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How We Met by Huma Qureshi

‘A tale of patience, tenderness and love that’ll add sunshine to your year.’
-Stylist (best non-fiction, 2021) 

‘A beautiful, refreshing and honest memoir about family, love, inheritance and loss that is warm and authentic’ - Nikesh Shukla

How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Paperback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 3 February 2022 / £9.99

You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.

If only it were that simple.

Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it comes to marriage.

Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.  

As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?

As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.

ABOUT Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). Her collection of stories, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love (Sceptre, Nov ’21), has been described as ‘deft, satisfying and poignant’ (Pandora Sykes).

A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times, Independent, Observer, Grazia, Red, Harpers, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.

Selected Praise for How We Met

‘A sweet, touching memoir about family, faith and love. There's a purity and simplicity to Huma's writing, as she attempts to reconcile the sprawling weight of expectation with her own desire for a contained but free life. But what does a life on her own terms look like? What even are her own terms?  A consolation to others who have trod this very path, enlightening for those of us who haven't, you'll be rooting for not just Huma, but for everyone she loves too.’ Pandora Sykes

‘I just loved loved loved loved How We Met. A love story about panic, faith, family, duty, living on your own, work, grief and trust. It delves into love and politics in the British South Asian community and left me beaming.’ Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic Years

‘This beautiful, romantic memoir grabs you from the first page and won’t let you go. Told with heart, wit and quiet restraint, How We Met is the story of how we can transcend the expectations of others and arrange our own happiness in life and in love.’ Viv Groskop

‘A wonderful read - a memoir of grief, becoming and true love. Huma Qureshi is a writer with a sharp eye and a romantic heart.’ Katherine May, author of Wintering

'I devoured this brilliant memoir! Huma's voice is effortless, beautiful, incredibly refreshing and so relatable. I highly recommend it' Haleh Agar, author of Out of Touch

‘There are the books that touch you. Then there are the books that open out their arms and straight out hug you - How We Met is this second kind of book. Honest, joyful, at times heart-breaking, at times laugh out loud funny, but always generous in its telling... this is Huma Qureshi, heart and soul.’ Ami Rao, author of David and Ameena

‘A fearlessly honest memoir of courage, love and loss, and trying to find your place in the world. Quietly heart-breaking but life-affirming too.’ Kia Abdullah, author of Take It Back

‘Every page radiates Huma’s love for her family, for her emerging self, and for the possibilities of a life more fully lived’ Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story

‘Huma Qureshi tells the story of her great loves with generosity and tenderness that will grab readers by the heart.'  Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of This Really Isn't About You

'How We Met is the book I, and countless women of similar heritage, have been waiting our whole lives for. I cried and laughed out loud as I recognised myself in so much of Huma Qureshi's story.’ Saima Mir, author of The Khan

‘I loved every minute.’ Laura Pearson

No Way to Die by Tony Kent

‘Like Baldacci at his best.’ Steve Cavanagh

The fourth adrenaline-fueled thriller from author of Zoe Ball Book Club and Richard & Judy Book Club picks

A deadly threat. A ghost from the past. And time is running out…

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NO WAY TO DIE
By Tony Kent
Boxer. Barrister. Thriller Writer.
HB / 18 November 2021 / Elliott & Thompson / £16.99

When traces of a radioactive material are found with a body in Key West, multiple federal agencies suddenly descend on the scene. This is not just an isolated murder - a domestic terrorist group is ready to bring the US government to its knees.

The threat hits close to home for Agent Joe Dempsey when he discovers a personal connection to the group. With his new team member, former Secret Service agent Eden Grace, Dempsey joins the race to track down the bomb before it’s too late. But when their mission falls apart, he is forced to turn to the most unlikely of allies: an old enemy he thought he had buried in his past.

Now, with time running out, they must find a way to work together to stop a madman from unleashing horrifying destruction across the country.

ABOUT TONY KENT

Tony Kent

Tony Kent is a practising criminal barrister who draws on his legal experience to bring a striking authenticity to his thrillers: Killer Intent, Marked for Death, Power Play and now No Way To Die.

