Jonathan Cape Animal Person MacLeod Alexander

From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom • A Hunger is the story of Anita: a talented sous chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds - the exciting bustle of her kitchen and her exhausting new role as a carer - Anita must make a decision: about her husband's future, as well as her own. Should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick once used to be? A decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past - and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life

How does one survive when all hope is lost? • In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe Andre was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, Andre was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world. Close to twenty years later, award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle (Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles) recounts Andre's harrowing experience in Hostage, a book that attests to the power of one man's determination in the face of a hopeless situation • Marking a departure from the author's celebrated first-person travelogues, Delisle tells the story through the perspective of the titular captive, who strives to keep his mind alert as desperation starts to set in

Is it possible life without romantic love isn't so bad? • An essential memoir about building life on your own terms • When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love • Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed

A stunning first graphic novel by a Cape/Comica/Observer graphic short story competition winner - a tale of a skirmish in the ice-cream wars that is worthy of Alan Bennett • In the small seaside town of Dobbiston, Howard sells ice creams from his van, just like his father before him. But when he notices a downturn in trade, he soon realises its cause: Tony Augustus, Howard's half-brother, whose ice-cream empire is expanding all over the North-West • Flake, Matthew Dooley's debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard - helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team - overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end

First published in 1980, two years after The Snowman, Gentleman Jim has been unavailable for many years. We are delighted to bring it back into print as the first book in an occasional series, Cape Graphic Classics • Gentleman Jim is the story of Jim Bloggs, a lavatory attendant who, dissatisfied with his station in life, devotes his time to envisioning a world beyond it. His walls are lined with books like Out in the Silver West, the Boys' Book of Pirates and Executive Opportunities, which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. Encouraged by his wife, Hilda, also eager to incorporate more adventure into her life, Jim sets out to bring these dreams to fruition by accumulating various accoutrements, only to discover that the life of an executive, an artist or a cowboy is more complicated and costly than it appears

Eating to Extinction is an astonishing journey through the past, present and future of food, a love letter to the diversity of global food cultures, and a work of great urgency and hope • From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to great chunks of fermented sheep meat in the Faroe Islands to an exploding corn in Mexico that might just hold the key to the future of food - these are just some of the thousands of foods around the world today that are at risk of being lost for ever • In this captivating and wide-ranging book, Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover the stories of these foods. He meets the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are preserving food traditions and fighting for change

From the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice comes a major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times • The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming

Discover a powerful, evocative and urgent new young voice in nature writing • 'Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life.' • Meet Mya-Rose - otherwise known as 'Birdgirl'. Birder, environmentalist, diversity activist. To date she has seen over five thousand different types of bird: half the world's species • Every single bird a treasure. Each sighting a small step in her family journey - a collective moment of joy and stillness. And each helping her to find her voice • Since she was young, she has visited every continent to pursue her passion, seeing first-hand the inequality and reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And the simple, mindful act of looking for birds has made her ever-more determined to campaign for all our survival

Edited by the finest British poet Alice Oswald and the celebrated anthologist Paul Keegan, a groundbreaking gathering of writing about nature's most dramatic spectacle: the weather • 'It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 • This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather - Homer's winds, Ovid's flood - to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting - weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters - to the drama unfolding above our heads • The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break • Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Toibin - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing • Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour

The second book from the "exact and poetic" (New York Times) author of critical smash Young Skins, winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, Homesickness is an emotionally resonant and wonderfully wry collection that follows the lives of outcasts, misfits, and malcontents from County Mayo to Canada • When Colin Barrett's debut Young Skins published, it swept up several major literary awards, and, in both its linguistic originality and sharply drawn portraits of working-class Ireland, earned Barrett comparisons to Faulkner, Hardy, and Musil. Now, in a blistering follow-up collection, Barrett brings together eight character-driven stories, each showcasing his inimitably observant eye and darkly funny style • A quiet night in a local pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive; a funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts simply won't lay in wake; a shooting sees a veteran policewoman confront the banality of her own existence; and an aspiring writer grapples with his father's cancer diagnosis and in his despair wreaks havoc on his mentor's life

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess • In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam • Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word