Polly Clark's haunting third collection is about leaving one's life and returning a stranger. In poems which are moving and often darkly comic, she explores the ways in which we try to hang on to what we were, and the ways in which we accept that everything we were certain of has gone forever. "Farewell My Lovely" is a book of transformation in many voices, from riffs on popular songs to a modern reworking of "Magnificat" or "Mary's Song". Polly Clark's vivid and unswerving gaze is applied with the same intensity to a dream of childhood, the vulnerability of a new species of bird or the fragility of marriage, creating a powerful collection about the price of survival. The book ends with a final farewell to innocence in a series of poems drawn from the Falklands War.

The landscape of Polly Clark's "Take Me with You" is strange and dangerous, her narrators searching for answers to questions about the nature of human attachment and longing. Her acclaimed first book, "Kiss", took the reader on a journey into the self. In this new collection, the journey turns outwards and explores the ways in which we connect with others and the wider world. Polly Clark's characters speak in many voices, both animal and human, bringing into focus the moments when we are most alive, and most alone. The poems are unsettling even as they are compelling, taking the reader from the last performance of a virtuoso octopus, to the dizzying industry of a Chinese city, to the vast and lonely seascapes of the Scottish coast.

**The thrilling new novel by the prize-winning author of Larchfield** 'Passionate, remarkable and uplifting novel' Guardian 'Grabbed me by the imagination and carried me into the wild' Laline Paull Set across two continents, Tiger is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the reader into one of the world's last wildernesses with blistering authenticity. Frieda is a primatologist, sensitive and solitary, until a violent attack shatters her ordered world. In her new role as a zookeeper, she confronts a very different ward: an injured wild tiger. Deep in the Siberian taiga, Tomas, a Russian conservationist, fears that the natural order has toppled. The king tiger has been killed by poachers and a spectacular tigress now patrols his vast territory as her own. In a winter of treacherous competition, the path of the tigress and her cub crosses with an Udeghe huntress and her daughter. Vengeance must follow, and the fates of both tigers and people are transformed. Learning of her tiger's past offers Frieda the chance of freedom. Faced with the savage forces of nature, she must trust to her instinct and, like the tiger, find a way to live in the world.

'Mysterious, wondrous, captivating' Louis de Bernieres 'We need the courage to choose ourselves' W. H. Auden It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether. Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears. The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Echoing the depths of Possession, the elegance of The Stranger's Child and the ingenuity of Longbourn, Larchfield is a beautiful and haunting novel about heroism - the unusual bravery that allows unusual people to go on living; to transcend banality and suffering with the power of their imagination.

**The thrilling new novel by the prize-winning author of Larchfield** 'Passionate, remarkable and uplifting novel' Guardian 'Grabbed me by the imagination and carried me into the wild' Laline Paull Set across two continents, Tiger is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the reader into one of the world's last wildernesses with blistering authenticity. Frieda is a primatologist, sensitive and solitary, until a violent attack shatters her ordered world. In her new role as a zookeeper, she confronts a very different ward: an injured wild tiger. Deep in the Siberian taiga, Tomas, a Russian conservationist, fears that the natural order has toppled. The king tiger has been killed by poachers and a spectacular tigress now patrols his vast territory as her own. In a winter of treacherous competition, the path of the tigress and her cub crosses with an Udeghe huntress and her daughter. Vengeance must follow, and the fates of both tigers and people are transformed. Learning of her tiger's past offers Frieda the chance of freedom. Faced with the savage forces of nature, she must trust to her instinct and, like the tiger, find a way to live in the world.

Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. "Lee Valley Poems" is his first book to be wholly conceived and written in London, once his place of exile and now his permanent home. It includes an extended sequence, "When Water Confirms", translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan, and a suite of shorter poems translated by several poets, most of these working with Yang Lian: Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, W.N. Herbert, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson and Arthur Sze. The book's preface, A Wild Goose Speaks to me, takes as its springboard Yang Lian's comment 'There is no international, only different locals'. With this perspective, the Lee Valley of his first London poems becomes the international inside the local: the poet may travel far but never really leaves the ground of his own inner self, and the value and joy of poetry is seen as fishing in the deep sea of existence. This title is published in a dual language Chinese-English edition.

Polly Clark shows the complex and often brutal making of a self in the poems of her first collection, from first passions, through losses and disappointments, to attempts to understand and forgive origins. The forces which shape who we are take on many personalities: surgeons, horses, Amazon parrots, Pontius Pilate and huge beetles all have lessons to teach about loss, bereavement and the shaping of a fragile identity. Who decides who we are and what we will be? Her journey encompasses diverse locations, from her native Canada to Hungary and Edinburgh Zoo, from the hospital bed to the zoo enclosure, demonstrating that places can be as important as people in shaping our internal landscape. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.