Canongate Books

13/02/2025

Happy Publication day to these six brilliant books!

OUR BRAINS, OUR SELVES – Masud Husain
THE CAFE WITH NO NAME – Robert Seethaler
THE WARDROBE DEPARTMENT – Elaine Garvey
ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS – Omar El Akkad
BETWEEN BRITAIN – Alistair Moffat
PITY – Andrew McMillan

All available now, online and in your favourite local bookshop. https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today/

in Our Brains, Our Selves, leading neurologist Masud Husain shares seven fascinating and surprising cases of brain disorders from across his career – and what they can teach us about our own brains

The international bestselling author of A Whole Life returns in The Cafe With No Name, a captivating historical tale set in 1960s Vienna, which shows how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.

'How I loved this book . . . Seethaler is in his very own league' Elizabeth Strout

The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present – and asking what comes next, set in the theatre world of the West End

‘A tremendous new talent in Irish writing’ Kevin Barry

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today, one which unpicks the hypocrisy and injustices of the West at a volatile and shocking time

‘A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book’ Brian Eno

Between Britain follows a walking tour of the border region where England and Scotland meet with the award-winning Scottish historian Alistair Moffat, meditating on the conflict and union of their relationship through history and in the future

Pity is the debut novel from award-winning poet Andrew McMillan exploring community, masculinity and post-industrialisation in Northern England

LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2025

'A deeply felt and rich enactment of love, loneliness and personal triumph that leaves an indelible mark on modern Q***r life' OCEAN VUONG

11/02/2025

On this day 132 years ago, Nan Shepherd was born ⛰️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 in Deeside, near Aberdeen. She graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield – to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults.

If you want to get started with Shepherd’s work, the best place would be her celebrated The Living Mountain. In this masterpiece of nature writing, Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be both parts breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly harsh. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape.
'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian

Her best known novel is The Quarry Wood – the story of a young woman's journey to maturity and independence, struggling to cope with the intellectual and emotional challenges that surround her, at a time when such space was rarely given freely to women. It continues to be taught in schools as one of the defining novels of Scottish modernism.

‘Spellbinding’ Ali Smith

07/02/2025

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

One Day is El Akkad’s non-fiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, at home, on university campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. 

We publish One Day in hardback, ebook and audio on 13th Feb 2025, with a typographic jacket designed by Alan Nevens and an illustrated hard cover underneath that matches our American and Canadian publishing partners

Click the link in our bio to find out more about the book and details of Omar’s UK and North American book tour.

05/02/2025

Looking for some romantic inspiration ahead of Valentines Day? ❤️

In Letters of Note: Love, Shaun Usher gathers together some of the most powerful messages about love ever composed, whether inspired by love’s first blush or the recriminations at its ending, the regrets of unrequited feelings and the joys of passions known.

'I love being in love with you, it makes even unhappiness seem no bigger than a pin' – James Schuyler

Includes letters by:
❤️ Simone de Beauvoir
❤️ Frida Kahlo
❤️ Georgia O’Keeffe
❤️ Zora Neale Hurston
❤️ Vita Sackville-West
❤️ Nelson Mandela
❤️ John Steinbeck & many more

❤️

30/01/2025

Happy publication day to these four wonderful books!

THE SECRET PAINTER – Joe Tucker
44 POEMS ON BEING WITH EACH OTHER – Pádraig Ó Tuama
POYUMS – Len Penny
YOUR BRAIN ON ART – Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross

Copies are available now at your favourite local bookshop, or online: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today

In THE SECRET PAINTER, Joe Tucker tells the story of his Uncle Eric, an unassuming working-class man who'd spent his life living in the house where he was raised, and unbeknownst to most had amassed a treasure trove of over 500 original paintings. It's a true story about class and ambition, loneliness and community, success and failure which reminds us that the extraordinary can be found in the most unexpected places.

44 POEMS ON BEING WITH EACH OTHER from Pádraig Ó Tuama explores human connection through a carefully curated selection, with reflections on each, from the host of the internationally acclaimed Poetry Unbound podcast.

POYUMS is the Sunday Times bestselling debut collection from Len Pennie, electric poetry in English and Scots about loving, learning, surviving, growing and giving. Whether she’s writing letters to her younger self, advocating for women’s rights or adapting fairy tales to process an abusive relationship, Len’s voice is bold, unashamedly frank and unmistakably hers.

YOUR BRAIN ON ART by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross is a life-altering journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts. It shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years.

27/01/2025

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. A day where many of us will be remembering the millions of people murdered under N**i persecution. At Canongate, we’re thinking of three figures in particular – Max and Mally Rychwalski and Charlotte Salomon, three out of a million whose stories came to us in fragments - Max & Mally’s story was unearthed through their granddaughter’s detective work, Charlotte Solomon’s account was fictionalised by David Foenkinos where no record remained.

