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Apparently these are uncertain times and yet we’re surrounded by new certainties. Things that only a few years ago would have seemed ridiculous are now the fabric of our lives. The inevitability of AI, the ever rightward trajectory of our politics and the collapse of international law are all foregone conclusions. You are, at best, naive if you questions any of these things - but that is exactly what Natasha Lennard asks us to do in her new book On Un/certainty. 
Drawing on the late work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as a cast of contemporary essayists, journalists and thinkers, Natasha asks us to reconsider what assumptions these certainties hinge on. How doubt can be marshalled in our dangerous age and whether the violent realities, brought about by these entrenched conceptions, are inevitable at all. 
“An invitation to rethink what we know, and how we know it. Lennard challenges conventional understandings of crisis, borders and gender, revealing how deeply entrenched certainties shape our perceptions of the world.”
Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
“Amidst inflationary talk of uncertainty and crisis, Lennard makes a bracing case, instead, for the critique of pernicious certainties. A brilliant provocation to further thought. A hinge book.”
Adam Tooze, author of Shutdown
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In his 2021 bestseller The Book of Trespass, Nick Hayes helped us jump the walls that keep us from the vast majority of the English countryside  —exposing the way in which centuries of enclosure laws have walled off our land and rivers. The book brought new energy to the Right to Roam movement with its central challenge; to view the British landscape not merely as a set of postcard views, but as a living site of historical struggle, exclusion and democratic potential.
Now, in The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England, Nick turns his focus from who owns the land to what that system of ownership has done to us collectively. Tracing the  connection between ecological destruction, private capital, and often-ignored colonial crimes, he sets out a vision for healing both soil and society. Refusing nostalgia, The Medicine Tree asks how we might mend an island poisoned by disavowal and division—inviting us to dismantle the boundaries, both physical and imagined, that keep us from a sense of belonging.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF TRESSPASS

'Brilliant, passionate and political . . . The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently' 
Robert Macfarlane

'A remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths' 
George Monbiot

PRAISE FOR THE MEDICINE TREE

This book elegantly weaves between a diaristic account of nine months moored on the Thames and a sprawling, granular and global history of the politics and spirituality of land. Both Nick's accounts of the past and the contemporary are shot through with righteous anger but countered by his tender, visceral descriptions of the body within nature that makes the reader ache to swim naked and walk barefoot in the dew. Every chapter, based on the months from September to May, demonstrates Haye's profound attachment to community, and are a clarion call for the vital rediscovery, or invention, of an Albion kinship of the land and the rivers.-
Leah Gordon

Dazzling in scope, effervescing with insights, richly illustrated, lyrically written and fired by a yearning to remake England anew. Hayes has delved deep into our buried radical history and forgotten folklore and unearthed a treasure trove.
Guy Shrubsole
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Few writers have reshaped British speculative fiction as quietly, or as radically, as M. John Harrison. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has dismantled genre tropes across science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction—earning accolades from the Arthur C. Clarke Award to the Goldsmiths Prize. Hailed by writers including Olivia Laing and Robert MacFarlane as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today, his work is instantly recognisable.  Beautifully strange, subversive and written with a poet’s economy.  
Now, in his latest, Booker-longlisted novel The End of Everything, he confronts the corrosive and alien presence of capitalism in a world inexplicably unraveling. Refusing easy answers or heroic arcs, the reader is taken to  an England where the disaster at hand is too vast, complex, and banal to fully articulate. A society where adaptation is the stuff of fiction and whose inhabitants can only think to keep going as an apocalypse of sorts rumbles on. It is eerily familiar stuff - a world unmoored from truth and made hostile by the reflex to exploit.
PRAISE FOR THE END OF EVERYTHING
‘M.John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ - The New Statesman 

The End of Everything elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity' - The Guardian 

'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' - Julia Armfield
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We hear from Holly Pester about her latest poetry collection, Cafés. Published this summer by Fitzcarraldo, it’s a series of dream-like narrative fragments, that explore the possibilities of friendship and love, the myriad ways in which capital invades our lives and a hope for connection that appears unnervingly bygone. 
Described by the publisher as both a ‘stylish, political intervention and an elegy for communal space,’ Holly’s writing is, as ever, resistant, loving, vivid and wildly funny - always running ahead of you, waiting as you turn the page only to lead you further on in.
‘Holly Pester’s café is a place to sink into the soft leather couches, eavesdrop, work and dream: a waiting room both strange and familiar, full of spillages (of coffee) and slippages (of language). A public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester’s brilliance builds this café up and invites us in to linger.’
― Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife
Music on this episode: Makaya McCraven - Standing on Shoulders 
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First up this month’s Sam speaks to Max Lury about his unsettling debut No Ghosts. After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend. Harlow, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos;  Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. No Ghosts is a novel set in new space - the eerie, boundless simulcra of ai and the dead air of a spiritless age. Unnerving and uncannily recognisable, it is infused from the first page to the last with the terrible weight of an elusive absence.
Then Lara sits down with Ghost in the Throat author Doireann ní Ghríofha to hear all about Said The Dead - an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page. In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs.
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