Joanna Kavenna

Abigail Reynolds writes the introduction to this book of her creative endeavors from her studio at Porthmeor in St Ives, where a strong Atlantic wind drives sand against salt-crusted windows and the sound of the surf fills the room. This elemental, shifting environment frames the making of Walking A Cappella, a book that reflects the looping and discursive nature of her artistic practice. The publication presents a flow of images, sequencing works without regard to chronology or technique but allowing them to speak to one another formally. Recurring ideas and forms emerge intuitively, mirroring the way Reynolds returns to her core concerns from different directions. A dialogue with curator and writer Sophie J. Williamson threads through the sequence, alongside an essay by novelist Joanna Kavenna and a preface from Hammad Nasar. Reynolds' work continually explores what lies beneath or behind: the unseen, the folded, the implied. She is interested in how much information can be held in tension, and how underlying structures shape experience. Her materials are often drawn from a personal library of books arranged in chronological order, beginning around 1890 when photography entered the public domain. The changing textures of paper and design across the decades of her book collection are echoed in the array of papers and typography arranged in signatures within Walking A Cappella. Earlier in her career, working for the Oxford English Dictionary in Duke Humphrey's Library, Reynolds honed a sensitivity to material history that remains central to her practice. Reynolds works across sculpture, collage, print and live events. Using techniques such as overlay and folding, she reconfigures fragments of the past to sharpen our awareness of time. She is interested in disciplines from geology to palaeobiology, and collaborates with brass bands, choirs, and DJs. Her work frequently explores the contested histories of her home in far west Cornwall. Reynolds studied English Literature at St Catherine's College Oxford University before receiving an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2016 she was awarded the BMW Art Journey prize at Art Basel to travel to lost libraries along the Silk Road. Her book Lost Libraries documenting this journey was published by Hatje Cantz in 2018. Over 2020-22 her work was featured in British Art Show 9, the landmark touring exhibition that defines new directions in contemporary art. In 2019 she transformed the sand and seaweed of a local beach into perfect mouth-blown glass. Her work is well represented in public collections including New York Public Library, the Government Arts Collection, and the Arts Council Collection. Her sculpture Anthronauts: Trilobite commissioned by Chatsworth House is now on view at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

'One of the most brilliant British writers working today.' Spectator Who decides the rules of the games we play? In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI. Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, Seven is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world.

'Fun and erudite' Sunday Times'Snort-inducingly funny' Daily Mail'One of the cleverest books you'll read this year' TelegraphEvery system, however immaculate, has a few little glitches.The latest in domestic tech should have predicted that businessman George Mann was about to murder his family. But instead it crashes and leads to the wrong man being caught and punished.Are there gremlins in digital giant Beetle's ubiquitous wearable tech, talking fridges and Dickensian droids? Have they been hacked, or is something even more sinister going on?With the clock ticking philandering Beetle CEO Guy Matthias, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and secretive hacker Gogol each try to uncover the truth in a darkly funny and horribly recognisable world only days ahead of our own.'Witty and horrifyingly relevant . . . Full of dark humour and refreshingly frank social commentary with a distinctly Orwellian flavour.' Scotsman

From the winner of the 2008 Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we will do--before we do. One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm. Now, what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient "lifechain" don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment--the ugliness and the beauty--perfectly.

'Smart, strange, coping with death through Light' Margaret Atwood'Extraordinary, wise, funny, adventurous' A. L. Kennedy'So utterly startling and inventive, it's almost an act of resistance' Miriam Toews'I couldn't put it down. A cult following seems certain' Literary Review'Refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely' Guardian'Opts to push the boundaries of what the novel is' Telegraph'A comic metaphysical thriller' Scotland on Sunday In this darkly ironic novel - a quest for truth, a satire, an elegy - Joanna Kavenna displays fearless originality and wit in confronting the strangeness of reality and how we contend with the death of those we love. Beautiful, ethereal drawings by Oly Ralfe illustrate this haunting journey through time, space and human understanding.

A brand new collection of essays exclusively commissioned by Notting Hill Editions. Iain Sinclair writes in his luminous introduction, the contributors try to explain their impulse to write 'by way of personal anecdote, revelation, or hopeful punt in the dark'.

Cassandra White is a woman on a mission. Her Lakeland farm may be falling apart, but at least she's escaped the madness of modern life. But when her valley is invaded by bankers buying up second homes, she's determined to put up a fight. What begins as a hare-brained scheme with a few unruly locals soon has the whole community taking up arms - and, before she knows it, Cassandra's leading a revolution...

Vienna1865: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. 2153: humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it. London in 2009: Michael Stone's novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child. A beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work about motherhood that is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.

Joanna Kavenna went north in search of the Atlantis of the Arctic, the mythical land of Thule. Seen once by an Ancient Greek explorer and never found again, mysterious Thule came to represent the vast and empty spaces of the north. Fascinated for many years by Arctic places, Kavenna decided to travel through the lands that have been called Thule, from Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia, and Greenland. On her journey, she found traces of earlier writers and travellers, all compelled by the idea of a land called Thule: Richard Francis Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, as well as the Norwegian Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. She met wilderness-lovers; poets writing epics about ice; Inuit musicians and Polar scientists trying to understand the silent snows. But she came to discover that a darkness also inhabits Thule: the Thule Society, obsessed with the purity of the Nordic peoples; the 'war children' - the surviving progeny of Nazi attempts to foster an Aryan race; as well as ice-bound relics of the Cold War. Finally she arrived in Svalbard, a beautiful Arctic archipelago, at the edge of the frozen ocean. Blending travelogue, reportage, memoir, and literary essay, Joanna Kavenna explores the changing life of the far North in the 20th Century. The Ice Museum is a mesmerising story of idealism and ambition, wars and destruction, survival and memories, set against the haunting backdrop of the northern landscape.

Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace.