I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll By Alan Edwards

Alan Edwards is the godfather of modern music PR, whose stellar list of clients has ranged over the years from David Bowie to Amy Winehouse via the Rolling Stones, Blondie, Prince and the Spice Girls and, outside of music, David Beckham and Naomi Campbell – now he tells his story.

“Alan wasn’t just there, he was everywhere, as immersed in the world of rock as any of the bold-face names he represented. From glam to punk, from Bowie to Jagger, from small clubs and sweaty pubs to stadiums and enormodomes, Alan saw it all… and wrote it all down. A brilliant book by a brilliant man.”

— Dylan Jones

“A beautiful, warm, jaw-dropping, once-in-a-lifetime, lifting-the-stone guide to a secret world . . . Edwards is an endlessly charming and gently amused companion as he reveals the truth about that lost time when the music was an embarrassment of riches. I loved it. And if the music ever mattered a damn to you, then you will love it too”

— Tony Parsons

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I Was There:

Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll

By Alan Edwards

Simon & Schuster / HB / 6 June 2024 / £25

I Was There traces Edwards’ career from the thriving punk scene of ’70s London, which inspired him to set up his own PR company, through his work with acts such as Blondie and the Rolling Stones, his collaboration with David Bowie over nearly four decades, his move into the pop world with the Spice Girls, and beyond.

Along the way, we’re treated to all the entertaining tales of debauchery and rock-star antics you might expect, but more uniquely we’re privy to Edwards’ fascinating observations about the brilliant artists he has worked with, and what makes them tick. We also get a front-row seat to the rise of PR as a major force in British society, from the seven-figure media deal Edwards brokered for the Beckhams’ wedding, to the role of spin in the New Labour government.

Even as Edwards grows into the consummate PR, playing a crucial background role in the lives and careers of some of the world’s biggest stars, he retains a powerful sense of being an outsider – never forgetting how lucky he is to look back on decades of music and culture and say, ‘I was there’.

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Feature ideas and talking points:

• The hippy trail - escaping from the suburbs and travelling the hippy trail age 16 years with no contacts, no mobile phone and barely any money and ending up with typhoid, dysentery and weighing under 7 stone

• Entertainment PR in the beginning - a cottage industry that used Hollywood publicists as a blueprint

• The British media then, now and the future

• On the road with celebrities – being mentored by Mick Jagger; touring the Sistine Chapel with David Bowie; playing football with Beckham; dealing with the Mob in the US; playing Russian roulette with a hells angel in Amsterdam; introducing Shakira to Tony Blair and chatting about Bowie with Bill Clinton

• Working with some of the biggest black music legends of all time - Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, Janet and Michael Jackson and Prince - and racism in the media  

• Involvement with reggae, and playing football with Bob Marley

• The influence of Punk

• US coast to coast road trip adventures with punk star Hazel O’Connor, generating ideas to follow the hit movie Breaking Glass

• Pioneering the worldwide stadium tour - how The Rolling Stones, and then Bowie, created a whole new industry

• Finding a ‘family’ with the Spice Girls, and brokering the famous £1million OK deal for Posh and Becks’ wedding

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Alan Edwards is the founder and CEO of public relations firm The Outside Organisation which has represented an eclectic range of clients including the biggest music stars on the planet, corporations and brands, government, royalty, celebrities, charities, events, sports legends and clubs.

Edwards’ 45 year career has seen him work with David Bowie (for nearly four decades), the Who, Victoria and David Beckham, Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, Amy Winehouse, Shakira, P Diddy, Britney Spears, Naomi Campbell, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Michael Jackson, Lin Manuel Miranda, Sir Paul McCartney and the Spice Girls, among many others.

Edwards was the third ever inductee to PR Week’s Hall of Fame in 2017, and as of March 2023 has been named the magazine’s number one entertainment PR for nine years running. He is a regular contributor to TV and radio, and has fronted programmes in the Music Moguls and Hits, Hype and Hustle series for the BBC.  In 2015 he staged his own show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, called “Always Print the Myth: PR and the Modern Age”. Among the contributors were Bob Geldof and Alastair Campbell.

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“At times in my career I’ve felt like a foreign correspondent, bag packed and always ready to fly off to the next conflict zone. I realised early on that I was a witness to rock and roll history – I was always writing notes on scraps of paper, airline tickets or the backs of my hands. But it was only years later, when I finally sat down to make sense of it all, that I realised I had wandered through some of the most incredible moments in the last half-century of culture.”

— Alan Edwards

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For further information or to request an interview or event, please contact:

EMMA FINNIGAN PR

07870 210468 | emma@emmafinniganpr.co.uk | @emmafinnigan | www.emmafinniganpr.co.uk

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The Infertile Midwife: In Search of Motherhood - A Memoir by Sophie Martin

An insightful, moving memoir, capturing life working as a midwife in a busy NHS hospital at the same time as dealing with experiences of infertility, IVF and loss.

“A vital, heartfelt read for anyone navigating the rough seas of infertility and pregnancy loss.” – LEAH HAZARD

“This beautifully written tender book has for me, captured so much of what I experienced and when women share, it’s incredibly comforting and empowering… I hope [Sophie’s] book – as a medical professional, individual and mother – plays a part in the women’s healthcare revolution that the world so needs.” – MELISSA HEMSLEY

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The Infertile Midwife

In Search of Motherhood - A Memoir

by Sophie Martin
Hardback | 31 August 2023 | Hardie Grant | £16.99

As a young married couple, Sophie Martin and her husband spent years trying to conceive. They went through several rounds of IVF, at great expense, and even travelled overseas for treatment, never quite knowing whether they would one day have a family. Alongside this, Sophie was working hard at a job she loved: looking after expectant mothers and newborn babies as a midwife in a busy hospital, where the patients’ daily new additions were a constant reminder of Sophie’s own setbacks in pursuit of motherhood.

The Infertile Midwife is a deeply personal, moving account of chasing something that you want so desperately. It also offers a much-needed look at how society treats infertility – from the language we use to the small talk we make – and the ways in which we can all do more to make things better for hopeful parents. With great warmth and honesty, Sophie shares her experiences of the bursts of hope and moments of great loss, but also the humour, love and joy that can be found in even the darkest places..

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ABOUT Sophie Martin

Sophie Martin is a registered midwife and worked in a Central London hospital for ten years before moving to a hospital in Essex. Her wider experience of infertility and baby loss informs her practice and has led to her being approached by organisations such as Emma’s Diary and My Surrogacy Journey to provide a professional overview for them. For the past three years, Sophie has curated and delivered a series of online talks and interviews to coincide with Baby Loss Awareness Week. Her interview with Elizabeth Day on infertility and baby loss was watched 17,500 times.

Sophie lives in Essex with her husband and their young son.

