we’re thrilled to be starting our autumn events programme by welcoming the brilliant Karishma Jobanputra to the shop in September. Karishma will be discussing her scintillating short story collection, The Body of the Thing, in conversation with award-winning poet and novelist, Nell Osborne.

One of 2026’s most anticipated debuts, the stories in The Body of the Thing, at their core, examine the myriad ways in which women negotiate all manner of body politics. Written with great wit and a fierce sensitivity, it’s a stunner of a first outing, making this is an event not to be missed!

A lyrical and visceral short story collection, The Body of the Thing unpicks the hierarchies that thrum under our relationships. Moving from bougie neighbourhoods in Manhattan to the sun-drenched piazzas of Italy, from coastal Maine to the bustle of London, these stories chase the fallout when women’s bodies are valued for their beauty and youth, dismissed and discarded when ill, or made useful as parents and caregivers. Fluid, sensual, and fearless, The Body of the Thing explores motherhood, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, and celebrates female desire in all its complicated wonder.

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‘Arresting, beautiful, humorous, observant, serious, all at the same time.’ Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

‘These stories are contemporary portraits of life across continents. Jobanputra’s careful prose depicts all the anxiety and claustrophobia of being alive. I can’t remember the last time I read a collection so compulsively.’ Sarvat Hasin, author of Strange Girls

‘Lyrical and specific, eloquent and real.’ Raffaela Barker author of Come and Tell Me Some Lies

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Karishma Jobanputra is a British-Indian writer currently based in London. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction Programme, where she was awarded a partial merit scholarship, a Chair’s Fellowship, and the Dean’s Travel Grant, her work has been listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and The Disquiet Literary Prize. The Body of the Thing is her debut publication.

Nell Osborne is a poet and novelist. Her poetry pamphlet, Thank You For Everything was published by Monitor Books in 2024, and her next pamphlet, Seances Near Me, is forthcoming from Spite Press in 2027. Her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books, 2025), jointly won the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize in 2026. Judge Marina Benjamin described the novel as ‘administrative noir in the orbit of body horror, as if Ottessa Moshfegh had written Severance.’

Photo of Karishma Jobanputra: credit Grace Shirley

we’re delighted to see that two of our event authors this year, Marlon James and Luke Kennard, have been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award. Big congratulations to two outstanding writers!

We’ll be welcoming Marlon, already a previous Booker winner, on September 23rd when he’ll be discussing his 2026 Booker-longlisted novel, The Disappearers, at the Beacon’s Lantern Hall in conversation with the wonderful Vanessa Kisuule.

The novelfollows a hard-up actor as he lands the starring role in a university professor’s experiment. The role involves him sitting at the back of a series of lectures, zipped up and hidden away in an oversized bag. As the experiment progresses, the actor’s childhood friend and flatmate plots a very 2020s-style moneymaking opportunity, bringing chewy dilemmas about – amongst other things – masculinity, the economic model’s extremes and human interaction.

Click on any of the covers to read the publishers blurb on our website, where you can order the book for collection from the shop or home delivery.

we are extremely pleased to announce that we will be hosting the much-loved Bristol author and poet, Stefan Mohamed, next month. Stefan will be discussing and reading from his brilliant new poetry collection, The Revelation Tapes, in conversation with fellow Bristol poet, Tom Sastry.

Here’s more from the collection’s publisher, Broken Sleep Books:

The Revelation Tapes… unfolds as a salvaged transmission: a film-show remastered from corroded cassettes, screened in the ruins of a drowned future, its overture barked by a game-show host of the apocalypse. Across seven acts a loose band of kids persevere through ecological collapse, blag their way into a nightclub at the end of the world, and meet God at the end of a metaphorical bullet. Mohamed braids manic comedy with grief, moving from prose tirade to scattered concrete text to group-chat syntax as he works through parasocial fixation, the remix of memory and self, and the wreckage of the overexamined mind. Mohamed’s poetry loops back on itself like the river that opens and closes it, finding tenderness inside the noise.

If you’ve never witnessed the Stefan Mohamed experience before then this is an evening not to miss!

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“Stefan Mohamed is a brilliant poet… A joyful and furious collection, and his best so far.” — Luke Kennard

“Stefan Mohamed is an unparalleled phrase maker, and this collection is rich with typographic and repetitious play that gives these poems their dark musicality.” — Suzannah Evans

“A mesmeric and sprawling work of alarming talent and uniqueness … I was gripped by the storytelling, wit and complexity of this book.” — Jake Wild Hall

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Stefan Mohamed is an award-winning author, poet, performer and creative writing tutor based in Bristol. He is the author of five novels and four books of poetry; The Revelation Tapes, is his fifth. He also DJs.

Tom Sastry is political, ironic, emotional, morbid and funny in all the wrong places. He is the author of three poetry collections and one pamphlet. These have been, variously, Poetry School Book of the Year, Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice, highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.