Ranked as a ‘leader in his field’ Tony has prosecuted and defended in the most serious trials during his twenty years at the Criminal Bar - specialising in murder, terrorism, corruption, kidnap and organised crime. His case history is filled with nationally reported trials and his practice has brought him into close professional contact with GCHQ, the Security Service and the Ministry of Defence. He has also defended in matters with an international element, involving agencies such as the FBI.

Tony also appears as a criminal justice expert on a number of TV shows, including Meet, Marry, Murder (coming soon to Netflix), My Lover, My Killer and Kill Thy Neighbour (both Channel 5).

Prior to his legal career Tony represented England as a heavyweight boxer and won a host of national amateur titles.

He lives just outside of London with his wife, young son and dog. 

NB Tony Kent is a pseudonym for Tony Wyatt.

NO WAY TO DIE will be published in paperback in April 2022, when Tony will be available for interview and to write features.

Selected Praise for No Way To Die

’An intricate twisty minefield . . . Kent has outdone himself’ - DAVID BALDACCI 

‘Twist after twist ... it builds to a brilliant finale’ - DAILY MIRROR

‘A high-octane conspiracy yarn’ - THE TIMES

‘A gripping conspiracy thriller’ - IAN RANKIN

The Best, Most Awful Job

“Poignant, funny, sensitive, but most importantly, heart-stoppingly true. This is an outstanding collection of stories, from some of the finest writers, which gets right to the dark heart of what it really means to be a mother. I loved it.” - Clover Stroud

‘An outstanding collection of essays from some of the finest writers’ - Grazia

‘Moving and vital, this is the kind of book that could well make a difference to someone’s life . . .every mother should read it.’ - Laura Pearson, author of I Wanted You to Know

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The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 5 August 2021 / £9.99 / PB

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

 Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.

Some highlights include:

  • Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

  • Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

  • Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

  • Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

  • MiMi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

  • Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

  • Saima Mir on the taboo that is maternal rage

  • Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.

 

‘A wonderful anthology. I enjoyed it so much – the honesty, intelligence, fury and tenderness of the essays; and, importantly and refreshingly, the range of voices and stories it contains. I only wished each essay were longer so that I might spend more time with each of these writers and their worlds.’
Liz Berry, author of The Republic of Motherhood and winner of the Forward Prize

‘If I had added a Post-it Note to every sentence in this book that made me laugh, wince in recognition, or faintly well up, I would have turned it into a paper porcupine.’
Ceri Radford, Independent
 

‘Absorbing stories from different women… Multiracial and non-binary perspectives are among the welcomingly diverse inclusions here.’
Jude Rogers, New Statesman
 

‘In this poignant, vital collection of essays, twenty writers meditate on what it means to be a mother… a real treat’
Elizabeth Morris, Crib Notes

 

‘These essays, diverse in the experiences of their authors but all hitting upon a near-universal truth, tackle beautifully [the challenge of] trying to balance creativity with childcare’
Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

 

‘I’ve been really missing the company of other mothers so this was a very good read… this book covers so much. The essay that really blew me away was Peggy Riley on not becoming a mother.’
Samantha Ellis, author of How To Be A Heroine

 

“Searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms”
Irish Examiner

‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice

ABOUT Katherine May

Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In her New York Times bestseller, Wintering, she looked at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

Lobby Life by Carole Walker

A no-holds-barred insight into the corridors of Westminster and personal stories of life in the Lobby from a journalist who was at the heart of the political establishment for two decades.

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Lobby Life
Inside Westminster’s Secret Society
By Carole Walker
Elliott & Thompson / Hardback non-fiction / £16.99 / 24 June 2021

Drawing on personal experience and interviews with former colleagues, politicians, spin doctors and critics of the system, Lobby Life tells the intriguing story of the once highly secretive institution known as the Lobby – the club at the heart of Westminster which has been the focal point of battles between government and the media for more than 140 years. From the Lobby's conception to the present day, Carole Walker exposes the battles between its political reporters and Downing Street to control the news agenda, including during some of most momentous stories in recent history. Through the rise and fall of successive governments – via war, industrial strife and scandal, the financial crash, Brexit and a global pandemic – we witness the rows and resignations, the drama and debate.

