Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

The strange and tender new novel from Costa-shortlisted author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

'Beautifully written and compelling' Daily Mail'Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti'Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged . . . The Sleep Watcher is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover' Cal Flyn, author of Islands of AbandonmentWhen she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of peculiar sleeplessness that isn't quite what it seems. Her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their fracturing relationship. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single choice soon changes everything.Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.'The writing is incredibly beautiful and unbearably tense . . . It is exquisite' Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers'An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching' Julianne Pachico, author of The Anthill

Set in New York and London and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and a selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's Starling Days is a stunningly observed and unflinching yet tender novel that interrogates the relationship between mental illness and love. Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she's not about to jump, but they don't believe her. Her husband, Oscar, is called to pick her up. Oscar hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will give Mina the space to heal, so they move to London, to Oscar's oldest friends and an apartment wallpapered with indigo-eyed birds, near a canal and flower market. Mina, a classicist, works on her book about mythological women and searches for solutions to her failing mental health by pondering their lives. Penelope, Psyche, Leda . . . They all survived, didn't they? Even Iphigenia, in one of the tellings. Mina finally finds a beam of light in Phoebe, a real-life woman, and Oscar and Mina's complicated love is tested. A gorgeously wrought novel, variously about love, mythology, mental illness, and the times we need to seek out milder psychological climates, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's Starling Days is a complex and compelling work of fiction by a singularly gifted writer.

The moving second novel from Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin. At its heart is Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and her struggle with her decision to leave her two-year-old son, Jay. As an adult, Jay sets out to find his mother and confront her abandonment.

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.' Zelda FitzgeraldLove is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from Philautia, self-love, to Agape, love for humanity; and from Storge, a natural affection for family, to Mania, a frenzied, obsessive love. Seven authors; seven short stories; seven flashes of love. This paperback edition of How Much the Heart Can Hold includes the winning short story from the SceptreLoves short story Prize.

Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki's son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old.

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki's son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his mother's abandonment of him when he was only two years old. The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki's life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds that asks--and ultimately answers--how does a mother desert her son?

An exciting new voice in fiction captures the fragile personal histories of an estranged mother and son.