.'In 40 Sonnets Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date.

.'In 40 Sonnets Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date.

Experience is speedy, the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has gone.

In April 1956, C S Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, married Joy Davidman, an American poet with two small children. After four intensely happy years, Davidman died of cancer and the author found himself alone again, and inconsolable. In this journal, he freely confesses his pain, rage, and struggle to sustain his faith.

Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's is a poignant family memoir offering a portrait of his parents' marriage and recalling his Leeds childhood, Christmases with Grandma Peel, and the lives, loves and deaths of his unforgettable aunties Kathleen and Myra.

Introduced by Petina Gappah, a lost classic by a radical black South African author: as exiled African activists in post-war London plot to revolutionise their native countries, idealism and tragedy collide when they return home as political leaders ...

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONJack Underwood's debut collection, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting .

In About Kane, Graham Saunders offers an important study of one of the most controversial and talented playwrights of recent times. His survey includes a concise biography, in-depth analysis of Sarah Kane's work, and interviews with Kane and those who helped to put her work on stage.

Dr Victoria Stewart explores the life and work of Sean O'Casey, whose writing career spanned some of the most tumultuous times in Ireland's history, tracing the path which led him to an association with Dublin's Abbey Theatre in the early 1920s, and the turn his career took after he made the decision to leave Ireland for good.

The book presents a series of new interviews, with Tom Stoppard himself and with the practitioners who put his work on stage, such as directors Peter Wood, Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre, lighting and set designers, and actors Felicity Kendal, John Wood, Essie Davis, Stephen Dillane and Simon Russell Beale.

Offering a meditation on the classic problems of leadership, this is the third part of a critically acclaimed trilogy of plays about British institutions. It presents a portrait of a Labour Party torn between past principles and future prosperity, and of a deeply sympathetic leader doomed to failure.