Follow Sophie on @the.infertile.midwife

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“Sophie’s words provide a supportive lighthouse of hope for many. She is gifted at starting and facilitating the conversations ensuring those who feel like they sit in the shadows of other people’s celebrations are supported, seen and validated. She holds up a microphone to the stories that need to be heard, generously sharing her own along the way.” ANNA MATHUR

“An important, insightful book for midwives and anyone interested in birth…Well written, deeply personal [it’s] a story that will resonate with many readers. This is an important story to tell, and highlights, also, the importance of language used around birth.” ANNA KENT Midwife, Aid worker, Author of Frontline Midwife

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Talking points and feature ideas

• The importance of language, and changes that should be made within the NHS – including how to talk about medical conditions without portioning blame or shame to the individual.

• Training and support needed for healthcare professionals around babyloss and infertility.

• Complex PTSD and support needed for midwives going through babyloss / infertility themselves.

• Sophie’s story and her drive to become a midwife and how maternity services can have a deep and lasting impact on the experiences of families.

• How to speak to families who are going through babyloss and infertility, and how to support friends or family who are living through this.

• IVF and what to expect. What the process entails, both emotionally and physically.

• Grief, trauma and the effect on the body.

• How to cope with infertility and babyloss as a family – how men or the non-biological partner may experience loss.

• Pregnancy after loss and the intense emotions and need for support during this time.

• The reality of having a child after loss, and reaching bittersweet milestones.

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For further information please contact:

EMMA FINNIGAN PR

07870 210468 | emma@emmafinniganpr.co.uk | @emmafinnigan | www.emmafinniganpr.co.uk

Twelve Moons by Caro Giles

Twelve Moons:
A Year Under a Shared Sky
Caro Giles
19 January 2023/ £14.99/ Hardback/ ebook/ audio

‘A multi-sensory experience of the natural world, which invites the reader to become both companion and witness in a timeless account of the power of the sea.’
- Katharine Norbury

TWELVE MOONS follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumberland skies.

Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her.

Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones – and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides.

TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. A dazzlingly honest memoir that while never turning away from the awkward truths of life, also shows how love will flourish if we can only find a space for ourselves.

Set against windswept beaches and ancient hills, this is a story steeped in nature and landscape. Since our earliest days, mankind has looked up at the moon and seen a story reflected back. Twelve Moons is one of those stories – a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.

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ABOUT Caro Giles

Caro Giles is a writer based in Northumberland. Her words are inspired by her local landscape, the wide empty beaches and the Cheviot Hills. She writes honestly about what it means to be a woman, a mother and a carer and about the value in taking the road less travelled. Her writing has appeared in journals, press and periodicals and she was named Countryfile magazine’s New Nature Writer of the Year in 2021. She tweets @CaroGilesWrites.

Buzzin’ by Bez

Buzzin’
The Nine Lives of a Happy Monday
By Bez
(With Andrew Perry)
White Rabbit / HB / 3 November 2022 / £20
(also available as ebook and audio book)

At the height of his initial, turn-of-the-1990's infamy as the maraca-wielding dancer with 'Madchester' giants Happy Mondays, Mark Berry - forever known to the world as Bez - was visibly a danger to society. He became the so-called Chemical Generation's bug-eyed pied piper, every weekend leading millions out to oblivion and beyond, as they adopted his E-gobbling party lifestyle.

Neither an accomplished musician nor even a very good dancer, Bez was a prime candidate for fleeting celebrity, soon to sink into 'Where Are They Now?' obscurity. That, however, never happened, nor does it show any sign of happening. Through Black Grape, the second band he co-fronted with the Mondays' Shaun Ryder, and his ever-presence in the mass media, Bez's popularity has grown exponentially, his star rocketing ever upwards.

When he bowled into Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, he ended up winning the series, as viewers came to understand his fundamental decency and sunny outlook. His adult life has been extraordinary: unbelievable scrapes with mortality, periods of financial ruin, mindfuck moments like when David Bowie genuflected before him, and enough narcotic-strewn hi-jinx to fill several more volumes of memoir.

Written with the assistance of estimable rock and roll ghostwriter, Andrew Perry (John Lydon, Tricky), this is the story of a bad lad who has turned his life good, tracing his passage from early-thirty-something casualty to middle-aged politician, eco-warrior and bee-aficionado.

‘There is no one like Bez: you could literally throw him out of a helicopter at 60,000 feet and he would land in somebody’s extra-deep swimming pool, get out they would cook him Sunday dinner – and let him stay the night! Shaun Ryder on Bez

Access All Areas by Barbara Charone

Memoir from the writer and music PR legend Barbara Charone, telling the story of a music-obsessed girl from Chicago who falls in love with British counter-culture, destined to re-shape it for multiple generations

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Access All Areas
A Backstage Pass Through 50 Years of Music and Culture
By Barbara Charone
Foreword by Elvis Costello
White Rabbit / HB / 23 June 2022 / £20

Access All Areas: A Backstage Pass Through 50 Years of Music and Culture tells the story of how a music-loving, budding journalist from a Chicago suburb became the defining music publicist of her generation. With an exclusive foreword from Elvis Costello, Barbara Charone’s debut memoir is a time capsule of the last fifty years, told through the lens of music, from the incredible woman who set the cultural agenda in her work with a myriad of stars including Keith Richards, Foo Fighters, REM, Rod Stewart and Madonna.

First as a journalist and then a publicist at Warner Brothers Records for nearly twenty years, Barbara Charone has experienced, first-hand, the changes in the cultural landscape. Access All Areas is a personal, insightful and humorous memoir packed with stories of being on the cultural frontline, from first writing press releases on a typewriter driven by Tip Ex, then as a press officer for heavy metal bands taking the bus up to Donnington Festival with coffee, croissants and the much more popular sulfate. To taking on Madonna, an unknown girl from Detroit, and telling Smash Hits 'you don't have to run the piece if the single doesn't chart', and becoming a true pioneer in music, Charone continues to work with the biggest names in music, including Depeche Mode, Robert Plant, Foo Fighters and Mark Ronson at her agency MBCPR.

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ABOUT Barbara Charone

Born in Chicago, Barbara Charone moved to London after graduating from Northwestern University. The first half of her career was spent as a music journalist working for NME, Sounds, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy and Cream before writing the authorised biography Keith Richards: Life As A Rolling Stone in 1979.

In November 2000, after almost 20 years at Warner Brothers, Barbara co-founded leading independent music agency MBCPR with Moira Bellas where she still works now. Within six months it became one of the country’s top music PR firms. The current client roster includes: Madonna, Mark Ronson, Foo Fighters, Elvis Costello, Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, Kasabian, Metallica, Depeche Mode, Texas, Rag’n’Bone Man, St Vincent, Pearl Jam, Olly Murs, Ray Davies  and Rufus Wainwright.

Barbara Charone is one of the most respected women working in the music business. In November 2001, Charone and her business partner, Moira Bellas, were honoured as Women of the Year by Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy and The Brit Trust and in 2006 and 2009 won the coveted Music Week PR Award.

