Canongate Books

In this essential and impassioned text, LeRoi Jones traces the intertwined development of blues and jazz music with the history of its creators in ‘White America’. As important and relevant as at its first publication in 1963, it shows how music and its people are inseparable – expressing and reflecting the other, surviving and adapting […]

Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life. Created from over forty hours of intimate conversations with Seán O’Hagan, it is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave’s own words, of what really drives his life and creativity. The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws […]

Since his first recordings in 1955, Johnny Cash has been an icon in the music world. In his newly discovered poems and song lyrics, we see the world through his eyes. The poetry reveals his depth of understanding, both of the world around him and within – his frailties and his strengths alike. He pens […]

Letters of Note is a collection of over one hundred of the world’s most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters, based on the seismically popular website of the same name – an online museum of correspondence visited by over 70 million people. From Virginia Woolf’s heart-breaking suicide letter, to Queen Elizabeth II’s recipe for drop scones […]

In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey’s music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes

‘When you are someone that falls outside of categories in so many ways, a lot of things are said to you. And I have had a lot of things said to me.’ In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed […]

‘Wide-ranging and eclectic’ TLS ‘Seductively curious’ Observer ‘A visual and intellectual journey’ Herald See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world’s most important photographers – from Eugène Atget to Alex Webb – Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he […]

Stranger Than Kindness is a journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave.

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day and then ages out. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of […]

Ethiopia, 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army

There are many ways civilisation could end, even with wise, benevolent leaders like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin watching over us. Now, in this fun interactive story of global doom, YOU decide how humanity perishes. Will we be turned to grey goo by Elon Musk’s nanobots? Driven collectively insane by Russia’s most potent […]

With the imagery of a poet and the reflection of a philosopher, David Whyte turns his attention to 52 ordinary words, each its own particular doorway into the underlying currents of human life. Beginning with Alone and closing with Work, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden […]

Standing at the crossroads – the Mississippi crossroads of Robert Johnson and the devil’s infamous meeting – Mark Radcliffe found himself facing his own personal crunch point. Aged sixty, he had just mourned the death of his father, only to be handed a diagnosis of mouth and throat cancer. This momentous time in his life, […]

‘I consider myself a poet first and a musician second’ ‘It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words’ There is no shortage of books about Bob Dylan. This one, however, is unique in its approach and the virtuosity of its execution. Ricks examines Dylan’s songs through the biblical concepts of the seven deadly […]

‘What will you do?’ ‘Oh, hell, I’ll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie.’ ‘What are you going to call it?’ ‘Hollywood.’ Henry Chinaski has a penchant for booze, women and horse-racing. On his precarious journey from poet to screenwriter he encounters a host of well-known stars and lays bare the […]

How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist…..

I Go Quiet is the exquisite story of an introverted girl, struggling to find her place in a noisy world. Through the power of books, creativity and imagination, she begins to see possibilities for herself beyond the present, to a future where her voice will finally be heard.

In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence. Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of […]

Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal. The two women dazzle – one with the promises of youth, the other with the fulfilment of nostalgia – as […]

In 1971, as her album Blue topped music charts around the world, Joni Mitchell created a dazzling and unforgettable holiday gift for her closest friends. Morning Glory on the Vine was an exquisite selection of Joni’s handwritten lyrics and poems, accompanied by more than thirty full-colour illustrations, paintings and watercolours. The book was hand-produced in […]

Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and

‘A cat is only ITSELF,’ Bukowski wrote. ‘Representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go’ A raw and tenderly funny look at the relationship between cats and humans from one of the world’s most treasured and transgressive writers. ‘The cat is the beautiful devil’ For Charles Bukowski there was something majestic and […]

In On Love, we see Charles Bukowski reckoning with the complications of love and desire. Alternating between the tough and the tender, the romantic and the gritty, Bukowski exposes the myriad faces of love in the poems collected here – its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its […]

A collection of previously unpublished letters from America’s cult icon on the art of writing. Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. On Writing collects Bukowski’s reflections and ruminations on the craft he dedicated his life […]

Cameron Bloom, his wife Sam and their three boys were a normal, happy family – until a near-fatal fall left Sam paralysed and she sank into a deep depression. But in the darkest days of Sam’s struggle a new and unexpected member of the family came into their lives: an injured magpie chick abandoned after […]

While cooking at Chez Panisse at the start of her career, Samin Nosrat noticed that amid the chaos of the kitchen there were four key principles that her fellow chefs would always fall back on to make their food better: Salt, Fat, Acid and Heat. By mastering these four variables, Samin found the confidence to […]

The debut work, a short story collection from the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of Under the Skin, The Crimson Petal and the White and The Book of Strange New Things. Michel Faber’s short stories reveal an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a deep love of language and an adventurous versatility. Playful, yet profoundly moving, wickedly satirical yet […]

Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria, Stay With Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of

For the last decade, Rob Sears has been painstakingly combing the words of Donald J. Trump for signs of poetry. To the surprise of many, he has found riches. By simply cutting up and reordering lines from Trump’s tweets, Truths and transcripts, Sears has unearthed a trove of verse by a writer of great conviction […]

Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women’s self-defence nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems and writings, selected and ordered by Cohen in the final months of his life. The book contains an extensive selection from Cohen’s notebooks, featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look […]

Not so long ago we timed our lives by the movement of the sun. These days our time arrives atomically and insistently, and our lives are propelled by the notion that we will never have enough of the one thing we crave the most. How have we come to be dominated by something so arbitrary? […]

How can you say goodbye to the love of your life? In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like […]

What can the rise and reign of this century’s most feared politician teach us about life, work and love? Rob Sears shows how the machinations that enabled Putin to dominate the Kremlin and undermine the United States of America could also help you take control of your mundane life. How would you like to ruin […]

A personal message from the author: Lots of individuals in society today are feeble-minded. They don’t know what the HELL is going on. Unfortunately many of these people are responsible for running THE COUNTRY. They don’t know the difference between a PRECIOUS JEWEL and a piece of animal turd. Their ideas are MEANINGLESS, illustrated using […]

‘From her raging, handwritten letters to late-night phone calls with David Bowie, this biography gets up close and personal with the tempestuous Nina Simone’ – Observer Drawing on glimpses into previously unseen diaries, rare interviews and childhood journals, and with the aid of her daughter, What Happened, Miss Simone? tells the story of the classically […]