In this no-holds-barred account of what really happens behind the closed doors of Westminster, Walker asks urgent questions about the role of the media today, when politicians can engage directly with voters online, bypassing journalists – and accountability.

TALKING POINTS

  • Lifting the lid on the mysterious world of the parliamentary Lobby – once so secretive that the late Chris Moncrieff, legendary former political editor of the Press Association, said it was like working for MI5.  When he joined in the 1970s he was warned he must never mention that he attended regular briefings from the Prime Minister’s press secretary to anyone – even his wife.

  • What it’s like being a Lobby journalist at Westminster: how you gather your stories; how you find your sources; how government and MPs seek to shape the stories we are told. The words uttered at Lobby briefings can make headlines around the world, signal the end of a ministerial career or indicate far-reaching policy changes. 

  • How the women of the Lobby have confronted outdated attitudes and established their rightful place, holding MPs and ministers to account and explaining the decisions that shape our daily lives. 

  • How female Lobby journalists helped to expose unacceptable behaviour by some of our most senior politicians when the #MeToo movement swept through Westminster in 2017. From the infamous ‘lunge after lunch’, which brought down a Cabinet minister, to casual comments and ‘wandering’ hands, women in the Lobby have dealt with it all.

  • The fun and frustration being a Lobby journalist ‘on tour’ with a Prime Minister: champagne on a flight with Margaret Thatcher; breaking news on-board Tony Blair’s plane; battles to meet deadlines in a desert sandstorm with David Cameron. On these tightly controlled package tours, the destination is far less important than your fellow-travellers. 

  • The power of key insiders at Westminster, such as Sir Bernard Ingham (Thatcher), Alastair Campbell (Blair) and Dominic Cummings (Johnson), on government – and how they use the Lobby to try to shape the agenda.

  • The role of Lobby journalists today when politicians can engage directly with voters via social media.

  • Behind-the-scenes at Westminster during some of the most pivotal moments in our recent history: Churchill’s war government, the Suez Crisis; mining strikes; the Falklands conflict and two Gulf wars; the ‘dodgy-dossier’ on WMD; the death of Dr David Kelly; the phone-hacking and expenses scandals; the financial crisis of 2008; Brexit and a global pandemic.

ABOUT Carole Walker

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Carole Walker is a high-profile journalist and political commentator with more than twenty years’ experience as a BBC Political Correspondent. As a Lobby journalist, she covered some of the biggest political stories in recent history including six general elections, the EU referendum, the rise and fall of successive governments, resignations, rows and parliamentary debates. She has travelled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Prime Ministers and reported on international summits, the first Gulf War, revolution in Moscow, the break-up of the Soviet Union and civil war in the Balkans and Somalia. She is now a flag-ship presenter on Times Radio, shining a light on the political events of the day.

Carole is available for interviews, features and events.

Earthed by Rebecca Schiller

‘A powerfully confessional memoir that excavates important truths about our lives, our selves and our dreams - and what happens when we have to let go.’
– Clover Stroud, author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights

‘The 'how I moved to a field and had a breakdown book' that desperately needed to be written. Incredibly bold, brave, poetic and absolutely beautiful: a fascinating insight into the mind.’
– Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover Games

‘So honest, so raw and so vulnerable. This much-needed story of resilience integrates history, myth and folklore, drawing on the histories of the people who have gone before and to whom this land once belonged. Such an evocative, sensitive and a refreshing take on nature writing and memoir.’
– Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias

‘A lyrical journey through nature and the human heart.'
– Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

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Earthed
By Rebecca Schiller
Elliott & Thompson / 6 May 2021 / Hardback / £14.99

A courageous memoir for our uncertain times: Earthed is a story of the power of place to transform us, of dreams and nightmares on the land and of living in an unfamiliar world and a volatile mind.  