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My Rock ’n’ Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn

An exploration of female friendship and women in music, from the iconic singer-songwriter and bestselling author of Another Planet and Bedsit Disco Queen

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'Entertaining, affectionate and righteous' Guardian

'Says so much about being a woman' Cosey Fanni Tutti 

‘A gorgeous, vivid account of female friendship, what it is to be a woman in a band, activism, art, motherhood, love and having men take credit for your work’ Sinéad Gleeson 

‘It's such a radical act – as well as a loving one – for a woman to tell the story of her friend like this, and to free her (and all of us, it feels!) from the distorting prism of the male gaze. I honestly wanted to stand up and cheer!’ Melissa Harrison 

‘My Rock ’n’ Roll Friend is a book to treasure, brimming with empathy and good jokes.’ Andrew O’Hagan

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My Rock ’n’ Roll Friend
By Tracey Thorn
Paperback / 5 May 2022 / £9.99

In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey’s music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock ’n’ roll love affairs.

Morrison – a headstrong heroine blazing her way through a male-dominated industry – came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn. They shared the joy and the struggle of being women in a band, trying to outwit and face down a chauvinist music media.

In My Rock 'n' Roll Friend Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. This important book asks what people see, who does the looking, and ultimately who writes women out of – and back into – history.

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ABOUT Tracey Thorn

Tracey Thorn is a singer-songwriter and writer, best known for her 17 years in bestselling duo Everything But The Girl. She has released four solo albums, one movie soundtrack, a large handful of singles, and three books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers Another Planet and Bedsit Disco Queen. She has been a judge of the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize and writes regularly for the New Statesman. She lives in London, with her husband Ben Watt and their three children.

@tracey_thorn | traceythorn.com

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Earthed by Rebecca Schiller

‘Wow! A beautiful memoir of one small plot of land and one complex human mind; a story of our interconnection and an ambitious search for the truth.’ - Amy Liptrot

‘A powerfully confessional memoir that excavates important truths about our lives, our selves and our dreams - and what happens when we have to let go.’ – Clover Stroud

‘The 'how I moved to a field and had a breakdown book' that desperately needed to be written. Incredibly bold, brave, poetic and absolutely beautiful: a fascinating insight into the mind.’ – Sophie Heawood

‘Earthed is Rebecca Schiller’s powerful, poetic meditation on the process of falling apart, and her love letter to the land that rooted and rebuilt her. A deeply affecting read.’ - Leah Hazard 

‘A moving, intriguing and beautifully conceived exploration of place, person and planet through time, Earthed speaks to the struggles of holding on during dark days and the power of hope in hard times.’ - Rob Cowen 

‘This is a hard and beautiful read. The tough truth about the simple life.’ – Eva Wiseman

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Earthed
by Rebecca Schiller
Elliott & Thompson / 10 March 2022 / paperback / memoir / £9.99

Can the good life ever be the simple life?

 After moving to a countryside smallholding, Rebecca Schiller finds that her family's new life – despite its beautiful surroundings – is far from simple. Overwhelmed by what she has taken on and reeling from the turmoil in the wider world, she turns to her land, searching for answers and hope.

Here, she begins to uncover the hidden layers of her plot's history – and of herself. As the seasons shift, the ground under Rebecca's boots offers hard lessons, revealing brutal truths about the past, our planet and the seeds she holds in her hands.

Yet as a New Year arrives, offering a life-changing diagnosis and a global emergency, Rebecca begins to move forwards with understanding: the smallholding has become her anchor and her family's shelter; an ancient oak tree her compass and guide. Because when we find ourselves lost, we all need something to hold on to – a way to keep ourselves earthed.

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About Rebecca Schiller

Rebecca Schiller is an author and journalist. She is co-founder and trustee of the human rights charity Birthrights and a regular contributor to the Guardian. Rebecca and her family raise a motley crew of goats, geese, ducks and chickens and work their Kent smallholding to grow vegetables, fruit and flowers and restore wildlife to the land.

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Talking Points

Mental health and the cost of hidden neurodiversity:

• in a time of pandemic as well as personal, political and environmental crisis

• exposing the destructive burden of undiagnosed ADHD

• the feminist issues raised by widespread underdiagnosis in women and girls and the extraordinary pressures of lockdown motherhood

• the highs and lows of smallholding as therapy: working the land, tending livestock and growing food to rebuild after breakdown and overwhelm  

The real story of the not-so-simple life:

• exploring our impulse to go back to nature, self-sufficiency, sowing and growing in uncertain times

• the practical lessons and joys of smallholding life: from breeding goats and 'counting chickens', to growing food as a family

• an unflinching look at the back-breaking, marriage-straining reality of following our post-pandemic escape-to-the-countryside dreams

Uncovering our land's hidden histories and politics:

• stories of the neglected women of our land's past and how their voices can help us today

• tracing an English country garden back to our brutal, colonial roots

• looking towards an uncertain future where climate change, political division, race inequality and pandemics collide

• asking how to live, love and thrive in complicated times of hope, fear and change

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The linocut on the jacket of Earthed was designed and painted by Anne Fewster using natural inks and pigments made from the author's smallholding, land and garden.

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How We Met by Huma Qureshi

‘A tale of patience, tenderness and love that’ll add sunshine to your year.’
-Stylist (best non-fiction, 2021) 

‘A beautiful, refreshing and honest memoir about family, love, inheritance and loss that is warm and authentic’ - Nikesh Shukla

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How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Paperback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 3 February 2022 / £9.99

You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.

If only it were that simple.

Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it comes to marriage.

Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.  

As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?

As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.

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ABOUT Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). Her collection of stories, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love (Sceptre, Nov ’21), has been described as ‘deft, satisfying and poignant’ (Pandora Sykes).

A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times, Independent, Observer, Grazia, Red, Harpers, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.

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Selected Praise for How We Met

‘A sweet, touching memoir about family, faith and love. There's a purity and simplicity to Huma's writing, as she attempts to reconcile the sprawling weight of expectation with her own desire for a contained but free life. But what does a life on her own terms look like? What even are her own terms?  A consolation to others who have trod this very path, enlightening for those of us who haven't, you'll be rooting for not just Huma, but for everyone she loves too.’ Pandora Sykes

‘I just loved loved loved loved How We Met. A love story about panic, faith, family, duty, living on your own, work, grief and trust. It delves into love and politics in the British South Asian community and left me beaming.’ Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic Years

‘This beautiful, romantic memoir grabs you from the first page and won’t let you go. Told with heart, wit and quiet restraint, How We Met is the story of how we can transcend the expectations of others and arrange our own happiness in life and in love.’ Viv Groskop

‘A wonderful read - a memoir of grief, becoming and true love. Huma Qureshi is a writer with a sharp eye and a romantic heart.’ Katherine May, author of Wintering

'I devoured this brilliant memoir! Huma's voice is effortless, beautiful, incredibly refreshing and so relatable. I highly recommend it' Haleh Agar, author of Out of Touch

‘There are the books that touch you. Then there are the books that open out their arms and straight out hug you - How We Met is this second kind of book. Honest, joyful, at times heart-breaking, at times laugh out loud funny, but always generous in its telling... this is Huma Qureshi, heart and soul.’ Ami Rao, author of David and Ameena

‘A fearlessly honest memoir of courage, love and loss, and trying to find your place in the world. Quietly heart-breaking but life-affirming too.’ Kia Abdullah, author of Take It Back

‘Every page radiates Huma’s love for her family, for her emerging self, and for the possibilities of a life more fully lived’ Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story

‘Huma Qureshi tells the story of her great loves with generosity and tenderness that will grab readers by the heart.'  Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of This Really Isn't About You

'How We Met is the book I, and countless women of similar heritage, have been waiting our whole lives for. I cried and laughed out loud as I recognised myself in so much of Huma Qureshi's story.’ Saima Mir, author of The Khan

‘I loved every minute.’ Laura Pearson

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Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale

‘[Annie Nightingale] is completely inspirational . . . The book is a riveting read’ DJ Magazine

‘Absolutely terrific’ David Quantick

‘A marvellous memoir’ Louder Than War

 ‘A joy to read’ Guardian

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Hey Hi Hello
Five Decades of Pop Culture from Britain's broadcasting DJ pioneer
By Annie Nightingale
White Rabbit/ 2nd September 2021/ Paperback/ £9.99

Featuring never exclusive interviews with The Beatles, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Billie Eilish and Primal Scream among others. 

