From the bestselling author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Shy is a novel about guilt, rage, imagination and boyhood. It is about being lost in the dark, and realising you are not alone. 'Max Porter is one of my favourite writers in the world.' George Saunders 'Beautiful and haunting.' Kevin Barry 'The strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books.' Ian Rankin 'A miracle of language.' Irish Times This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy. You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him. Got your special meds, nutcase? He is escaping Last Chance, a home for 'very disturbed young men', and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past and the heavy question of his future. 'An act of humanity and grace, heightened by its distinctive form and artistry.' Telegraph

** Pre-order Shy, the new novel from Max Porter, now ** A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. This extraordinary debut, full of unexpected humour and emotional truth, marks the arrival of a thrilling and significant new talent.

Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories. Eight authors were given the freedom of their chosen English Heritage site, from medieval castles to a Cold War nuclear bunker. Immersed in the past and chilled by rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. Also includes a gazetteer of English Heritage properties which are said to be haunted.

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny. 'A little masterpiece.' Irish Times 'Luminous.' Observer 'One of our most exciting writers.' The Spectator Madrid. Unfinished. Man dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. In seven extraordinary written pictures, untethered from reality, Max Porter translates the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.

Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize

An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

There’s a village an hour from London. It’s no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land’s past.

It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 British Book Awards, Book of the Year - Discover Award Longlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize Winner of a 2022 Somerset Maugham Award Cabbages . . . The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud, that's where we put the heroin . . . There's a stash of heroin waiting to be imported, and no one seems sure what to do with it . . . But Ayla's a gardener, and she has a plan. Offering a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London heroin trade, Keeping the House lifts the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice: not only in McDonald's queues and men's clubs, but in spotless living rooms and whispering kitchens. Spanning three generations, this is the story of the women who keep their family - and their family business - afloat, juggling everything from police surveillance to trickier questions of community, belonging and love.

From the bestselling author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Shy is a novel about guilt, rage, imagination and boyhood. It is about being lost in the dark, and realising you are not alone. This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy. You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him. Got your special meds, nutcase? He is escaping Last Chance, a home for 'very disturbed young men', and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past and the heavy question of his future.

A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets.

The British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today. With her striking musical gifts, she is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open.

This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American press, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back, a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived.

Eight authors were given after hours freedom at their chosen English heritage site. Immersed in the history, atmosphere and rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. Sarah Perry's intense tale of possession at the Jacobean country house Audley End is a work of psychological terror, while Andrew Michael Hurley's story brings an unforgettably shocking slant to the history of Carlisle Castle. Within the walls of these historic buildings each author has found inspiration to deliver a new interpretation of the classic ghost story. Relish the imagined terrors at these exhilarating locations: Kate Clanchy, Housesteads Roman Fort | Stuart Evers, Dover Castle | Mark Haddon, York Cold War Bunker | Andrew Michael Hurley, Carlisle Castle | Sarah Perry, Audley End | Max Porter Eltham Palace | Kamila Shamsie, Kenilworth Castle | Jeanette Winterson, Pendennis Castle