’Samuel Fisher’s prose moves with swift and sure tread across the glinting particulars of locality, until that condition, that curse, with its pains and pleasures, becomes universal. Our fate. Our challenge. Our discarded future' – Iain Sinclair

In a London ravaged by climate change, where the few survivors suffer from an epidemic of chronic pain, accompanied by haptic and visual hallucinations known as ‘migraine aura’, Ellis wakes from his first bout of the illness in a ruined bookshop. Accompanied by the bookshop’s former owner Sam, he embarks on a psychogeographic quest through the city in search of his ex-girlfriend Luna. Fisher’s third novel Migraine (Corsair) confronts vital issues of environmental collapse, and asks what kind of society might survive in the face of it. He was in conversation with the poet and essayist Helen Charman, author of Mother State.

Kim Hyesoon is one South Korea’s foremost poets. Her groundbreaking and radically feminist poetry – ‘a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism’ (Griffin Prize Judges) – has been translated into English by poet Don Mee Choi for over a decade.

We celebrate the latest of these translations – the Griffin Prize-winning masterpiece on mourning and survival, Autobiography of Death, now published for the first time in the UK by And Other Stories – with an evening of readings from Kim and discussion of her work with Will Harris, whose latest collection is Brother Poem (Granta).

In The Original (Scribner), Nell Stevens’s second novel, Grace Inderwick grows up as the ward of a cold Victorian family in which the only warmth and affection is provided by her cousin Charles. After many years missing at sea, Charles returns to the household. But is this the real Charles or an impostor? Nell Stevens brilliantly reconfigures the familiar trope of the returning stranger as a gripping meditation on forgery and authenticity, in life, in art, and in love.

Nell Stevens was joined in conversation by essayist and novelist Olivia Laing, whose most recent book is The Garden Against Time.

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In 1958 the 18-year-old Liliane Lijn left New York for Paris, determined to become an artist. Her captivating memoir Liquid Reflections (Hamish Hamilton) tells the story of her meetings with poets, painters, philosophers and revolutionaries and of the development of her groundbreaking artistic practice, pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and feminine mythology. Now resident in London, Lijn was in conversation about her life and work with Jennifer Higgie, former editor of the art magazine frieze and author of The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World.

Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan (Kick the Latch, The Dominant Animal) acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged and rearranged the diarist’s words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog.

Scanlan was joined by Emily LaBarge, whose book Dog Days was published in autumn 2025.

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Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Deep House (Allen Lane) is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams – just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. Via forests and deserts, London fashion shows and East Village hotel rooms, they eventually shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco.

Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is a journey through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

Atherton Lin is in conversation with Diarmuid Hester, author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears (Allen Lane).

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In her new book In Defence of Leisure (Cape), Akshi Singh presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner’s approach – from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea – she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire.

Singh was in conversation with Anouchka Grose, psychoanalyst, writer and climate campaigner whose books include Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard (Mack, 2022) and Fashion: a Manifesto (Notting Hill Editions, 2023).

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Geoff Dyer has written books on every subject under the sun; now, at last, he turns his hand to memoir. Homework is his account of his childhood and adolescence in provincial England, as the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, and the opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement in the 1960s and 1970s. Merve Emre describes it as being like ‘going for a long walk with a close friend, whose singular voice — inventive, absorbing, a little rakish, and wonderfully dry — will hold your interest for hours on end.’ Dyer was in conversation with curator, editor and writer Gareth Evans.

Francesca Wade’s biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, follows on from her acclaimed Square Haunting (Faber, 2020) to present a portrait of one of 20th century modernism’s most rowdy and confounding geniuses, in what Lisa Appignanesi has described as both a ‘discerning literary biography and a page-turning whodunit’.

Wade was joined by Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light (CB Editions, 2024).

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Since its founding, the online food and culture publication Vittles has sought to disrupt mainstream ideas of what food writing looks like. To mark its fifth anniversary, Vittles produced its first print issue – an engaging mix of newly commissioned articles and a selection of some of the best essays it published in the previous five years.

At the Bookshop, three contributors to Vittles Issue 1 – Robin Craig, Amy Key and Waithera Sebatindira – discussed what it means to write about food as a non-food writer with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue.

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