'It was a tower block, but it was home.' The early hours of Wednesday 14 June 2017. The north-west corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. A twenty-four-storey residential tower. The scene of a national tragedy. This powerful verbatim play is drawn from the testimony of residents – a group of survivors and bereaved – at the heart of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It reveals the impact of the multiple failures that led to the most devastating residential fire in the UK since the Second World War, and asks: how do we stop this ever happening again? Startling, urgent and deeply moving, Grenfell: in the words of survivors explores the courage and resilience of an ill-treated community and their continued campaign for justice. Created from interviews by Gillian Slovo, the play was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in July 2023, co-directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike. 10% of the net proceeds from sales of this book will be donated by the publisher to the Grenfell Foundation, who support the bereaved and survivors in the aftermath of the fire, as well as help them ensure Grenfell is remembered long into the future.

There was probably only one person who could make Sarah Barcant, successful prosecutor, leave New York and return home to Smitsrivier, the small town in South Africa she left years before. Ben. Her lawyer mentor and inspiration; the man who encouraged her to get out and know the world now needs her back, to help him with one last case, part of the Truth Commission. In the back of a van, handcuffed, Dirk Hendrickes is being driven to the police station where once he was proud to call himself deputy. Later, down the same hot,dry road, will come Alex Mpondo, alternating between cursing Dirk and feeling sick at the idea of facing him, his torturer. And in Smitsrivier: James Sizela, who has passed years waiting for the moment when the man he is certain killed his son, will be forced to tell where the body lies. The people who are about to meet their pasts will not experience the real truth-telling in the court room, at the public show. The real truth will be felt offstage...

In Khartoum the trumpeters, layers of red sand glittering on their faces, are posted at each corner of the palace roof. Trapped between the desert and the Jihad, oblivious to the heat and the impending dust storm, General Gordon is waiting, hopelessly, for Wolseley's camel corps to cross the shimmering land and rescue him. He begins to hallucinate betrayals and beheadings; unwittingly he is about to touch and change lives far beyond his own including those of a London doctor, John Clark and his wife Mary, and especially the young boy from the English dockyard slums who now stands beside him, his reluctant last ally.

A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, a daughter who always had to come second to political commitment. While recalling the extraordinary events which surrounded her family's persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents' relationship and her own turbulent childhood, leading her at one point to a chilling interview with one of the men responsible for her mother's death, Gillian Slovo has reated an astonishing portrait of a courageous, beautiful mother and a father of integrity and stoicism.

With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.

Irina Davydovna is a cleaner. She has no time for politics or even for that matter, people: 'rules and rulers may come and go, but dirt never changes.' Boris Aleksandrovich is a revolutionary. He thinks he understands power. But this is Leningrad in 1933 and Stalin is about to turn against their city. When the life of his beloved daughter Natasha is threatened and his old friend Anton saves a skinny little orphan he finds on a Moscow train, Boris' faith in his ideals are put to the test. While Irina, watching it all, must learn the power of loyalty and love. 'Powerful and moving, Ice Road is a novel whose epic scope never obscures the individual lives that are lived in the shadow of great events. I shall never forget Natasha and Kolya's love story . . . or Irina, whose sturdy self respect and determination to survive, seems, at times, to speak for an entire people. Gillian Slovo excels in depicting complex human beings, full of passion, love, ambition, self-interest, who are caught up in their country's history and swept along by it.' Pat Barker

House of Cards meets Homeland in this powerful and unputdownable thriller tracing a riot from its inception through to its impact one year on...

It's 4 a.m. and dawn is about to break over the Lovelace estate. Cathy Mason drags herself out of bed as she swelters in her overheated bedroom - the council still haven't turned the radiators off despite temperatures reaching the 30s. In a kitchen across London, Home Secretary Peter Whiteley enjoys the tea that his security detail left for him before he joins his driver and heads to Parliament, whilst his new police chief, Joshua Yares, clears his head for his first day with a run. All three will have reasons to recollect this morning as their lives collide over ten days they will never forget.

Ten Days takes an unflinching look at how lives are ruined and careers are made when small misjudgements have profound effects on frustrated communities and damaged individuals. Gillian Slovo's game-changing novel about political expediency and personal disenfranchisement is as page-turning as it is culturally significant.

