By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award Winner of the Guardian First Book Award Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live better than you do; sisters (especially Fran) can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award It's Christmas Eve in Manhattan. Harrison Hanafan, noted plastic surgeon, falls on his ass. So far, so good. 'Ya can't sit there all day, buddy, looking up people's skirts!' chides a weird gal in a coat like a duvet - Mimi! She kindly conjures for him the miracle of a taxi. Recuperating in his apartment with Schubert, Bette Davis, and a foundling cat, Harrison adds items to his life's work, a List of Melancholy Things (Walmart, puppetry, Velcro, whale...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award Eloise is a wreck: jobless, friendless, burdened by Damaging Encounters with milkmen. She proclaims herself a hermit, and reduces her contact with the outside world to written communication with the Queen and manufacturers of toilet-roll holders. Yet she yearns hopelessly for roguish American poet George. Freed from the ties of marriage and lettuce soup, George has just arrived in England with the vague intention of finding Eloise, but has been waylaid by...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize ‘As lunatic and splenetic and distinctive as anything that will be published this year ... I begin to suspect she may be some sort of genius' Telegraph 'It is somehow hard not to be optimistic in the hands of a writer so angry and intelligent ... Doctors & Nurses is a novel bracingly alive, making more polite books cadaverous by comparison' Guardian The tranquillity of a rural backwater - SHATTERED! The ancient arts of medicine - EXPOSED! Her darling cleft-chinned doctor - FORCED TO...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Shrewd, passionate, outrageous and very, very funny' Sunday Times Dot used to think she was perfect, with her pointy nose, pink skin and blonde hair. But now she lives on Abalone Avenue with a husband who chases women and swordfish. And she has a rather icky Fatal Flaw. And the universe doesn't give a damn! So DOT decides to End It All. Will death be fast? Slow? EMBARRASING? But despite her valiant suicide by tea cosy followed by a jaunt to the morgue, DOT wakes up...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Funny and furious ... Lucy Ellmann is clever, and very angry' The Times In an eminent London art institute - the Catafalque - Our Heroine Isabel (she of the obsessional habits, perpetual virginity and peculiar belly button) sit in wistful contemplation of Chardin's brushstrokes and the virile red socks of passing lecturers. Isabel's wholly imaginary love life (based on the romantic notions of authoress Babs Cartwheel) bears little resemblance to that of her flatmate Pol, who prefers to...