Hey Hi Hello is a greeting we have all become familiar with, as Annie Nightingale cues up another show on BBC Radio 1. Always in tune with the nation's taste, yet effortlessly one step ahead for more than five decades, in this book Annie digs deep into her crate of memories, experiences and encounters to deliver an account of a life lived on the frontiers of pop cultural innovation.

Annie Nightingale was the first female DJ on the BBC and has the longest running radio show on BBC Radio 1, celebrating her 50 years in broadcasting in 2020. As a writer, DJ and broadcaster on radio, tv and the live music scene, Annie has been an invigorating and necessarily disruptive force, working within the establishment but never playing by the rules. She walked in the door at Radio 1 as a rebel, its first female broadcaster, in 1970. Fifty years later she became the station's first CBE in the New Year's Honours List; still a vital force in British music, a DJ and tastemaker who commands the respect of artists, listeners and peers across the world.

Hey Hi Hello tells the story of those early, intimidating days at Radio 1, the Ground Zero moment of punk and the epiphanies that arrived in the late 80s with the arrival of acid house and the Second Summer of Love. It includes faithfully reproduced and never before seen encounters with Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, The Beatles and bang-up-to-date interviews with Little Simz and Billie Eilish. 

Funny, warm and candid to a fault, Annie Nightingale's memoir is driven by the righteous energy of discovery and passion for music. It is a portrait of an artist without whom the past fifty years of British culture would have looked very different indeed.

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ABOUT ANNIE NIGHTINGALE

Annie Nightingale CBE began her career as a journalist, columnist and fashion boutique owner. She was the first female DJ on BBC Radio 1 and is now the stations longest serving broadcaster, celebrating 50 years at the BBC last year.

Annie was the first female DJ from Radio 1 to be inducted into the Radio Academy Hall of Fame, and she received a special Gold Award at the Sony Radio Academy Awards. She won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Audio Production Awards in 2020 and was awarded MBE by The Queen in 2000. She is an ambassador of The Princes’ Trust and patron of Sound Women, an organisation to promote women in broadcasting.

As well as touring the world as a live DJ, she has also released music compilation collections, including Annie On One (Heavenly) and Masterpiece (Ministry of Sound), and two volumes of autobiography, Chase the Fade and Wicked Speed.

In 2020 BBC Four devoted a night's TV to Annie, including two new documentaries about punk and post punk music. This reflected Annie's tenure as the only ever female anchor of the legendary BBC TV music series, The Old Grey Whistle Test. Annie was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in 2020.

Note:
The photography section includes photographs from Annie's personal collection. Featuring Mick Jagger, Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys, Little Simz, Billie Eilish, and a series of recently discovered backstage pictures from the height of Beatlemania with The Fab Four.  

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‘Annie was important to me back when I was a teenager, when not only was she one of the few people playing records I liked, she was a WOMAN doing it, which was inspirational to me. I wrote about her in my book Another Planet, where I quote a diary entry from 1978 which listed things I was loving in between watching Bowie on tv and taping a Bruce Springsteen album, the entry simply says, ‘Listened to Annie Nightingale’.’  - Tracey Thorn
 

‘I can’t imagine what growing up without Annie Nightingale would have been like. I don’t want to contemplate the limitations that would have been imposed on my cultural life and my own ambitions in that sphere without her presence. Thank god I don’t have to and she was there every step of the way from a voice on the radio to an enthusiastic comrade in the chill out zone and post-rave party.’ - Irvine Welsh

‘It wasn’t until I heard Annie Nightingale on Sunday evenings after the chart rundown that I understood what music radio could be. Nightingale had a broader music taste than, say, John Peel, but was alternative enough to introduce me to songs I never would otherwise have heard. She’s still on Radio 1 now, at the very Nightingale time of 1am. She still plays tracks I hate, tracks I love. She’s still the best.’
Miranda Sawyer - ‘Top 50 inspiring cultural icons’, Observer

‘Full of brilliant anecdotes, this autobiography offers a rare insight into a woman who has lived at the forefront of pop culture’ - The Sun 

‘Jam-packed with stories and events that span decades of music and culture, from the Beatles via Marc Bolan to Primal Scream and Little Simz . . . very hard to put down’ - Buzz Magazine

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The Best, Most Awful Job

“Poignant, funny, sensitive, but most importantly, heart-stoppingly true. This is an outstanding collection of stories, from some of the finest writers, which gets right to the dark heart of what it really means to be a mother. I loved it.” - Clover Stroud

‘An outstanding collection of essays from some of the finest writers’ - Grazia

‘Moving and vital, this is the kind of book that could well make a difference to someone’s life . . .every mother should read it.’ - Laura Pearson, author of I Wanted You to Know

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The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 5 August 2021 / £9.99 / PB

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

 Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.

Some highlights include:

• Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

• Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

• Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

• Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

• MiMi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

• Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

• Saima Mir on the taboo that is maternal rage

• Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.

‘A wonderful anthology. I enjoyed it so much – the honesty, intelligence, fury and tenderness of the essays; and, importantly and refreshingly, the range of voices and stories it contains. I only wished each essay were longer so that I might spend more time with each of these writers and their worlds.’
Liz Berry, author of The Republic of Motherhood and winner of the Forward Prize

‘If I had added a Post-it Note to every sentence in this book that made me laugh, wince in recognition, or faintly well up, I would have turned it into a paper porcupine.’
Ceri Radford, Independent
 

‘Absorbing stories from different women… Multiracial and non-binary perspectives are among the welcomingly diverse inclusions here.’
Jude Rogers, New Statesman
 

‘In this poignant, vital collection of essays, twenty writers meditate on what it means to be a mother… a real treat’
Elizabeth Morris, Crib Notes

‘These essays, diverse in the experiences of their authors but all hitting upon a near-universal truth, tackle beautifully [the challenge of] trying to balance creativity with childcare’
Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

‘I’ve been really missing the company of other mothers so this was a very good read… this book covers so much. The essay that really blew me away was Peggy Riley on not becoming a mother.’
Samantha Ellis, author of How To Be A Heroine

“Searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms”
Irish Examiner

‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice

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ABOUT Katherine May

Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In her New York Times bestseller, Wintering, she looked at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

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Lobby Life by Carole Walker

A no-holds-barred insight into the corridors of Westminster and personal stories of life in the Lobby from a journalist who was at the heart of the political establishment for two decades.

