4pm | 14th November | Porphyry Hall | Fowey

Join us for a workshop of rituals to welcome in the winter & celebrate the publication of The Season of Frost and Fire with author & Wiccan Priestess Rebecca Beattie, inside the atmospheric setting of Porphyry Hall within the historic grounds of Place in Fowey. Rebecca will be discussing her life as a practising witch, alongside the inspiration behind her new book, and then will take us through examples of the rituals we can perform to help us embrace the coming winter.

The materials needed for the rituals will be provided, but you’re encouraged to bring a notepad and pen/pencil if you can.

You’ll also receive a 10% discount on any copies of the book sold at the event.

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The Season of Frost and Fire by Rebecca Beattie:

Winter is often seen as a season for retreat.

But what if the cold months could hold their own magic? In The Season of Frost and Fire, green witch Rebecca Beattie shares thirteen luminous rituals to guide us through the darkest days – from fire rituals that welcome in the winter and banish fears on stormy nights to comforting ceremonies that honour our desire for transformation. Discover the tarot cards that will light your path from the first frost to the thaw of early spring. Meet the forgotten goddesses who will become your companions and guides in the shadows.

Hear bewitching tales of shapeshifting beings and thin veils between mist-covered worlds. Even in winter’s quiet, Beattie reveals the warmth, wisdom and renewal alive beneath the surface of things. Bring back the light this winter – with The Season of Frost and Fire.

Perfect for fans of The Wheel of the Year; The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg; Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials by Marion Gibson; and fans of Lia Leendertz’s Almanac.

'A warming, reflective and beautifully written book of seasonal magic.' Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

9th October at 6.30pm | The Old Bank, Fowey

Wyl Menmuir / Clare Howdle / Luke Thompson

Three of Cornwall's great contemporary writers, each with new books out this year, gather together at The Old Bank in Fowey to discuss their latest work.

Each of these writers explores the spirit of place but they do so using different themes, forms and subjects, whether that's through the rocks and stones that form a landscape, the language used, or the animals that are found or imagined there.  

Wyl Menmuir'sThe Spirit of Stone is the final book in his trilogy of non-fiction titles that navigate our relationships with place, this time through landscapes of rock, stone and earth. 

Clare Howdle'sHirethow is a debut collection of short stories that play with ideas of place, connection and reality to find fresh perspectives on the Cornish word, 'hireth', meaning loss, longing and a yearning for home.

Luke Thompson'sA Cornish Bestiary is a compendium of Cornwall's most curious creatures from natural history and folklore, broadside ballads and news reports, literature and hoax. 

They knew they were changing history. They didn't know they would change each other.

Oxford, 1920.

For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight and find themselves thrust into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. They have come here from all walks of life, but Dora, Beatrice, Otto and Marianne all long to move on from the Great War, whose ghosts, grief, and secrets still feel very real indeed.

But Oxford is a place caught between tradition and change, where centuries of misogyny and exclusion clash with the promise of new freedoms. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time under the city’s dreaming spires, their friendship will become more important than ever.

‘A beautifully wrought story of women’s rights, freedom, love and experience. I couldn’t put it down’ Harriet Evans, author of The Treasures

‘I became completely involved in the lives of the four pioneering heroines whose friendship is the beating heart of the book’ Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures

'This book is an act of excavation, and an act of remembering.'

As Kim Willis drifts from the traditional path of marriage and motherhood, she yearns for a new set of stories to light her way. Here, she is pulled towards the source of the Severn, hearing whispers of ancient matriarchs: shape-shifting enchantresses, scaly nymphs and goddesses who once commanded our lands. These are no fair maidens, but powerful warrioresses and animalistic beasts, snaking along the edges of watery places where we meet the otherworld in the shadows.

As she uncovers the ancient myths hidden in the rugged landscapes of the British Isles, the stories of women like Arianrhod, Melusine and Cerridwen awaken a forgotten power. Journeying from the Severn to Skye, Eryri to Northumberland, Kim discovers new magic in the tales of old, unveiling forgotten truths about grief and healing, while charting a new course through sisterhood and sexuality, fertility and freedom.

Through the threads of folklore, history and landscape, Kim identifies a better way of being for modern women, and crafts a new vision for Britain where women are - and always were - a force of nature.

From the author of A Ghost in the Throat, an unforgettable book – both history and ghost story – that will leave you gasping by its final page.

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them – and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?

A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.

Sometimes people just…click.

‘A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful’
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

‘Castillo is a literary firecracker… If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you’ll like this’
Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits

Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s one of the best at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.

Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing… Girlie’s type.

‘Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?’

You couldn’t really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?

After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves.

As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters’ lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.

Do you want to change the world but wonder if there’s any point trying?

Are you unsure what you can offer, or don’t feel that you fit the activist mould?

Do you think activists can be self-righteous, even oblivious to the very people they’re trying to help?

‘A wise, rich and crucial book.’ George Monbiot

How Not To Save the World is a book about doing good, for anyone who has looked at politics or public discourse and thought, ‘we need better than this.’ The fervour that drives us to change the world can create blind spots, where we don’t see our own behaviour, or disregard it because the cause is urgent.

Realistic, candid and hopeful, How Not To Save the World is a sympathetic exploration of alternatives to righteousness, purity traps and other unhelpful habits. It shows that there are ways to work together for what matters, without alienating the people we need to convince.