The new verbatim drama from the pioneering team behind Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom. Over the last twelve months headlines have been dominated by the growth of Islamic State, and terror attacks claimed by IS have spread across the world. What is the entity that calls itself Islamic State? Why are some young Muslim men and women from across Western Europe leaving their homes to answer the call of Jihad? And what should we do about it? This piece of verbatim documentary theatre, written by novelist Gillian Slovo using material from the interviews she conducted and directed by Nicolas Kent, is the result of many months researching Islamic State, meeting people affected by the organization and involved in the fight against it.

Loyalties, beliefs, love, family ties: all are tested to the limit in one of the most devastating moments of human history: the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Boris Aleksandrovich, a well-meaning bureaucrat, thinks he can negotiate between idealism and politics. His daughter, Natasha, learns otherwise when, as a young woman in love, she is almost crushed by her father's compromises. Watching all this unfold is Irina. Wise, ironic, marvelous Irina, whom Boris had persuaded to go on an ill-fated voyage to the Arctic Circle, where she barely survived. When she arrives back in Leningrad, he feels honor bound to find her a position within his family circle. Irina comes to understand how love for another may, in the end, be more powerful and more profound than blind loyalty to an idea. Exciting and heroic, peopled with wonderfully complex characters, Ice Road is a masterpiece. A finalist for the Orange Prize.

When the genteely impoverished and rebellious Evelyn marries the charming Emil, scion of a privileged Sinhalese family, she thinks that her dream of a life in England can now at last come true. So the family travel, with their young son Milton, from Ceylon to Tilbury Docks. But this is England in the 1950s and, no matter how hard Evelyn wishes that it would, England does not take kindly to strangers, especially families who are half black and half white. A profound and moving novel, this is the story about the search to feel at home in your own skin.

"""I don't know what crime I am supposed to have committed for which not only I but my wife and children should continually suffer."" - British detainee Moazzam Begg This verbatim play, drawn from letters and interviews from Guantanamo Bay prisoners, their lawyers and relatives, weaves together personal stories, legal opinion and political debate. Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom looks at the questions surrounding the detentions in Guantanamo Bay, and asks how much damage is being done to Western democratic values during the 'war on terror'."

"Perhaps the most important piece of fiction yet to emerge from the new South Africa."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Written with the pace of a thriller""—Times Literary Supplement), Red Dust is set in a rural South African town, where three people are about to meet their past. Sarah Barcant has left her law career in New York to assist an old friend as prosecutor on a Truth Commission hearing. Dirk Hendricks, a former police deputy, is being taken in handcuffs to the station where he once worked. There he will confront Alex Mpondo, the man he had tortured, who is now an MP.

"A piercingly revealing light on...the unspeakable bond between political police interrogator and victim."—Nadine Gordimer

"Reads like a first-rate courtroom drama, with lively, unexpected twists and turns."—New Leader

"Written with the pace of a thriller."—Times Literary Supplement

The Government has so far refused a Public Inquiry into the riots that shook our cities this Summer, so the Tricycle is mounting its own. This verbatim play builds a real-time picture of the riots as they unfolded. And then, from interviews with politicians, police, teachers, lawyers, community leaders, as well as victims and on-lookers, The Riots analyses what happened, why it happened, and what we should do towards making a better future for ourselves and our city. Astonishing stories and equally astonishing conclusions told by the many voices that have been stirred up by the riots.

A revelatory and necessary survival memoir of five years of illegal detainment and torture in Guantanamo Bay

On September 11, 2001, in a cafe in London, Ahmed Errachidi watched as the twin towers collapsed. He was appalled by the loss of innocent life. But he couldn't possibly have predicted how much of his own life he too would lose because of that day. In a series of terrible events, Ahmed was sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans in the diplomatic lounge at Islamabad airport and spent five and a half years in Guantanamo. There, he was beaten, tortured, humiliated, and very nearly destroyed. But Ahmed did not give in. This very ordinary, Moroccan-born London chef became a leader of men. Known by the authorities as The General, he devised protests and resistance by any means possible. As a result, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement. But then, after all those years, Ahmed was freed, his innocence admitted. This is Ahmed's story. It will make readers rethink what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will also make readers look anew at courage, survival, justice, and the War on Terror.