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Lobby Life
Inside Westminster’s Secret Society
By Carole Walker
Elliott & Thompson / Hardback non-fiction / £16.99 / 24 June 2021

Drawing on personal experience and interviews with former colleagues, politicians, spin doctors and critics of the system, Lobby Life tells the intriguing story of the once highly secretive institution known as the Lobby – the club at the heart of Westminster which has been the focal point of battles between government and the media for more than 140 years. From the Lobby's conception to the present day, Carole Walker exposes the battles between its political reporters and Downing Street to control the news agenda, including during some of most momentous stories in recent history. Through the rise and fall of successive governments – via war, industrial strife and scandal, the financial crash, Brexit and a global pandemic – we witness the rows and resignations, the drama and debate.

In this no-holds-barred account of what really happens behind the closed doors of Westminster, Walker asks urgent questions about the role of the media today, when politicians can engage directly with voters online, bypassing journalists – and accountability.

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TALKING POINTS

• Lifting the lid on the mysterious world of the parliamentary Lobby – once so secretive that the late Chris Moncrieff, legendary former political editor of the Press Association, said it was like working for MI5.  When he joined in the 1970s he was warned he must never mention that he attended regular briefings from the Prime Minister’s press secretary to anyone – even his wife.

• What it’s like being a Lobby journalist at Westminster: how you gather your stories; how you find your sources; how government and MPs seek to shape the stories we are told. The words uttered at Lobby briefings can make headlines around the world, signal the end of a ministerial career or indicate far-reaching policy changes. 

• How the women of the Lobby have confronted outdated attitudes and established their rightful place, holding MPs and ministers to account and explaining the decisions that shape our daily lives. 

• How female Lobby journalists helped to expose unacceptable behaviour by some of our most senior politicians when the #MeToo movement swept through Westminster in 2017. From the infamous ‘lunge after lunch’, which brought down a Cabinet minister, to casual comments and ‘wandering’ hands, women in the Lobby have dealt with it all.

• The fun and frustration being a Lobby journalist ‘on tour’ with a Prime Minister: champagne on a flight with Margaret Thatcher; breaking news on-board Tony Blair’s plane; battles to meet deadlines in a desert sandstorm with David Cameron. On these tightly controlled package tours, the destination is far less important than your fellow-travellers. 

• The power of key insiders at Westminster, such as Sir Bernard Ingham (Thatcher), Alastair Campbell (Blair) and Dominic Cummings (Johnson), on government – and how they use the Lobby to try to shape the agenda.

• The role of Lobby journalists today when politicians can engage directly with voters via social media.

• Behind-the-scenes at Westminster during some of the most pivotal moments in our recent history: Churchill’s war government, the Suez Crisis; mining strikes; the Falklands conflict and two Gulf wars; the ‘dodgy-dossier’ on WMD; the death of Dr David Kelly; the phone-hacking and expenses scandals; the financial crisis of 2008; Brexit and a global pandemic.

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ABOUT Carole Walker

Carole Walker is a high-profile journalist and political commentator with more than twenty years’ experience as a BBC Political Correspondent. As a Lobby journalist, she covered some of the biggest political stories in recent history including six general elections, the EU referendum, the rise and fall of successive governments, resignations, rows and parliamentary debates. She has travelled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Prime Ministers and reported on international summits, the first Gulf War, revolution in Moscow, the break-up of the Soviet Union and civil war in the Balkans and Somalia. She is now a flag-ship presenter on Times Radio, shining a light on the political events of the day.

Carole is available for interviews, features and events.

Life on a Knife’s Edge by Dr Rahul Jandial

“A beautifully written and fearless depiction of both brain surgery and the mind of a surgeon. Riveting”

— Jim Down, author of Life Support

“Is this a memoir or a science book? An exposé of the shortcoming of our healthcare system or a paean to the wonders of modern medicine? The answer is YES, to all those things and more. Jandial takes us deep into the day-to-day life of his profession as a brain surgeon while simultaneously taking us even deeper into the inner-workings of our own biology. It’s an unconventional approach, and a bit disarming at first blush, but pays off in spades. I loved this book.”

— James Nestor, New York Times bestselling author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“A reminder that what makes us stellar physicians and surgeons are not our skills with our hands and/our knowledge but rather our empathy and ability to connect with our patients”

— Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa

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Life on a Knife’s Edge
A Brain Surgeon’s Reflections on Life, Lose and Survival
Dr Rahul Jandial
Penguin Life / HB non-fiction / 3rd June 2021 / £16.99

A raw and unflinching account from leading neuroscientist and neurosurgeon of the valuable lessons we can learn from patients confronted with their own mortality.

 As one of the world's leading brain surgeons, Dr Jandial is the last hope for many patients who have extreme forms of cancer - patients who can't be saved but deserve more time.

Life on a Knife's Edge is his account of the resilience, courage and belief he has witnessed in his patients, and the lessons he has learned from them. Both an unflinching account of extreme surgeries and a profound, moving and introspective memoir, this book reveals the depths of a surgeon's psyche who is pushed to his limits, day in, day out.

From keeping a gun victim's heart pumping with his own hand, to saving a woman from paralysis and performing brain surgery while time is running out on a haemorrhaging patient, we see how making life and death decisions and facing unimaginable pressure has shaped one man's life. Now, he shares the many truths about human nature that he has learned along the way: from how we deal with trauma, loss, addiction, failure and threat to our innate belief and sense of self. 

From a life spent balancing the line between life and death, Rahul reveals what it means to survive life's challenges.

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FEATURE IDEAS / TALKING POINTS

• Lessons of hope and survival learnt from cancer patients

• Lessons on coping with trauma from a frontline worker

• Reverse PTSD and resilience– how to mentally survive, heal and thrive after trauma

• Healthy ways to deal with tremendous uncertainty

• How to enhance your performance – from neural efficiency to simulated crisis management and breathing techniques

• From University dropout to world-class surgeon – Dr Jandial’s personal journey

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ABOUT Dr Rahul Jandial

Dr Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD is an American dual-trained neurosurgeon and scientist at City of Hope, a research centre, hospital and postgraduate training faculty in Los Angeles. When he isn't performing surgery, he is leading a team of scientists in Jandial Laboratory, named after him and known for its cutting-edge approach to brain surgery and neuroscience. In addition to being a world-class surgeon and scientist, Dr Jandial is the author of ten academic books and over 100 papers. Sunday Times bestseller Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon (2019) was his first book for a general audience.

Repotting Your Life by Frances Edmonds

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“The ultimate handbook for anyone wanting to be challenged, fulfilled and stay young in mind and body.”

— Angela Rippon

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Repotting Your Life: Reframe Your Thinking. Reset Your Purpose. Rejuvenate Yourself Time and Again

By Frances Edmonds
Elliott & Thompson / hardback / non-fiction / 13 May / £14.99 

Do you feel stuck or stifled, but struggle to know what to do next? It’s time to ‘repot’ your life.