***

‘The stories in this book show how we can build bridges in order to work together for the world that we want.’ Brian Eno

‘Read it and weep, laugh, cringe… it might bring more compassion and togetherness in a broken world.’ Dr. Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion

‘Anthea Lawson’s provocative book provides us with deep insights into the tactical, emotional and ethical complexities of campaigning.’ Sir Jonathon Porritt

It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.

But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend . . .

‘Imaginative and empathetic’
Guardian

‘A celebration of the exuberance of night-time and a moving portrait of the dangers of the dark’
The Times

‘A fascinating voyage into the night’
i Paper

The night has always been teeming with life. From the labour of security guards and sex workers to the ecstasy of queer raves and religious ceremonies, this nocturnal landscape is populated by many, cloaked beneath the darkness. It is a time of fear and vulnerability, nightmares and insomnia – yet it contains another world, too, one of beauty and possibility.

Haunting and intimate, Wolf Moon is an entrancing journey from dusk until daybreak, and a remarkable exploration of how the night has shaped our bodies, minds, and cultures.

Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Francis Young's new history of fairies demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.

Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed – but not destroyed – by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.

No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture – or the woods at the bottom of their garden – in the same way again.

The new novel from a literary star – brilliant and deeply relatable.

‘Brilliantly fun.’ OBSERVER
‘One of the best writers alive today.’ STYLIST
‘Audacious, incisive and very funny.’ DAILY MAIL

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week.

There’s a Kinga for every day: on Mondays, you can catch Kinga A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath.

Kingas A-G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life – between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.

It’s an arrangement that’s not without its fair share of admin, grudges and half-truths. But when Kinga A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

A dazzlingly original reassessment of the power and plurality of women's singing voices by the critically acclaimed author of Art Monsters and Scaffolding

'It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker’ Viv Albertine

For millennia, women’s raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death.

In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices – and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism. Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing.

A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there. Immersing readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to art punk, what follows is a full-throated tour of women’s voices, including Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyoncé, FKA Twigs and Billie Eilish.

Reflecting on what makes women’s singing so powerful – to the point where others feel the need to control or manipulate it – Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms, a siren call:

Girls to the front: NOW.

Cornwall Uncharted reveals the county's vibrant queer histories for the first time, tracing a hidden tapestry of creativity and community from the eighteenth century to today. Through an original synthesis of art and literary analysis – examining studio paintings, poetry, novels and private manuscripts – as well as meticulous archival research in coaching-inn records, market ledgers, architectural surveys and wartime reminiscences, this rigorous study reconstructs the social and cultural worlds where nonconforming lives were forged. Six thematic chapters – from urban concealments and coastal artist retreats to lighthouses, rural hinterlands, du Maurier’s literary landscapes and contemporary grassroots networks – demonstrate how Cornwall’s unique geography shaped queer expression and solidarity.

Challenging metropolitan-centric narratives, this book offers a compelling model of peripheral resistance and belonging, inviting scholars and general readers alike to rediscover Cornwall as a crucial site of queer innovation.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE
WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, BBC, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine

‘A fierce and funny road-trip novel’ GUARDIAN, the 50 hottest books to read right now
‘Inventive and playful’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A stunning debut’ OBSERVER
‘I was gripped . . . Brilliant’ DAILY MAIL
‘A thrilling ride’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘A bold, brilliant, original, funny and devastating novel’ KATE MCLOUGHLIN, TLS
‘Brilliant and heart-stopping’ LOS ANGELES TIMES
‘Startling and ambitious‘ NEW YORK TIMES
‘Animated by dark humor and cool fury’ NEW YORKER
‘Dexterous and formally inventive’ MARCEL THEROUX, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work-entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism.

Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.

So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.

LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARDS *

‘Fantastic . . . I love works that are smarter than I am and this is one‘ PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of Booker-shortlisted JAMES

‘Funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure . . . This is essential reading‘ ANN PATCHETT, bestselling author of TOM LAKE

‘Heartbreaking, hilarious, profound, and vital‘ LARA PRESCOTT, bestselling author of THE SECRETS WE KEEP

Rediscover the brilliance of Tortoise by Candlelight in the Mermaid Collection - classic books by popular pioneering female authors republished to delight new generations of readers. Set just outside London in the early 1960s, this is a charming novel about a family living on the edge of society in their dilapidated Victorian house following the departure of their mother - and the upheaval when a new couple moves in next door . . . With a foreword by Eve Chase

Fourteen-year-old Emmie Bean loves her family. But she worries about them too.

Her mother is gone (no one will say where). Her father drinks instead of writing. Her younger brother Oliver has started stealing.

And older sister Alice disappears on illicit dates. Then there is their isolated house’s menagerie of birds and animals, including Mo the squirrel and Murgatroyd the tortoise, all of which require Emmie’s love and attention. When the Sargents, a childless couple, move in next door, Emmie and the Beans find themselves drawn to this welcoming but aimless husband and wife.

Emmie fears the darkness and chaos surrounding them all. But perhaps love burns bright . . .

‘An exceptional picture of disorganised family life’ Observer

‘Bawden is noted too for the sharp sense of humour that edges her tales of middle-class manners and mores towards satire, particularly when it all goes wrong’ Guardian