Each has a Stolpersteine (stumbling stone) dedicated to them in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and it’s upon a chance discovery with Max & Mally’s that their granddaughter’s work begun.

The Memory Keeper, is the gripping story of Jackie Kohnstamm’s search for the truth about her grandparents, and their deaths during the Holocaust.

With searing prose and meticulous detective work, Jackie Kohnstamm pieces together family papers and accounts, offering a gripping and poignant portrait of an ordinary family and revealing a remarkable story of loss, discovery and memory.

Charlotte, by David Foenkinos shares the fictional tale of a young Jewish girl from Berlin, with an exceptional talent for painting and a great love for a brilliant, eccentric musician. But just as Charlotte is coming into her own as an artist, death is coming to control her country. The N**is have come to power, Charlotte's life is narrowing, and she knows every second is precious.

Inspiring, unflinching, terrible and hopeful, Charlotte is the heartbreaking true story of a life filled with curiosity, animated by genius and cut short by hatred.

24/01/2025

'Something fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror. This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

It may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children.

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice, and who sided with power?'

In 3 weeks we publish One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by . This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.

17/01/2025

We’re very sad to hear of the death of David Lynch, one of the true greats of cinema and a brilliant visual artist. We were lucky and honoured to publish Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream.

Nothing Lynch ever produced was boring or conventional, and Room to Dream is no exception: it moves between chapters by Kristine McKenna – that capture the detail and chronology of Lynch's life, based on interviews and extensive research – and chapters by Lynch, in which he responds with the memories and stories she has prompted. The end product is as fascinating and compelling as Lynch’s films: as the introduction to the book says, it is “basically a person having a conversation with his own biography.”

(And the print book and audiobook are different as a result: when the time came to narrate his sections of the audiobook Lynch was clearly inclined to other stories and memories.)

Like many other people, Lynch’s work has meant a huge amount to me over the course of my life. He made unapologetically personal art in a form that – because of the money involved – seems almost antithetical to that kind of uncompromising individuality. We’re lucky to have had him.

This is how Lynch ends Room to Dream:
"MAY EVERYONE BE HAPPY
MAY EVERYONE BE FREE OF DISEASE
MAY AUSPICIOUSNESS BE SEEN EVERYWHERE
MAY SUFFERING BELONG TO NO ONE
PEACE”

02/01/2025

It's the first publication day of the year! Happiest of publication to:⁠
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THE BRIGHT SIDE – Sumit Paul-Choudhury
LET THE LIGHT POUR IN – Lemn Sissay
BLACK GHOSTS – Noo Saro-Wiwa
THE PROMISED PARTY – Jennifer Clement
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All available in your favourite local bookshop & online now, https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today/⁠
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In THE BRIGHT SIDE, astrophysicist-turned-journalist Sumit Paul-Choudhury takes us on a deep dive into the power and science of optimism, offering practical suggestions on what it really takes to be an optimist today and, providing a powerful manifesto for hope and a much-needed new perspective on our prospects that will change the way you think for good. ⁠
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For the past decade, Lemn Sissay has composed a short poem as dawn breaks each morning. Life-affirming, witty and full of wonder, these poems chronicle his own battle with the dark and are fuelled by resilience and defiant joy. LET THE LIGHT POUR IN is a collection of the best of these poems, and a book celebrating this morning practice.⁠
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BLACK GHOSTS follows the travels of Noo, a Nigerian woman in China exploring the intersections and divides between the two cultures and the lives of African economic migrants in the bustling People’s Republic, shortlisted for the Edward Stanfords Travel Book of the Year⁠
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In THE PROMISED PARTY Jennifer Clement pens an ultra-vivid, carnivalesque memoir of her life growing up in 60s Mexico and 80s New York, exploring what it means to be young, free and alive at the centre of two of the greatest cultural moments of our time

18/11/2024

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig has sold 10 MILLION COPIES worldwide!! Thank you SO much to all the booksellers, bookbloggers and tockers, partner publishers, reviewers and of course amazing readers all around the globe who have made this possible. Congratulations Matt Haig!

14/11/2024

alert!

We're recruiting a talented, flexible & detail-oriented reader for an entry-level Editorial assistant role working with our Publisher-at-Large. Based in Edinburgh, salary and benefits in ad:

Current vacancies at Canongate – the award-winning independent book publisher based in Edinburgh and London.

13/11/2024

“We are kinder than we might think, but we could be kinder still - with enormous benefits to your personal mental health and well-being, as well as for society, the economy and the environment.”