“What I learnt along my journey of repotting – a journey that would take me to a whole new country and an undertaking full of possibility and growth – offers, I hope, a useful new model for navigating the increasing number of transitions that we are all called upon to make throughout life in the modern world. And so my gift to anyone embarking on a new stage in life would be an understanding of how best to master the challenging and often daunting process of moving on and branching out. My gift would be proficiency in the art of repotting.”

— Frances Edmonds

In a world in which we’re living longer, and change is a necessary yet often uncomfortable process, Repotting Your Life offers a toolkit to revitalize your relationships, your passions or your career, whatever your age. It is for anyone who feels stuck or stifled, and is struggling to know what to do next.

There are four simple steps in the process of repotting:

Step 1 – Potbound: Know when you need to make a change.

Step 2 – Pots and Plans: Identify where you want to be. Understand what makes you feel fulfilled and matters most to you. Figure out a plan of action.

Step 3 – Pulling up the Roots: Prepare to end one phase of your life and commit to your repotted future.

Step 4 – Bedding In: Put down new roots and re-energize yourself for your next adventure.

With verve, wit and wisdom, Repotting for Life offers the motivation to set aside what is no longer working and the tools required to design a thriving life full of fresh possibility. 

Frances Edmonds has had an extraordinary professional career full of transitions and transformation, latterly becoming a longevity and well-being fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute in 2018, where her concept of ‘repotting’ was born. She is an inspirational keynote speaker, a cross-generational mentor and helped create the UK’s most prestigious business development network. Previously an international conference interpreter at the European Union, United Nations and World Economic Summits, she is also a bestselling author and broadcaster

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Feature ideas / talking points

• Intergenerational education, teamwork and cross-mentorship: a new model for the future: Frances took up her research fellowship at the Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford (the epicentre of California’s Silicon Valley, innovation and high-tech) in her mid-60s at the same time as her 30-year old daughter who’d left a lucrative career in investment banking and was studying at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
  
  Independently, they navigated the challenges of their own new beginnings. Together they helped forge a powerful inter-generational community that combined the energy of thrusting young students with the wisdom of experienced elders - a model for tomorrow’s innovative, flexible and highly effective blended teams.

• Ageism: We often talk about diversity and inclusivity – but these concepts rarely extend to “older” people who have enormous amounts of accumulated wisdom to share and are too often denied the appropriate opportunities. Reseach has demonstrated that in business a blended team of mixed ages achieves the best results.

• Post Pandemic Priorities: The new work/life integration model: At a time of global change, more people than ever are being obliged to reassess their priorities. Even before the COVID pandemic, the classic 3-chapter model of Learn, Earn and Retire at 65 had become unrealistic for the vast majority of people. In a world of extended life expectancy, a new model of work/life integration is required that will involve constant oscillation in and out of work and in and out of continuous personal and professional development throughout a far longer life span.

• The huge challenge is that society does not yet have the culture or the institutions to deal with the “30 extra gifted years” of life expectancy that a baby born today will have as compared to a baby born in 1900. What Mindset, Toolset and Skillset will be necessary to successfully navigate the expected “100 year life”?

• How Frances conceived of the idea of ‘repotting’ whilst at Stanford: The plaque at the entrance to Stanford’s world famous Graduate School of Business: “Repotting - that’s how you get new bloom -  you should have a plan of accomplishment and when that is achieved, you should be willing to start off again.” (Ernest Arbuckle – former Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business.)

• Reframe Your Thinking: Techniques for dialing down the emotion, taking the heat out of negative thought patterns, and “turning the debacle into an earner.”

• Reset Your Purpose:  What happens when you lose your sense of purpose?  The end of a relationship, an empty nest, a situation that’s no longer working… there are endless catalysts that precipitate loss of purpose. How do you identify and move on to the next organising principle in your life?

• Rejuvenate Yourself Time and Again: “Repotting” is a process – and you are never, ever finished. It’s a journey, not a destination. It’s a system, not a goal. The better you understand the system, the more effectively you’ll be able to negotiate today’s increasingly frequent and radical changes.

• Importance of wellness, purpose and community: The key pillars of a meaningful life well-lived.

For more information, please contact Emma Finnigan PR.

Earthed by Rebecca Schiller

‘A powerfully confessional memoir that excavates important truths about our lives, our selves and our dreams - and what happens when we have to let go.’
– Clover Stroud, author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights

‘The 'how I moved to a field and had a breakdown book' that desperately needed to be written. Incredibly bold, brave, poetic and absolutely beautiful: a fascinating insight into the mind.’
– Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover Games

‘So honest, so raw and so vulnerable. This much-needed story of resilience integrates history, myth and folklore, drawing on the histories of the people who have gone before and to whom this land once belonged. Such an evocative, sensitive and a refreshing take on nature writing and memoir.’
– Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias

‘A lyrical journey through nature and the human heart.'
– Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

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Earthed
By Rebecca Schiller
Elliott & Thompson / 6 May 2021 / Hardback / £14.99

A courageous memoir for our uncertain times: Earthed is a story of the power of place to transform us, of dreams and nightmares on the land and of living in an unfamiliar world and a volatile mind.  

In 2017, Rebecca Schiller turned fantasy to reality and moved her family to a countryside smallholding for a life of sowing and growing. But as the first few years go by, and the ever-expanding list of tasks builds to a cacophony, it becomes clear that this is not going to be simple.

Another January comes in, and with it the threat of a mental health crisis, and so Rebecca turns to the garden where she has made her home, and to the women of this place’s past. Here, she stumbles on a wild space of imaginative leaps, where she begins to uncover the hidden layers of her plot’s history – and of herself.

The ground under Rebecca’s boots offers hard lessons as the seasons shift, delivering unflinching glimpses of damage done to peoples and the planet and regular defeats in her battle with the slugs.

Yet as the New Year returns, carrying a life-changing diagnosis and then a global pandemic, Rebecca begins to move forwards with hope: the smallholding has become her anchor, her teacher and her family’s shelter. Because when we find ourselves in an unknown land, we all need something small to hold on to and a way to keep ourselves earthed.

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TALKING POINTS & FEATURE IDEAS

Mental health and the cost of hidden neurodiversity:

• in a time of pandemic as well as personal, political and environmental crisis

• exposing the destructive burden of undiagnosed ADHD

• the feminist issues raised by widespread underdiagnosis in women and girls and the

• the highs and lows of smallholding as therapy: working the land, tending livestock and growing food to rebuild after breakdown and overwhelm  

The real story of the not-so-simple life:

• exploring our impulse to go back to nature, self-sufficiency, sowing and growing in uncertain times

• the practical lessons and joys of smallholding life: from breeding goats and 'counting chickens', to growing food as a family

• an unflinching look at the back-breaking, marriage-straining reality of following our post-pandemic escape-to-the-countryside dreams

Uncovering our land's hidden histories and politics:

• stories of the neglected women of our land's past and how their voices can help us today

• tracing an English country garden back to our brutal, colonial roots

• looking towards an uncertain future where climate change, political division, race inequality and pandemics collide

• asking how to live, love and thrive in complicated times of hope, fear and change

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ABOUT Rebecca Schiller

Rebecca Schiller is a writer, journalist and the author of Your No Guilt Pregnancy Plan (Penguin Life) and Why Human Rights in Childbirth Matter. She is co-founder and trustee of the human rights charity Birthrights and a regular contributor to the Guardian. Rebecca and her family raise a motley crew of goats, geese, ducks and chickens. They work their small plot to grow vegetables, fruit and flowers and restore wildlife to the land.

