Europe’s internal borders have rarely been ‘natural’; they have more often been created by accident or force.

In Borderlines, political historian Lewis Baston journeys along twenty-nine key borders from west to east Europe, examining how the map of our continent has been redrawn over the last century, with varying degrees of success. The fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but today’s map of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945.

To journey to the centre of the story of Europe, Baston takes us to its edges, bringing to life the fascinating and often bizarre histories of these border zones. We visit Baarle, the town broken into thirty fragments by the Netherland-Belgium border, and stop in Ostritz, the eastern German town where Nazis held a rock festival. We meander the back lanes of rural Ireland, and soak up the atmosphere in the coffee houses of the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Through these borderlands, Baston explores how places and people heal from the scars left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences, and he searches for a better European future – finding it in unexpected places.

Hodder, 2024

Nanako Hanada’s life has not just flatlined, it’s hit rock bottom… Recently separated from her husband, she is living between 4-hour capsule hostels, pokey internet cafes and bookshop floors. Her work is going no better – sales at the eccentric Village Vanguard bookstore in Tokyo, which Nanako manages, are dwindling. As Nanako’s life falls apart, reading books is the only thing keeping her alive.

That’s until Nanako joins an online meet-up site which offers 30 minutes with someone you’ll never see again. Describing herself as a sexy bookseller she offers strangers ‘the book that will change their life’ in exchange for a meeting. In the year that follows, Nanako meets hundreds of people, some of whom want more than just a book…

Acerbic and self-knowing, The Bookshop Woman is a soul-soothing story of a bookseller’s self-discovery and an ode to the joy of reading. Offering a glimpse into bookselling in Japan and the quirky side of Tokyo and its people, this is a story of how books can help us forge connection with others and lead us to ourselves.

This is a story about the beauty of climbing into a book, free diving into its pages, and then resurfacing on the last page, ready to breathe a different kind of air…

Brazen, 2024

fiction

Four teenagers are sent ahead to their holiday cottage in the south of France for the summer. Luke, Connor, Thea and Violet share a father, but have only lately come to know about one another. Languid days by the pool and the lake have an undercurrent of tension as sibling frictions and personal upsets leave them brooding. In the meantime, animals and plants begin to behave in uncanny self-destructive ways and the weather is subtly wrong. Then one night Violet sees a plane fall from the sky. Sporadic news updates show the same footage of empty streets in the capital cities, and they lose contact with parents, friends and neighbours. The siblings adapt to their new isolation as they all try to take care of one another during the strange overcast days, doubtfully looting the empty houses and stockpiling books in the French only Thea can translate. For a while, they survive – but all are altered. Luke, the eldest, finds himself fraying under the pressure of his caretaking role. Connor begins to hear a drone without a source. Thea’s panic attacks and Violet’s paranoia gather steam and the world gets stranger.

Its a slow build novel, reminding me of How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff with some elements in common with Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. There’s an undercurrent of desire gone toxic, overripe yearning, disrupted sexuality. Private traumas metastasize in the greater upheaval and nothing will endure unchanged.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices — a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.

Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies’s intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.