Picador imprint: 544 books

In the decades since the end of the Second World War, it has been widely assumed that the western model of liberal democracy and free trade is the way the world should be governed. However, events in the early years of the twenty-first century – first, the 2003 war with Iraq and its chaotic aftermath...

Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired – Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic...

For several years now, Kathleen Jamie's work has addressed two principal concerns: how we negotiate with the natural world, and how we should define our conduct within family and society. In The Tree House Jamie argues - as Burns did before her - for an engagement of the whole being through a kind...

The dark attunes our eyes to detail the light can sometimes conceal; similarly, Colette Bryce’s new poems are ‘slant tellings’ that reveal strange and true reflections. Using a wide range of imaginative strategies, Bryce examines the ways in which time is held, space enclosed – and a life...

Nothing transforms our lives like parenthood -- and Kate Clanchy's intimate, daring sequence of poems maps the switchback ride of human emotions from conception through to the first years of a new life. Clanchy's most powerful and accomplished book of poetry to date, Newborn will delight her many...

Annie Freud’s award-winning first collection, The Best Man That Ever Was, introduced readers to a remarkably versatile new voice; The Mirabelles delivers a similarly exhilarating cornucopia – the Mask of Temporary Madness, Marc Almond, mini-novels a sonnet long, Carottes Vichy, and the most gripping...

‘Antigona,’ I said. ‘How would you feel if I wrote your life down in a book?’ ‘Good,’ she said at once. ‘Good. And then a feature film, actually. Mini-series.’ One morning in London, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer,...

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award "It came one morning with the milk, and it seemed - at first - almost as innocent..." When Roberta "Bertie" Lightfoot is struck down with polio, her world collapses. But Mama doesn't tolerate self-pity, and Bertie...

An adventure, a black comedy, a fairy tale of sorts and a romance, Little Gods tells the story of larger-than-life Jean Clocker, whose birth challenges the very balance of nature and whose body resists all attempts to contain it. A girl – and later, woman – of unusual size and strength,...

February 2002. A helpless nation watches as the city of Ahmedabad in India is rocked by religious violence. Before sunrise the next day, more than a hundred Muslim men, women and children will be killed, most of them burnt alive. Above the smoke and flames, the dead decide to intervene. So...

Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. Travelling through Morocco and...

Charlatan. Guru. Master of disguise. Ahead of his time, wise beyond his years, a simple opportunist or the great pretender; however you choose to see him, one fact is certain: Dr Ragab is a mysterious man. Talked about by pretty much everyone in 1920s Cairo, only a few get the chance to make his acquaintance,...

In her extraordinary collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words: '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate...

Ian Duhig’s erudite, compassionate and often wonderfully droll poetry sits at the intersection of the literary and folk traditions, and moves in an easy and masterly fashion between them. While this has lent his verse an enviable musicality and force, it has also written him a visa to places poets...