Signal imprint: 112 books

This timely portrait of Lebanon exposes the fault lines that underlie the current crisis in the Middle East, and charts the country’s attempts to rebuild a fragile peace after its long civil war and recent conflict with Israel. Part reportage, part travel narrative, Paradise Divided chronicles the...

“I was only born into the world,” begins one of Vincent Colistro’s poems, “didn’t invade it, didn’t ransom it for a nicer one.” Late Victorians, Colistro’s debut, is a beguilingly irreverent investigation of the life he was “born into.” Hyper-fluent, riding wave after wave of copious...

East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses (“Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.”) Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent,...

Sympathy for the Couriers is a collection of messages from the border region of our lives—that vast allegorized territory of cheap self-deceptions and illusions. By turns comical and grim, these new poems feature Peter Richardson at his most ventriloquistic. The “couriers” in question...

The Empire's Missing Links explores a world familiar to readers of Walid Bitars previous three books: a world where language is never simple, where the most ordinary words are weapons used against us in the play for private and public power. Resembling a series of unflinchingly ambivalent, and often...

Satisfying Clicking Sound is a book that’s never afraid to make a show of itself. In his third collection, Jason Guriel gives us a quick-thinking colloquial style that segues deftly from deadpan wit to deep emotion. Like the hard-to-master knuckleball he celebrates as “less spun / than blown /...

A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization...

Patagonia is the ultimate landscape of the mind. Like Siberia and the Sahara, it has become a metaphor for nothingness and extremity. Its frontiers have stretched beyond the political boundaries of Argentina and Chile to encompass an evocative idea of place. A vast triangle at the southern tip of the...

Shy boy Amadeo reigns supreme at table football in his local café. Taking on all comers he is one of “the unbeatables” with his loyal team of tiny foosballers. But there’s another “unbeatable” in town. Aggrieved by his only ever defeat at the hands of Amadeo in a foosball match when they...

Athens is an historical anomaly. Excavations date its first settlement to over seven thousand years ago, yet it only became the capital of Greece in 1834. During the intervening centuries it was occupied by almost every mobile culture in Europe: from its earliest likely settlers, tribes from what...

Deborah Manley’s selection of extracts reveals how generations of writers have viewed the landscapes of Malta and Gozo, the people of the islands, the splendours of Valletta and its famous harbour, and the celebrated festas, the village festivals that celebrate the island’s Catholic identity. An...

Lord Byron’s Grand Tour is recorded as impressions in his own letters and journals, more methodically in the diary of his travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse, and reflected poetically in the first two cantos of the epic poem that was to make his fame and start his legend.Lord Strathcarron’s re-Tour...

Scattered off the west coast of mainland Greece are the seven Ionian Islands, celebrated for their spectacular landscapes, olive groves and classical associations. Together with the mountainous mainland region of Epirus, the combined populations of Corfu, Paxos, Lefkas, Ithaca, Kefalonia, Zakynthos...

The Basque Country is a land of fascinating paradoxes and enigmas. Home to one of Europe's oldest peoples and most mysterious languages, with a living folklore rich in archaic rituals and dances, it also boasts a dynamic post-modern energy, with the reinvention of Bilbao creating a model for the twenty-first-century...