May 2016

1.

The debut novel from award-winning author of Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia.

When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them.

In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes – and their governesses – are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led by charismatic inventor Nikita Slavkin, inspired by his belief in a future free of bourgeois clutter and alight with creativity. Yet the chaos and violence of the outside world cannot be withstood forever. Slavkin’s sudden disappearance inspires the Soviet cult of the Vanishing Futurist, the scientist who sacrificed himself for the Communist ideal. Gerty, alone and vulnerable, must now discover where that ideal will ultimately lead.

Strikingly vivid, this debut novel by award-winning writer Charlotte Hobson pierces the heart with a story of fleeting, but infinite possibility.

The Vanishing Futurist

2.

A Utopia Like Any Other is an accessible and easy to understand guide to contemporary Sweden and its politics. Part travelogue, part academic primer and part reflection on our own need for utopias, the book takes readers on a journey from the 1930s to the present day and from an Arctic iron mine to the suburbs of Shanghai.

On its way it features a migrant camp, political festivals, radical feminist activists and concrete housing projects, TV talk shows and celebrity economists, faded bathing resorts, neo-Nazis, and the Scottish independence referendum. All of these different locations and characters are used to explain the Swedish model; what it is, how it works and what it means for the rest of the world.

A Utopia Like Any Other

3.

A luscious historical novel, The Jewel brings to glorious life the dramatic years of Jean Armour and Robert Burns’s courtship, and their passionate married life, against a background simmering with political intrigue and turmoil.

Jean, a beautiful young woman with the voice of a nightingale, set young Rab’s heart aflame from the first. Jean’s father tried to protect her from the advances of the mercurial ploughman-poet, whose roving eye was notorious. But she would not be kept from him.

Their marriage endured against all odds, its rocky course revealing Jean’s indomitable strength and character.

How Jean lived with – and frequently without – Scotland’s most famous son is surely Scotland’s greatest love story.

The Jewel

4.

Library Cat – the resident cat of Edinburgh University Library – is not like other cats. He is a thinking cat. You can tell by the canny glint in his eye, his arched, disdainful whiskers and his unrelenting interest in books and piles of paper.

This is Library Cat’s story. Join him on the adventures he takes when he leaves his favourite turquoise chair in the library and his favourite food (bacon-rind) behind to go out into the big, bad world. Meet his cousins Biblio Chat and Saaf Landan Tom. Hold your breath during his brief encounter with the elusive Puddle Cat and his run-in with the terrifying and mysterious Black Dog.

This is principally the story of Library Cat’s search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. But it’s about us Humans, too. You see, with his black and white head bobbing a foot off the ground, Library Cat has seen us Humans from a very different angle. And he thinks we have it all wrong...

Library Cat

5.