In 2017, Rebecca Schiller turned fantasy to reality and moved her family to a countryside smallholding for a life of sowing and growing. But as the first few years go by, and the ever-expanding list of tasks builds to a cacophony, it becomes clear that this is not going to be simple.

Another January comes in, and with it the threat of a mental health crisis, and so Rebecca turns to the garden where she has made her home, and to the women of this place’s past. Here, she stumbles on a wild space of imaginative leaps, where she begins to uncover the hidden layers of her plot’s history – and of herself.

The ground under Rebecca’s boots offers hard lessons as the seasons shift, delivering unflinching glimpses of damage done to peoples and the planet and regular defeats in her battle with the slugs.

Yet as the New Year returns, carrying a life-changing diagnosis and then a global pandemic, Rebecca begins to move forwards with hope: the smallholding has become her anchor, her teacher and her family’s shelter. Because when we find ourselves in an unknown land, we all need something small to hold on to and a way to keep ourselves earthed.

TALKING POINTS & FEATURE IDEAS

Mental health and the cost of hidden neurodiversity:

  • in a time of pandemic as well as personal, political and environmental crisis

  • exposing the destructive burden of undiagnosed ADHD

  • the feminist issues raised by widespread underdiagnosis in women and girls and the

  • the highs and lows of smallholding as therapy: working the land, tending livestock and growing food to rebuild after breakdown and overwhelm  

The real story of the not-so-simple life:

  • exploring our impulse to go back to nature, self-sufficiency, sowing and growing in uncertain times

  • the practical lessons and joys of smallholding life: from breeding goats and 'counting chickens', to growing food as a family

  • an unflinching look at the back-breaking, marriage-straining reality of following our post-pandemic escape-to-the-countryside dreams

Uncovering our land's hidden histories and politics:

  • stories of the neglected women of our land's past and how their voices can help us today

  • tracing an English country garden back to our brutal, colonial roots

  • looking towards an uncertain future where climate change, political division, race inequality and pandemics collide

  • asking how to live, love and thrive in complicated times of hope, fear and change

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ABOUT Rebecca Schiller

Rebecca Schiller is a writer, journalist and the author of Your No Guilt Pregnancy Plan (Penguin Life) and Why Human Rights in Childbirth Matter. She is co-founder and trustee of the human rights charity Birthrights and a regular contributor to the Guardian. Rebecca and her family raise a motley crew of goats, geese, ducks and chickens. They work their small plot to grow vegetables, fruit and flowers and restore wildlife to the land.

The linocut on the jacket of Earthed was designed and painted by Anne Fewster using natural inks and pigments made from the author's smallholding, land and garden.

How We Met by Huma Qureshi

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How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Hardback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 28 January 2021 / £14.99

You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.
If only it were that simple.

Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it came to marriage.

Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.

As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?

As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.

Talking Points

  • Defying your parents’ expectation of marriage

  • Bringing your children up with multiple identities

  • Raising three boys

  • Grieving a parent (Huma's father died when she was in her early 20s, profoundly shaping her experience of early adulthood)

  • The relationship between mother and daughter, and how we come to better understand our parents with age

  • Learning to be happy and fulfilled in your own company

  • Being a mother and a writer and carving out time to work

  • Marriage ten years on, and how it evolves and changes after having children

  • Huma's own love story – meeting her husband, who converted to Islam soon after

  • Home – where it is and how that changes. As Huma’s mother is selling the family home, she is in the process of buying her ‘forever’ family home

  • Growing up with love stories – how growing up reading Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer shaped Huma’s romantic ideals, and how nineteenths century social etiquette and the matchmaking mothers seemed so reminiscent of the circles in which she grew up

  • Navigating others’ perceptions as a person of colour in the media.

About Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times,  Independent, Observer, Grazia, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.

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How to Be Hopeful by Bernadette Russell

How do we find hope? And how do we hold onto it?
This kind and compassionate book leads the way.

