Nero 2024

When Principal Wombat makes monitor lizards Zeke, Daniel, and Alicia hall monitors, Zeke gives up on popularity at his new school. Brought in as part of a district blending program, the monitor lizards were mostly ignored before. Reptiles aren’t bullied any more than other students, but they do stick out among zebras, ostriches, and elk. Why would Principal Wombat make them hall monitors? Alicia explains that it’s because mammals are afraid of being yelled (hissed) at by reptiles. The principal’s just a good general, deploying her resources. Zeke balks, until he gets on the wrong side of Pelicarnassus. More than a bully, the pelican is a famed international supervillain—at least when his mother isn’t looking. Maybe the halls are a war zone, and the school needs a hero. Too bad it isn't... Zeke. Smart, relatable, and densely illustrated in black and white for graphic appeal, this middle-grade series debut by a revered author returns to his themes of grief, bullying, and negotiating differences—but with zeal and comic relief to spare.This funny, wise middle-grade series explodes every stereotype—including what it means to be a hero—in a brilliant reptilian take on surviving school.

Horror movie enthusiast Charley is determined to keep a low profile when she's enrolled at a girls' boarding school on a remote island. That is, until someone starts killing off her senior class! From elaborate scare tactics to severed heads in fridges, Charley has found herself at the centre of a teen horror movie. And that's not the only alarming thing that's happening — she's now seeing the ghosts of her former classmates! Haunted by her peers, and with everyone beginning to suspect her, Charley decides to do something about it. She and her only best friend Olive are going to solve the murders and find out who's killing off the class before graduation. Charley just needs those pesky ghosts to shut up and give her a hand...A fast-paced tongue-in-cheek YA novel about two friends trying to survive senior year — literally! Perfect for fans of Fear Street, The Midnight Club and the Scream franchise.

After the tragic death of his mother, eleven-year-old Will is sent to temporarily stay with his uncle in the mountains. After years trapped in a high-rise flat, with only birds for company, Will doesn't know how he'll survive a place like this, but he soon finds solace in the woods, when he's surrounded by birdsong.With his new friend Omar — a refugee from Afghanistan — Will discovers an osprey nest with two small chicks inside. He forms an unbreakable bond with the birds, especially the smallest chick, whom they name Whitetip. But when tragedy almost strikes again one stormy night and Whitetip is knocked out of the nest, breaking a wing, Will is determined to save her. Smuggling her down from the mountain, he finds a way to keep her alive.As Will helps Whitetip to grow and to heal, he finds a strength inside himself that he never knew he had. Maybe, finally, Will can find a way to take flight too...Can you heal a broken wing? What about a broken heart?Endorsements“Catherine Bruton is one of our best and most versatile writers for young people” — Anthony McGowan

As the Winter solstice blankets the Pembrokeshire landscape in an otherworldly glow, sisters Kit and Libby are drawn to a mysterious white tower to test a prophecy they've heard about. But when the magic of the tower causes Libby to vanish, they find themselves caught in a mystery that takes them into the deep past. Libby has been erased from the world — her laughter, her presence, even their mother's memories of her have all disappeared.The world has rewritten itself, leaving Kit to navigate a reality where her sister doesn't exist. Determined to unravel the enigma surrounding her sister's disappearance, Kit joins forces with a local boy named Story. Together, they journey through a world steeped in ancient folklore, on a quest fraught with danger beyond their wildest imagination. The race is on to find a sister, help heal a cosmic wound and put the world back on its proper course. This lyrical and beautiful novel explores themes of responsibility, both personal and political, and the importance of love and friendship to do good in the world.

As Ballina in the west of Ireland prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer Cillian English and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night, he finds Doll—Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother—in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog, and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling that something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night, and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.A darkly funny and deeply moving debut novel about crimes of desperation, dreams abandoned, and small-town secrets that won’t stay buried.

