceptance, persistence and finding joy in the everyday, as eight years of outdoor swimming through every season deepen Atkin’s knowledge and understanding of both the landscape she calls home and her disabled body.
Each month in the water reveals how a life lived with pain can be as rich, rewarding and full of delight as any other. Atkin swims for the sheer pleasure of it, showing how that pleasure may be found in every season, even by those who find the cold neither thrilling nor soothing. She reminds us of the quiet power of noticing the lives alongside ours — birds, plants and people. And through paying attention to herself and to the living world around her, she finds swimming becomes a transformative force, a kind of natural magic through which the extraordinary is revealed day after day, year after year.
Jim Crumley
Jim Crumley is the author of more than forty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland, many of them making the case for species reintroductions, or ‘rewilding’. His Seasons series, a quartet of books exploring the wildlife and landscapes and how climate change is affecting our environment across the four seasons, is highly acclaimed. The Nature of Autumn was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The third in the series, The Nature of Spring, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The Nature of Summer, was shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize. The Eagle’s Way was shortlisted for a prestigious Saltire Society award, and his Encounters in the Wild series – which sees Jim get up close and personal with Britain’s favourite animals – has found him many new readers. He has written about the return of the beaver to the UK’s wetlands in Nature’s Architect, and his most recent title is Lakeland Wild, his first to focus entirely on an English landscape. Lakeland Wild was longlisted for the 2022 Lakeland Book of the Year prize. Jim is also a poet, an occasional broadcaster on both radio and television and a widely published journalist who wrote columns for the Dundee Courier for many years and has a monthly column in The Scots Magazine.
The Seasons quartet is now available in one handsome hardback edition, Seasons of Storm and Wonder.
Hare
by Jim Crumley
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Buy Hare
In the Encounters in the Wild series, renowned nature writer Jim Crumley gets up close and personal with British wildlife. With his inimitable passion and vision, he relives memorable encounters with some of our best-loved native species, offering intimate insights into their extraordinary lives.
“The moon climbed high above the trees beyond the far side of the field, contriving a night of raw, primitive beauty out of the still-lingering wisps of mist, the pale, tumbling curves of field, the parallel inked-in blue-black curves of the hedges, the quiet and surprisingly pale shades of the distant firth. Tawny owls stabbed at the darkness with sharp, two-syllable shrieks. Then there was a hare, far down the field. It ran easily out into the moonlight from the hedge on the far side and at once it was partnered in dance by its own giant shadow.”
Prizes and awards
Lakeland Book of the Year prize 2022: Longlisted
Highland Book Prize 2021: Shortlisted
Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017: Longlisted
Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017: Shortlisted
Saltire Society Literary Award 2014: Shortlisted
Jim Crumley
Jim Crumley is the author of more than forty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland, many of them making the case for species reintroductions, or ‘rewilding’. His Seasons series, a quartet of books exploring the wildlife and landscapes and how climate change is affecting our environment across the four seasons, is highly acclaimed. The Nature of Autumn was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The third in the series, The Nature of Spring, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The Nature of Summer, was shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize. The Eagle’s Way was shortlisted for a prestigious Saltire Society award, and his Encounters in the Wild series – which sees Jim get up close and personal with Britain’s favourite animals – has found him many new readers. He has written about the return of the beaver to the UK’s wetlands in Nature’s Architect, and his most recent title is Lakeland Wild, his first to focus entirely on an English landscape. Lakeland Wild was longlisted for the 2022 Lakeland Book of the Year prize. Jim is also a poet, an occasional broadcaster on both radio and television and a widely published journalist who wrote columns for the Dundee Courier for many years and has a monthly column in The Scots Magazine.
The Seasons quartet is now available in one handsome hardback edition, Seasons of Storm and Wonder.
Swan
by Jim Crumley
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Buy Swan
In the Encounters in the Wild series, renowned nature writer Jim Crumley gets up close and personal with British wildlife. With his inimitable passion and vision, he relives memorable encounters with some of our best-loved native species, offering intimate insights into their extraordinary lives.
“The birches, the larches, the mountain grasses and the reed bed are all afire, sparkling after sleety rain and in fitful sunlight. It is as if nature has contrived its finest theatrical stage set and then turned up the colour. There are stags roaring, for it is the season of the red deer rut. There are golden eagles in the mountains, peregrines and ravens on nearby crags, and otters on the river. Every spring, reliably at the nesting season, the place floods spectacularly. I have come here to watch a pair of mute swans.”
Prizes and awards
Lakeland Book of the Year prize 2022: Longlisted
Highland Book Prize 2021: Shortlisted
Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017: Longlisted
Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017: Shortlisted
Saltire Society Literary Award 2014: Shortlisted
Jim Crumley
Jim Crumley is the author of more than forty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland, many of them making the case for species reintroductions, or ‘rewilding’. His Seasons series, a quartet of books exploring the wildlife and landscapes and how climate change is affecting our environment across the four seasons, is highly acclaimed. The Nature of Autumn was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The third in the series, The Nature of Spring, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The Nature of Summer, was shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize. The Eagle’s Way was shortlisted for a prestigious Saltire Society award, and his Encounters in the Wild series – which sees Jim get up close and personal with Britain’s favourite animals – has found him many new readers. He has written about the return of the beaver to the UK’s wetlands in Nature’s Architect, and his most recent title is Lakeland Wild, his first to focus entirely on an English landscape. Lakeland Wild was longlisted for the 2022 Lakeland Book of the Year prize. Jim is also a poet, an occasional broadcaster on both radio and television and a widely published journalist who wrote columns for the Dundee Courier for many years and has a monthly column in The Scots Magazine.
The Seasons quartet is now available in one handsome hardback edition, Seasons of Storm and Wonder.
Barn Owl
by Jim Crumley
BUYING OPTIONS
Buy Barn Owl
In the Encounters in the Wild series, renowned nature writer Jim Crumley gets up close and personal with British wildlife. With his inimitable passion and vision, he relives memorable encounters with some of our best-loved native species, offering intimate insights into their extraordinary lives.
“The barn owl is an ambassador for life on the edge. It is the night owl that also hunts fearlessly by day; the silent flier with a sudden shriek that can shatter glass; the restless sentry of the outside edge of the woods with one ear attuned to the grassy banks and the other to the first and last tree shadows; the stone-still embellishment on a country kirkyard gravestone beyond the edge of the village, looking in moonlight like nothing so much as the sculptor’s final inspired flourish.”
Prizes and awards
Lakeland Book of the Year prize 2022: Longlisted
Highland Book Prize 2021: Shortlisted
Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017: Longlisted
Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017: Shortlisted
Saltire Society Literary Award 2014: Shortlisted