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How to Be Hopeful
Your Toolkit to Rediscover Hope and Help Create a Kinder World
By Bernadette Russell
Elliott & Thompson / £12.99 / 10 September 2020

How to be Hopeful is a celebration of hope: an essential and courageous thing to envisage, create and connect with in our everyday lives. It shows us the places we can look for hope – in ourselves, nature, art, the kindness of strangers, communities, science, technology, innovation, as well as our individual and collective actions – and ways to keep it alive through all the challenges life throws at us. It invites us to act on our hopes towards positive and real change and includes stories of seemingly impossible odds overcome by individuals and groups of people who dared to do so, and triumphed. Starting with how we find hope in ourselves, this book also offers practical and creative exercises and tips on how we can embrace and develop hope in our communities, the wider world and in our future, as we face the very real and complex challenges of our times.

Exploring scientific, philosophical and spiritual perspectives on hope throughout the centuries and today, How to Be Hopeful is the essential book for our times.

TALKING POINTS

  • Why we should try and find hope and how acting with hope can help us create positive change. How hope is different from wishful thinking or blind optimism, how hope can provide us with the fuel to transform our lives, our communities and the world.

  • How hope is connected with compassion - how compassionate practise - to ourselves, each other and to the whole world, can restore hope and increase happiness.

  • The ‘positivity bias’ of children - how understanding and being inspired by children and our younger selves can help us find and maintain hope as adults – bringing us joy and giving us courage to try things.

  • Why adults are prone to pessimism and how we can counter this? How cynicism and negativity can diminish our lives and how nurturing hope can help us live our lives more fully.

  • How hope can help us even when we’re faced with life’s big challenges, such as illness, grief, death and dying.

  • How to remain hopeful in the face of huge global problems such as the climate crisis, and how to stay informed yet not drift to despair. How to become an active part of the solution, and how to enjoy yourself whilst doing so! (activism for beginners!)

  • The neurological benefits of acts of kindness and self-care, and how they fortify hope - how being kind to yourself and others can and should co-exist and how compassionate practise makes you more resilient, hopeful and more able to recover from setbacks and disappointment.

  • How to grow your hope by connecting with your communities and your neighbours, and improve your own life and the area in which you live.

  • How science, tech and art can all provide us with hope for the future - and how we can support and join in with those who are working towards a brighter tomorrow.

  • How to find hope in the midst of a barrage of online negativity and relentless bad news - how to stay informed and engaged with the world whilst increasing your happiness and hope.

  • How sharing stories can help us regain hope when it is lost, those of triumph over adversity, succeeding despite the odds, and happy endings. Understanding the way we tell our own stories can affect how our hope and our happiness, and how to take charge of our own stories and our lives, to help us realise our dreams.

‘This book is an invitation to start your own journey towards hope. I believe that active hope increases the chances that our future can be better and our present lives happier.’

Bernadette Russell

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ABOUT Bernadette Russell

Bernadette Russell is an expert on hope and kindness, as well as a writer, performer and activist who plants a lot of trees – and helps others do the same. She is author of The Little Book of Kindness and The Little Book of Wonder, both published by Orion and in multiple foreign editions around the world. Since 2012, she has toured the US and UK speaking about the importance and life-changing experience of practicing kindness, including for BBC Radio 4 Saturday Live, Action for Happiness, Birmingham School of Philosophy, People United’s Kindness Symposium, The Roundhouse, Tate Britain, Turner Contemporary, Sunday Assembly and the Southbank Centre, where she was nominated as one of sixty-seven change makers for her project 366 Days of Kindness. Since 2018 she has worked with the Royal Albert Hall, producing performances with kindness and creativity at their heart. 

Bernadette presents the ‘How to be Hopeful’ podcast.

More information at: https://www.bernadetterussell.com/ Instagram: @bernadetterussell / Twitter: @betterussell / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bernadetterussellwrites /

Bernadette is available for interviews, features and events.

The Best, Most Awful Job Edited by Katherine May

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

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The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 19 March 2020 / £12.99 / HB

Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.

Some highlights include:

  • Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

  • Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

  • Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

  • Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

  • Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

  • Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

  • Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.

‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’ - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice

ABOUT KATHERINE MAY

Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Adams grew up in the United Kingdom, but currently lives in Limassol, Cyprus where she lives with her family and two cats. She has written two psychological thrillers, and her next release, Little Wishes, is a love story set in Cornwall, stretching across five decades of life. Michelle writes fulltime, and can occasionally be found working as a scientist.

Javaria Akbar is a freelance writer. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Telegraph, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, The Pool, Munchies, Vice, Dazed Beauty and more. She is also a part-time cookery writer and mother of two. 

Charlene Allcott is a graduate of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme and author of two novels: The Single Mum’s Wish List and More Than a Mum. She was born in Croydon and now lives in Brighton.

British-born to Burmese parents, MiMi Aye has always moved between two worlds, and her life at home in the suburbs of London with her husband and two children is very different from the life spent with her family back in Burma. Her latest book, Mandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, was described by Nigella Lawson as “a really loving and hungry-making introduction to a fascinating cuisine” and by Tom Parker-Bowles as “a glorious revelation … autobiography, history and recipes all rolled into one magnificent whole ... a brilliant, beguiling book". She is on Twitter and Instagram as @meemalee and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/itsmeemalee

Jodi Bartle is a New Zealander who has lived in London for nearly twenty years. In-between, she has written for Vice, i-D, Chanel, Quintessentially, Gaggenau, Selfridges, Sunseeker and The London Mother on photography, interior design, fashion, art, travel and babies, in both print and on-line form. She is currently part of the journalistic and editorial team at MCCA’s Diversity & the Bar, a US-based publication which highlights diversity issues in the legal profession, and spills all her embarrassing parenting stories via her blog theharridan.

Playwright, screenwriter and prose writer, Sharmila Chauhan’s work is often a transgressive meditation on love, sex and power. Her plays include Be Better in Bed, The Husbands (Soho Theatre), Born Again/Purnajanam (Southwark) and 10 Women (Avignon Festival). Both her short films (Girl Like You, Oysters) were produced by Film London and her feature Mother Land was long-listed for the Sundance Writers’ Lab. Sharmila also has a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in clinical pharmacology. She lives in London with her husband, son and daughter and cat Tashi. You can find her at www.sharmilathewriter.com

Josie George lives with her son in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands. Her days are watchful, restricted and often solitary, in a large part because of the debilitating disability she’s had since she was a child, but also because she’s discovered that a slow, quiet life has much to teach her. Josie’s brave and singular memoir will be published by Bloomsbury in early 2021. In the meantime, she is working on a novel and writes blogs about her powerful and gently subversive way of looking at the world at bimblings.co.uk. You can find her on Twitter as @porridgebrain.

Leah Hazard is a serving NHS midwife, author of the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and mother of two children. She lives in Scotland with her family and continues to write about the many wonders and challenges of women’s journeys to motherhood.

Joanne Limburg has published non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Her most recent books are the memoir Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations (Atlantic Books) and the poetry collection The Autistic Alice (Bloodaxe Books). She lives in Cambridge with her husband and now-teenage son.

Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist whose first book, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, was published in 2015. She was born in Porto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal).

Dani McClain writes and reports on race, reproductive health, policy and politics, and is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow with The Nation Institute. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Talking Points Memo, Al Jazeera America, EBONY.com and Guernica, and her feature reporting has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Hollie McNish is a writer based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published three poetry collections, Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and one poetic memoir on politics and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, about which The Scotsman said: ‘The world needs this book”. Her next book, Slug: And Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate, will be published in February 2021 and is a collection of poems, memoir and short stories. She normally likes her tea with two sugars.

Saima Mir is an award-winning journalist. She started her career at the Telegraph & Argus and went on to work for the BBC. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Broadcast Association’s World View Award, and has written for numerous publications including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. Her essay for the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa appeared in Guardian Weekend and received over 250,000 hits over two days. Her novel The Khan will be published by Oneworld in 2021.

Carolina Alvarado Molk was born in the Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently working on a collection of essays about her experiences growing up undocumented.