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The linocut on the jacket of Earthed was designed and painted by Anne Fewster using natural inks and pigments made from the author's smallholding, land and garden.

Everything I’ve Learned About Motherhood by Zeena Moolla

Everything I’ve Learned About Motherhood
From My Single-Parent Dad
By Zeena Moolla
24th February 2021

Motherhood is amazing and the devotion you encounter is staggeringly strong. But when you’re in the eye of the shitstorm, veering between love and lunacy, wondering how this tiny, adorable human can wreak so much bedlam in your life, I believe you need a robust sense of humour to help save your sanity.

For Zeena Moolla, the early days of being a new mum were a heady cocktail of sleepless nights, acid reflux and aching boobs. But finding the funny in the chaos buffered so much of the stress. And she has her dad to thank…

Being brought up solely by a single dad, one of a foreign, Muslim background, exemplified beautifully that parenting and families come in all different shapes and sizes. His massive-hearted parenting shaped the kind of mother Zeena is, and as the funniest person she knows, he can also turn any situation around with warmth, wit and a cheese sandwich. If that’s not a vital skill in parenting, then what is?

With top tips for surviving sleep-deprivation (spoiler alert: embrace a cantankerous mood and don’t buy crap coffee) to dealing with judgy idiots, getting to grips with shitty mum-guilt and returning to work, Zeena will show you that motherhood won’t just get better, it’ll be incredible.  

Laugh-out-loud funny, honest, tender and packed with real life advice – this is essential reading for every new mother not cherishing every moment, feeling like a misfit or simply finding this parenting lark all too much.

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ABOUT Zeena Moolla

Zeena Moolla is a journalist, editor, and blogger. As a journalist, Zeena has written for many publications including Marie Claire, The Telegraph, The Mirror, Good Housekeeping and OK! magazine.

Her blog wordtothemothers.com was also turned into a TV series for Made Television, in which Zeena hosted a parent-specific chat show. 

Zeena is also mum to Zain, eight and Yasmin, six. Her parenting style has very little in common with Gwyneth Paltrow’s and she’s alright with that. Her lovely husband Pete and very happy kids seem to be too. 

Instagram: word_to_the_mothers
Twitter: @bristolgirl1973

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How We Met by Huma Qureshi

How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Hardback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 28 January 2021 / £14.99

You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.
If only it were that simple.

Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it came to marriage.

Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.

As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?

As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.

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Talking Points

• Defying your parents’ expectation of marriage

• Bringing your children up with multiple identities

• Raising three boys

• Grieving a parent (Huma's father died when she was in her early 20s, profoundly shaping her experience of early adulthood)

• The relationship between mother and daughter, and how we come to better understand our parents with age

• Learning to be happy and fulfilled in your own company

• Being a mother and a writer and carving out time to work

• Marriage ten years on, and how it evolves and changes after having children

• Huma's own love story – meeting her husband, who converted to Islam soon after

• Home – where it is and how that changes. As Huma’s mother is selling the family home, she is in the process of buying her ‘forever’ family home

• Growing up with love stories – how growing up reading Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer shaped Huma’s romantic ideals, and how nineteenths century social etiquette and the matchmaking mothers seemed so reminiscent of the circles in which she grew up

• Navigating others’ perceptions as a person of colour in the media.

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About Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times,  Independent, Observer, Grazia, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.

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Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale

Hey Hi Hello
Five Decades of Pop Culture from Britain's First Female DJ
By Annie Nightingale
White Rabibit / 3 September 2020 / hardback, e-book and audio / £18.99

50 stories and encounters in the inimitable voice of Annie Nightingale, celebrating 50 years of broadcasting and presenting at the BBC.

Featuring never before seen exclusive interview with The Beatles, Billie Eilish, Bob Marley and Primal Scream among others

Hey Hi Hello is a greeting we have all become familiar with, as Annie Nightingale cues up another show on BBC Radio 1. Always in tune with the nation's taste, yet effortlessly one step ahead for more than five decades, in this book Annie digs deep into her crate of memories, experiences and encounters to deliver an account of a life lived on the frontiers of pop cultural innovation.

Annie Nightingale was the first female DJ on the BBC and the Guinness World Record holder for the longest running radio show on BBC Radio 1. As a DJ and broadcaster on radio, tv and the live music scene, Annie has been an invigorating and necessarily disruptive force, working within the establishment but never playing by the rules. She walked in the door at Radio 1 as a rebel, its first female broadcaster, in 1970. Fifty years later she became the station's first CBE in the New Year's Honours List; still a vital force in British music, a DJ and tastemaker who commands the respect of artists, listeners and peers across the world.

Hey Hi Hello tells the story of those early, intimidating days at Radio 1, the Ground Zero moment of punk and the epiphanies that arrived in the late 80s with the arrival of acid house and the Second Summer of Love. It includes faithfully reproduced and never before seen encounters with Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, The Beatles and bang-up-to-date interviews with Little Simz and Billie Eilish.

Funny, warm and candid to a fault, Annie Nightingale's memoir is driven by the righteous energy of discovery and passion for music. It is a portrait of an artist without whom the past fifty years of British culture would have looked very different indeed.

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About the author

Annie Nightingale CBE began her career as a journalist, columnist and fashion boutique owner. She was the first female DJ on BBC Radio 1 and is now the stations longest serving broadcaster, celebrating 50 years at the BBC this year.

Annie was the first female DJ from Radio 1 to be inducted into the Radio Academy Hall of Fame, and she received a special Gold Award at the Sony Radio Academy Awards. She was awarded MBE by The Queen in 2000, was made an honorary Doctor of Letters at the University of Westminster in December 2012. She is an ambassador of The Princes’ Trust and patron of Sound Women, an organisation to promote women in broadcasting.

As well as touring the world as a live DJ, she has also released music compilation collections, including Annie On One (Heavenly) and Masterpiece (Ministry of Sound), and two volumes of autobiography, Chase the Fade and Wicked Speed.

Annie’s 50th anniversary at Radio 1 in 2020 will be marked by two documentaries on BBC TV, a series of events on Radio 1.

Annie lives in West London.

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“Annie was important to me back when I was a teenager, when not only was she one of the few people playing records I liked, she was a WOMAN doing it, which was inspirational to me. I wrote about her in my book Another Planet, where I quote a diary entry from 1978 which listed things I was loving in between watching Bowie on tv and taping a Bruce Springsteen album, the entry simply says, ‘Listened to Annie Nightingale’.”

— Tracey Thorn

“I can’t imagine what growing up without Annie Nightingale would have been like. I don’t want to contemplate the limitations that would have been imposed on my cultural life and my own ambitions in that sphere without her presence. Thank god I don’t have to and she was there every step of the way from a voice on the radio to an enthusiastic comrade in the chill out zone and post-rave party.”

