Rough Trade Books

12/12/2025

🎅HO HO HO… Have you clocked our amazing Christmas Gift recommendation machine yet? Head to our website for failsafe gift ideas for your literary loved ones…

11/12/2025

Sam Reid’s ‘The Pin Jar’ is full of the kind of ghost stories told by mad bastards in the rural Sussex pubs of Mathew Clayton’s youth.

REVIEW TIME!!!

Thanks to for this wonderful on the ever brilliant

Come and listen to Sam Reid chatting to in the new year on Thursday 5th February

11/12/2025

Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is published in just a few weeks so we thought we’d share some quotes by the lucky literary folk who’ve already had the pleasure of reading it… so if you don’t wanna take our word for it then how about the words of following geniuses including Philippa Snow, Emma Garland, Jude Rogers and John Higgs???

Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is a short sharp literary shock from acclaimed songwriter and musician Owen Williams. With blistering honesty, Williams examines the particular grief he feels in the wake of his mother’s su***de through the prism of a certain social media platform——‘the Atrocity Exhibition’. Through the Exhibition’s various galleries and spaces we come into contact with trauma-grift, ‘lolcows’, cruelty, paganism, Joan Didion and illness, de Sade and sexuality, and of course J.G. Ballard——all dissected with the deftest of prose touches and building into a frank accounting of the delusions and deceptions we all build so much of our selves from——both on and off-line.

PRE-ORDER YOUR SIGNED AND GEMSTONED COPY TODAY

10/12/2025

🚌 COVER REVEAL🚌

ON THE BUS WITHOUT A PHONE
BY BABAK GANJEI
PRE-ORDER NOW
COMING APRIL 2026

Taking place over the course of a bus journey en route to a first date, Babak Ganjei’s debut novel charts the seemingly infinite disappointments, misunderstandings and humiliations that have piled up over the course of narrator Bob Green’s life to date. Bob’s immediate circumstances, and the cast of characters with which he shares them, provide the imaginative jumping off point for digressions on teenage love, suburban ennui, po*******hy, race and identity, mobile phones, Converse, adult love, fatherhood, fast food, MF DOOM, the etiquette of bus seating and, perhaps most importantly of all, The Remains of the Day.
 
On the Bus Without a Phone is a dazzlingly intelligent, unashamedly comedic and ultimately moving work from a hugely original new writer. With his surrealist flair, world-weary melancholy and self-effacing humour, Ganjei is a Brautigan for the digital age.

All pre-orders from our website come signed by the man himself…

09/12/2025

SIGNED. SEALED. DELIVERED…
These books above could be yours… or someone special during the gift-giving season

Ungone by Hannah Patterson
In The End, It Was All About Love by Musa Okwonga
Soft Tissue Damage by Anna Whitwham
All of This Unreal Time by Max Porter
Egg and Spoon by Rose Blake
Open Mouths by Sharan Hunjan
The Pin Jar by Sam Reid


whitwham

08/12/2025

Thanks to all who came out on a wet and windy Sunday evening down in East Sussex last night to hear and chatting to about their books The Pin Jar and The Paper Lantern. Both set in pubs, both haunted by the ghosts England old and new and both brilliant reads.
It was our last event of 2025, but fear not we’ve only got a couple of weeks before the next event which we’ll be letting you about very soon…

06/12/2025

SIGNED COPIES ARE GO!!! 🥊
Soft Tissue Damage by .whitwham
Perfect stocking filler this Christmas

“An astounding book, moving between shadow and light with an honesty and self-awareness I found completely compelling. As an account of how to handle our private and public hurts, and of a woman’s rage, and how pain and beauty is always interwoven, it felt unique. There is a power to being vulnerable, but also a power to fighting back. Anna Whitwham does both these things, with eloquence and fire.” —Jessie Burton (author of The Miniaturist)

“A beautiful, bold exploration of pleasure and pain. Whitwham intertwines her twin subjects of boxing and grief with magnetic honesty. This is prose that glints with truth.” —Nikita Lalwani (author of You People)

“Anna Whitwham’s Soft Tissue Damage is a beautifully-written and moving account of how she healed herself in the brutal world of boxing. It is also a compelling, visceral and tender book about grief and loss, life and death, identity and sexuality, written by a daughter, a mother and an aspiring fighter.” —Donald McRae (author of The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing)

“Soft Tissue Damage places Whitwham firmly in the tradition of Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer and other novelists who have evoked the blood and spit of the world’s most brutal and beautiful sport.” —Sam Parker, British GQ

Soft Tissue Damage tells the story of author ANNA WHITWHAM’S lifelong interest in boxing manifesting itself in the physical act of getting into the ring to fight. From her first tentative training sessions through bruising sparring and building up to a full-blooded fight, Whitwham charts the transformative impact the sport—and all its complicated implications—has on her during a profoundly difficult period dealing with the grief of losing her mother to cancer. Tender, insightful, honest and full of startling and original thought, this is a book that fully examines what the human body is both capable and incapable of, a book that examines what the human body truly means in its capacity for sexuality and violence, love and death, strength and vulnerability.

05/12/2025

10 REASONS TO BUY ONE OF OUR 10 GIFTS FOR UNDER £10

1. A cracking little counter-cultural stocking filler…🎄
2. What better little gift for the radical reader in your life?🤓
3. A perfect present for less than £10 - the price of a pint🍻 (well, nearly😭)!
4. Give them the gift of a lifetime this Christmas—or if that’s impossible, how about this lovely little offering?🎁
5. Now they can show their counter-cultural credentials for all to see.👀
6. These are WAY better than anything you’ll find in your supermarket Christmas crackers…🧨
7. Give a little something while knowing you’re throwing a bone to independent culture. Win-win innit?🦴
8. A little something that won’t break the bank (though of course we wish we could break the whole rotten financial system, right? Right?)💷
9. POV: You’ve just bought someone a little slice of literary goodness… ✨
10. Perfect for the secret Santa, the last minute panic, the unknowable teenager, the work mate, the Scroogey old punk— because who doesn’t like a bit of Rough Trade?🎅

05/12/2025

05/12/2025

🎉It’s Bandcamp Friday which means Bandcamp waive their share of sales for 24 hours, giving you all a chance to support our authors audiobook sales that little bit more!

🎧Head to our Bandcamp page today and choose from 8 different titles including…

- Do Your Own Thing by
- Goodlord: An Email by
- Soft Tissue Damage by .whitwham
- GOBLINHOOD: Goblin as a Mode by
- Open Mouths by
- Pessimism is for Lightweights: 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance by .godden
- In The End, It Was All About Love by
- Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

These audiobooks were made possible by funding from