Emily Morris is an author and freelance journalist from Manchester, UK. My Shitty Twenties, her memoir of single parenthood, was named a Guardian readers’ favourite book of 2017, and has been optioned for a TV series, which is in development. She is currently working on a novel.

Jenny Parrott is publishing director of Point Blank, the literary crime imprint at prize-winning independent publisher Oneworld, and she teaches creative writing. She also writes WW2-set sagas under the names Kitty Danton and Katie King, with series currently at Orion and HarperCollins.

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning author, journalist and blogger. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, as well as several other national publications including The Times, The Independent and New Statesman. Her first book, In Spite of Oceans, a collection of short stories, won The John C Laurence Award from The Authors' Foundation. Her blog, Our Story Time, is a collection of her personal writing.

Peggy Riley is a playwright and writer.  Her novel, Amity & Sorrow, is about how we make families, however strange they might appear.  Her short fiction has been shortlisted for prizes including Bridport and the Costa Short Short prize.  Her work for theatre has been produced off-West End and on the fringe, on tour and in community, for radio and site-specifically.  Originally from Los Angeles, Peggy lives on the North Kent coast with a husband and an enormous golden retriever. You can find her at www.peggyriley.com

Michelle Tea is the author of ten books, the founder of literary non-profit RADAR Productions, the co-creator of Sister Spit, and the curator of Amethyst Editions, a collaboration with the Feminist Press. Her most recent book is Against Memoir.

Tiphanie Yanique is a poet, novelist and essayist, and Professor of English and of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Born in the Virgin Islands, she lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her family. Her 2016 poetry collection, Wife, won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for a first collection. She has written for publications including the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal, and American Short Fiction.

The Breakdown: Making Sense of Politics in a Messed-Up World by Tatton Spiller

The Breakdown is a smart, entertaining handbook showing how we can understand – and feel better about – modern politics.

The Breakdown: Making Sense of Politics in a Messed-Up World
By Tatton Spiller
Elliott & Thompson / 30 May / hardback / £12.99

We’re in a time of enormous political engagement, but most of us are ill equipped to truly understand and debate the issues currently rocking our world. Instead, we become entrenched in our echo chambers, convinced that those with a different viewpoint are stupid, awful human beings whose actions must be stopped. This lack of political knowledge and wider understanding is unsurprising – after all, few of us are taught about our political system or about different ideologies – but it leaves us unable to engage in the conversation, to influence others’ opinions, or to effect change. It leaves us with no control.

With sections including How it All Works; How Different People Think; and Making Change Happen, this superbly clear-sighted, light-hearted and judgement-free book will equip readers with the tools they need to understand the different arguments, to work out what is happening and why – and then to do something about it.

In a shifting political landscape that can at times be frustrating, emotional or confusing, The Breakdown is an oasis of calm in a turbulent world.

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TALKING POINTS

  • How subscription ‘news’ websites have a vested interest in keeping you angry

  • How we dehumanise the opposition thereby preventing any kind of meaningful debate

  • Why there is a reluctance to try and solve problems and find workable solutions, and the damage this is causing

  • Social media abuse and the damage it is doing to democracy

  • A snappy tour of different political ideologies (liberals; libertarians; socialists; traditional conservatives; one-nation conservatives; social democrats)

  • A tour of political battlegrounds – Education; Privatisation; Tax and Spend; Immigration; Free speech; Brexit

  • A look at successful changemakers of the 21st Century, and what drove that success

  • Tips to keep your head clear and out of your echo chamber

ABOUT TATTON SPILLER

Tatton Spiller is the founder of Simple Politics, a hugely successful project that aims to explain and engage people with politics, both online and via talks. He has been a teacher and a journalist, and worked at the Houses of Parliament, devising, training and delivering education sessions for visiting school students. While at Parliament, he watched many, many debates, engaged thousands of people, and organised Q&A sessions with hundreds of MPs. This gave him a real insight into how the whole thing works. The nagging feeling that nobody was really breaking down politics in a way that engages people never left him.

Tatton is available for interviews, features and events.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about this book, please don't hesitate to get in touch.