Olga Pavic's house has been requisitioned. The council will bulldoze it. Her home will become a monument to a massacre.But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror.Olga can't allow them to unearth the secrets held in this space, not until she reunites with her children for a final dinner. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly back to Belgrade.Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Lara Haworth spins a tender, magical story of familial love and loss.Via a panoply of perspectives, Monumenta compellingly and playfully explores remembrance and how tragedy can be the catalyst for remarkable transformation.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.But as the performance draws near and the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. And Lampo, whose ambitions have never stretched beyond having enough coin for the next jug of wine, finds his aspirations elevated, his heart entangled and his courage tested in ways he could never have imagined.Glorious Exploits is an exhilarating and fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art; and — in the face of the Gods' apparent indifference — of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves.Endorsements'Bold and totally unexpected, I loved this book' — Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain'A very special, very clever, very entertaining novel' — Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha'Madly ambitious, cathartic like all great tragedy, but shockingly funny too, Ferdia Lennon's outstandingly original début is just glorious' — Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Three women. For a year they live in the flat below Earl's on Blossom View Estate. Then there are two.The Runner Livia's been running for long enough to think her past might never catch up with her. But now she's been forced to stop, catch her breath and face the daughter she left behind.The Firecracker Mickey is angry about a lot: having a mother who left and a father who didn't fight hard enough to make her stay. And with no other place to go, she's forced to need the very person who abandoned her.The Child Summer has a new grandmother, but she is strange and now her mum is either angry, sad or out looking for men to distract her. Summer hates school but is good at making friends with the boy from around the corner, with Earl from upstairs in his flat filled with plants, and with the nice friend of her mum's who starts to pick her up from school.Spanning a year, this is a novel of hope, desire and loss which explores the damage we do to the people we claim to love the most. Told with music and grace, No Small Thing reveals tender truths about motherhood, the intersection of class and race, and the history we inherit.

It's 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch Angel Delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackerjack and Jackanory, 'Layla' and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos.But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school, pretty as a picture and full of gossip and speculation, as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled, but Deborah is wary and keeps her distance. That same week, eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That's bad enough, Deborah thinks, but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he's the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne, and Deborah fears what she'll make of her mum. It's good to be different, her mum often says; but not, Deborah knows, too different.So, Deborah changes tactics, keeping her friends close and her enemy closer, even stepping up for some of Sarah-Jayne's levitation sessions. Then she's invited to Sarah-Jayne's lovely house, where she meets her charming family and encounters Sarah-Jayne's big sister's fiancé, Max, which is when she senses that all isn't quite as it seems.

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might hope, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with, and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

"Like an old wives’ tale, like a piece of wisdom passed down through generations which no one questioned or even thought about too hard. Like folklore. It was just something everyone knew, a rule to be followed: Don’t go to Almanby."Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it. And Antonia—poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever. As they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable—you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.

‘I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise…’ Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two. In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding. But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch…A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices.

When Orlando Whitfield first meets Inigo Philbrick, they are students dreaming of dealing art for a living. Their friendship lasts for fifteen years until one day, Inigo — by then the most successful dealer of his generation — disappears, accused of a fraud so gigantic and audacious it rocks the art world to its core.Deception is a fine art. A sparklingly sharp memoir of greed, ambition and madness, All That Glitters will take you to the heart of the contemporary art world, a place wilder and wealthier than you could ever imagine.

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.For too long, Africa's history has been neglected. Dominated by Western narratives of slavery and colonialism, its past has been fragmented, overlooked and denied its rightful place in our global story.Now, Zeinab Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history, from the origins of humanity through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with powerful queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.Seeking out occluded histories from across the continent, meeting with countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, and travelling through more than thirty countries, Badawi weaves together a fascinating new account of an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

What begins as an eccentric English love story turns into one of the most dramatic adventures ever recorded...Maurice and Maralyn couldn't be more different. He is as cautious and awkward as she is charismatic and forceful. It seems an unlikely romance, but it works.Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England — and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation — forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.On their tiny raft, their love is put to the test. When Maurice begins to withdraw into himself, it falls upon Maralyn to keep them both alive.Filled with danger, spirit, and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive — not just at sea, but in life.Endorsements'One of those very special books that makes you put everything on hold so you can get back to it' — Rachel Joyce'Extraordinary... Elmhirst is a terrific writer' — Elizabeth DayGuardian, Observer & Waterstones Nonfiction Book of 2024

We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented-reality face filters, photo-editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth, and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control?In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal and the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others’ to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and to explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: We know our standards are unhealthy, but following them helps us succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, yet we strive for it.From Love Island to lip filler, "blackfishing" to the "beauty tax," Pixel Flesh exposes what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, it unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence.An up-close and striking look at modern beauty culture—from Botox and Instagram filters to lip flips and editing apps—and the realities of coming of age online