What makes Nicolas Bouvier such a well?loved travel writer is his exquisite sensitivity to the beauties of life, and his ability to capture those elusive moments in a style that is light, yet pregnant with wonder. Whether he s delirious in the wintery Aran Isles, where the air `unites the virtues of champagne, cocaine, caffeine, and the ecstasy of love or singing the praises of his Chinese tour guide, this collection of his shorter travel pieces brims with his particular joie de vivre.

To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was `shrieking, dumb, defiled’ constantly test a vision of `faith, life, virtue in the sun’. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.

A Book of the Year 2019 in The Morning Star. This is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a small, ambitious press over a period of radical transformation in publishing. Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters - handwritten, typed, and now emailed - between an author and the editor. Beginning in 1969 with the response to an invitation to subscribe to Carcanet for two guineas, the book traces Carcanet's progress and offers insight into the nature of literary editing. At its heart is the personal relationship of author and editor/publisher, the conflicts, friendships and vicissitudes that occur at the nexus between the work, its creator, publisher and reader. Poets are central, but fiction writers, translators, biographers and critics also contribute to the Carcanet ferment and firmament. Fifty Fifty celebrates the writers', readers' and editor's risks, passions and pleasures.