Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in All Categories

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band.

Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she once said.

In 1980s Britain, the line was that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, whether that be owning a home or going to university. Now, house prices are exorbitant and both student loans and childcare costs have skyrocketed. Combining her own experience and the stories of women she’s met over the last ten years whilst travelling around Britain as a journalist, Vicky Spratt’s crucial and remarkable book is a deep exploration of how the economic context of the last thirty years has shaped the lives of Millennials and Generation Z.

Brown Girls dives deep into the lives of a group of young women of colour growing up in Queens, New York. Here, streets echo with many languages, subways rumble above dollar stores and the briny scent of the ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Here, girls like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and many others, struggle to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture they come of age in. Here, they become friends for life. Or so they vow.

Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation, which is reflected in his own face. From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity night clubs and voices in a dizzying variety of languages, dialects and slangs, to create an intricate and astoundingly vivid portrait of a place caught between the fast-approaching future and a past that won't let go.

Before they become mothers, women are repeatedly reminded that their biological clock is ticking. Once pregnant, a woman’s body becomes public property: she is patronised, panicked and forbidden from exercising her autonomy. In labour, women’s wishes are overridden, resulting in potentially life-changing injuries and trauma. When the baby comes home, women begin a life of pay cuts, lost job opportunities, heavier housework, unequal emotional loads and judgement from all sides.

Identifying the meaning of life and where we are heading preoccupies all of us at some stage or another. Who better to help us articulate this sense of direction than the most articulate people among us? Writers and thinkers, Ben Hutchinson suggests in this sparkling new book, help us reflect on purpose.

In this powerful and timely personal essay, best-selling author Otegha Uwagba reflects on racism, whiteness and the mental labour required of Black people to navigate relationships with white people. Presented as a record of Uwagba’s observations on this era-defining moment in history - that is, George Floyd’s brutal murder and the subsequent protests and scrutiny of institutional racism - Whites explores the colossal burden of whiteness, as told by someone who is in her own words, ‘a reluctant expert’.

Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her 40s and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her story. Consent is the story of her stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Springora’s memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a 13-year-old girl to become involved with a 50-year-old man.

Ambitious and hardworking Tracy Flick feels underappreciated and stuck. Her job as a high school assistant principal isn’t the political career she dreamed of as an over-achieving teen, so when the longtime principal abruptly announces his retirement, offering a rare chance of promotion, Tracy is filled with zeal at the prospect of success. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be.

In Meetings with Moths ecologist Katty Baird roams Scotland seeking out, documenting and observing moths. Green Longhorns, Pimpinel Pugs and Peacock Moths are just some of the species that catch her attention as she climbs into holes, ventures behind waterfalls and wanders forests with her boundless curiosity. But you needn’t travel far and wide to see beautiful moths. Katty shows that you can easily enjoy discovering moths and caterpillars without specialist knowledge by creating your own light trap or simply looking more closely at your immediate landscape.

This is an audiobook about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This an audiobook about a poet, W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society. Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Michaela and her husband have moved to the starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape of New Mexico, to take up an academic residency. But when Gerard is struck by a fatal illness, their life begins to resemble a nightmare. At thirty-seven, Michaela must first face the terrifying prospect of widowhood, then the chaos of the days when Gerard is gone.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies. Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York—or be anywhere in particular—she flees to Berlin....

In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time - Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel García Márquez - remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss.

This debut collection movingly explores how women and girls are looked at, look at one another and look at themselves, and how living as an object can shape their passions, fears and joys. With a clear eye and dark humour, Danielle Pender considers sex, parenting, grief and class as lenses for the ways in which the world watches women—and how women are always watching back.

In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot.

In Millennial Love, journalist Olivia Petter explores the questions, quirks and anxieties that consume the contemporary dating landscape. Olivia scrutinises the myths surrounding modern romance and asks why, despite having endless technology designed to aid communication, it’s harder to meet someone now than ever before.