The Keys to Kindness by Claudia Hammond is out now!

07/11/2024

Happy publication day to this beautiful stack of books!

A BALLET OF LEPERS – Leonard Cohen
THE CARETAKER – Ron Rash
CONSOLATIONS II – David Whyte
THE GAME CHANGERS – Tim Clare

All available now in your favourite local bookshop or online here https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today !

A Ballet of Lepers is the uncovered novel from the world's greatest lyricist, Leonard Cohen. Meditative, surprising, playful and provocative, A Ballet of Lepers is vivid in its detail, unsparing in its gaze, and reveals the great artist and visceral genius like never before.

‘The writing captures all the gorgeous poeticism that we have come to love about his music, as well as a youthful naivete and a playfulness, a rawness that I wouldn't have predicted.’ OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

Set in a small Appalachian town, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honour and love.

‘Ron Rash is an American master who writes the heart’s language with tremendous grit and grace’ PAUL LYNCH

A revelatory read to reorientate your life, David Whyte returns with fifty-two elegant meditations on a single word. Consolations II deepens David Whyte's exploration of all facets of our world through the prism of everyday words, inviting the reader to think more deeply about the choices that influence our lives.

‘We think we know what we are talking about, the meaning of things, the basic rules of language, until we read David Whyte’s Consolations where we are forced to reassess everything and begin again. Such an essential and beautiful book’ NICK CAVE

Filled with humour, thrill and insight, The Game Changers explores the world of games, showing how they have shaped human history and why we should play them.

'The best book on games I've read in years' G.T. KARBER, the number one Sunday Times bestselling author of MURDLE

31/10/2024

Happy UK publication day to EAT THE WORLD! An essential debut poetry collection from platinum-certified singer-songwriter , which shares her singular observations of the human heart through poetry which explores trauma, youth, and the highs and lows of relationships⁠
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Get your copy now! Available in all good bookshops and online: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/eat-the-world-marina-diamandis/7687010?ean=9781837262182
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‘The persona-driven approach that has informed many of [Marina's] lyrics is used here, the character an unmoored rock star. There’s brilliant phrasemaking and sharp observations throughout’⁠
Guardian ⁠
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‘Like the music, [Marina's] poetry is by turns surreal and straight, packed with lines that start out sweet and quickly sour. Eat the World explores love, bad boyfriends, youth and loneliness; the poems have gut-punch titles’⁠
Sunday Times

24/10/2024

Wishing a very happy publication day to Malachy Tallack’s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz!⁠
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Set between 1957 on a whaling ship in the South Atlantic and present day Shetland, this is a story of unlikely friendship, longing, the power of music and the pull of home. That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is a soulful and moving exploration of a life revisited – and reimagined.⁠
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Malachy has also released an accompanying album of the same name, featuring songs whose lyrics appear in the book.⁠
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Copies of the book and album available now, books at all good bookshops and both via this link: https://buythebook.online/that-beautiful-atlantic-waltz ⁠
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‘Wonderful’ ELVIS COSTELLO⁠
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‘A quiet marvel, a rich and gentle book of small moments, large lives and hidden miracles’ MARTIN MACINNES⁠
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‘Entrancing, enthralling and . . . I savoured every moment and morsel of it’ MICHAEL PEDERSEN

10/10/2024

Wishing a happy publication day to these two brilliant books!

HOW TO LOSE A COUNTRY by Ece Temelkuran
THE RADLEYS by Matt Haig

Copies available now, https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today/

How to Lose a Country is an urgent call to action from one of Europe’s most well-regarded political thinkers and a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe. It's a book for our times, which we're delighted to publish into our Canons.

‘Highly readable and vibrates with outrage’ THE TIMES

‘A brilliant analysis of how democracy can be starved to death. It's one of the most important books anyone could read at the moment’ Philip Pullman

THE RADLEYS, Matt Haig's darkly comic vampire novel publishes in a new film tie-in livery released alongside the Sky Original film starring Damian Lewis and Kelly McDonald

‘Addictive’ Daily Mail
‘Highly recommended’ Observer

07/10/2024

We're so happy by is number 5 on the Sunday Times bestseller list! We fell for this heart-warming true story of an unlikely friendship from the moment of reading the first proposal, so it's really special to see so many readers enjoying it.

It's no small thing for a debut memoir about nature to make the bestseller lists in the Autumn, even one as remarkable as this, so we also want to thank all the booksellers and reviewers who are championing Hare ❤️🐇

https://buythebook.online/raising-hare?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZqEepKhnr-WqGofG2txJLLwVDyx6XD7skU9xNP78CS0K7I6uZXJGbhQrY_aem_89c2IrQfXc_hFsOsjw1SHQ