— Irvine Welsh

“It wasn’t until I heard Annie Nightingale on Sunday evenings after the chart rundown that I understood what music radio could be. Nightingale had a broader music taste than, say, John Peel, but was alternative enough to introduce me to songs I never would otherwise have heard. She’s still on Radio 1 now, at the very Nightingale time of 1am. She still plays tracks I hate, tracks I love. She’s still the best.”

— Miranda Sawyer - ‘Top 50 inspiring cultural icons’, Observer

Watermarks by Lenka Janiurek

Lenka Janiurek has written the remarkable story of her life - an unflinching account of loss, success, love, despair, and the solace of the natural world.

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Watermarks
Life, Death and Swimming
By Lenka Janiurek
Allison & Busby / HB / 21 May 2020 / £14.99

Lenka Janiurek’s story really begins with the death of her mother when she was nine. She is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father, and one of eight children. Across the years she is plagued by the rage, addiction and despair of the controlling men she is closest to. This memoir grapples with identity, of trying to find a place in a world and within a family, that don’t feel like your own.

This remarkable story from the 1960s to the present day, describes the loss of her mother to her relationships with 2 stepmothers, early success as a playwright, extensive travel, and encounters with both extreme wealth and poverty. Throughout Lenka explores and celebrates the beauty and tragedy of living life to the full.

Watermarks is a stunning evocation of alienation, searching, and the restorative power of nature.  

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Talking points

• Wild swimming – Water has been central to Lenka’s life, at the moment she swims in the sea every day. 

• Green housing – Lenka is passionate about housing solutions, she helped build a straw bale house in Pembrokeshire. It was Grand Designs Eco home award winner in 2008.

• Living with chronic illness – both Lenka and her younger daughter have had ME, severely limiting their lives.

• Living off grid for a year up a mountain in West Wales 20 years ago.

• Extensive travel in remote areas of India with 2 children.

• Inherited trauma – trying to understand and process the legacies of war, secrets, grief, addiction, violence, and the loss of country and identity.

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About LENKA JANIUREK

LENKA JANIUREK was born in York. At the age of 17 she won the prestigious Young Writer’s Competition at the Royal Court Theatre and subsequently had three plays on at the Royal Court Theatre, a platform play at the National Theatre, and one at the Other Place with the RSC in Stratford-on-Avon. She has facilitated workshops in writing, drama, art, and well-being, in schools, colleges, at camps, and in a women's prison. And worked as a baker, fundraiser, caretaker, green builder and researcher. She has four children. She lives close to the sea in Wales.

Lenka is available for interviews, features and events.

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The Best, Most Awful Job Edited by Katherine May

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

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The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 19 March 2020 / £12.99 / HB

Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.

Some highlights include:

• Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

• Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

• Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

• Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

• Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

• Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

• Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.
  

‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’ - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice

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ABOUT KATHERINE MAY

Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Adams grew up in the United Kingdom, but currently lives in Limassol, Cyprus where she lives with her family and two cats. She has written two psychological thrillers, and her next release, Little Wishes, is a love story set in Cornwall, stretching across five decades of life. Michelle writes fulltime, and can occasionally be found working as a scientist.

Javaria Akbar is a freelance writer. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Telegraph, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, The Pool, Munchies, Vice, Dazed Beauty and more. She is also a part-time cookery writer and mother of two. 

Charlene Allcott is a graduate of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme and author of two novels: The Single Mum’s Wish List and More Than a Mum. She was born in Croydon and now lives in Brighton.

British-born to Burmese parents, MiMi Aye has always moved between two worlds, and her life at home in the suburbs of London with her husband and two children is very different from the life spent with her family back in Burma. Her latest book, Mandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, was described by Nigella Lawson as “a really loving and hungry-making introduction to a fascinating cuisine” and by Tom Parker-Bowles as “a glorious revelation … autobiography, history and recipes all rolled into one magnificent whole ... a brilliant, beguiling book". She is on Twitter and Instagram as @meemalee and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/itsmeemalee

Jodi Bartle is a New Zealander who has lived in London for nearly twenty years. In-between, she has written for Vice, i-D, Chanel, Quintessentially, Gaggenau, Selfridges, Sunseeker and The London Mother on photography, interior design, fashion, art, travel and babies, in both print and on-line form. She is currently part of the journalistic and editorial team at MCCA’s Diversity & the Bar, a US-based publication which highlights diversity issues in the legal profession, and spills all her embarrassing parenting stories via her blog theharridan.

Playwright, screenwriter and prose writer, Sharmila Chauhan’s work is often a transgressive meditation on love, sex and power. Her plays include Be Better in Bed, The Husbands (Soho Theatre), Born Again/Purnajanam (Southwark) and 10 Women (Avignon Festival). Both her short films (Girl Like You, Oysters) were produced by Film London and her feature Mother Land was long-listed for the Sundance Writers’ Lab. Sharmila also has a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in clinical pharmacology. She lives in London with her husband, son and daughter and cat Tashi. You can find her at www.sharmilathewriter.com

Josie George lives with her son in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands. Her days are watchful, restricted and often solitary, in a large part because of the debilitating disability she’s had since she was a child, but also because she’s discovered that a slow, quiet life has much to teach her. Josie’s brave and singular memoir will be published by Bloomsbury in early 2021. In the meantime, she is working on a novel and writes blogs about her powerful and gently subversive way of looking at the world at bimblings.co.uk. You can find her on Twitter as @porridgebrain.

Leah Hazard is a serving NHS midwife, author of the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and mother of two children. She lives in Scotland with her family and continues to write about the many wonders and challenges of women’s journeys to motherhood.

Joanne Limburg has published non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Her most recent books are the memoir Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations (Atlantic Books) and the poetry collection The Autistic Alice (Bloodaxe Books). She lives in Cambridge with her husband and now-teenage son.

Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist whose first book, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, was published in 2015. She was born in Porto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal).

Dani McClain writes and reports on race, reproductive health, policy and politics, and is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow with The Nation Institute. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Talking Points Memo, Al Jazeera America, EBONY.com and Guernica, and her feature reporting has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Hollie McNish is a writer based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published three poetry collections, Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and one poetic memoir on politics and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, about which The Scotsman said: ‘The world needs this book”. Her next book, Slug: And Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate, will be published in February 2021 and is a collection of poems, memoir and short stories. She normally likes her tea with two sugars.

Saima Mir is an award-winning journalist. She started her career at the Telegraph & Argus and went on to work for the BBC. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Broadcast Association’s World View Award, and has written for numerous publications including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. Her essay for the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa appeared in Guardian Weekend and received over 250,000 hits over two days. Her novel The Khan will be published by Oneworld in 2021.

Carolina Alvarado Molk was born in the Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently working on a collection of essays about her experiences growing up undocumented.

Emily Morris is an author and freelance journalist from Manchester, UK. My Shitty Twenties, her memoir of single parenthood, was named a Guardian readers’ favourite book of 2017, and has been optioned for a TV series, which is in development. She is currently working on a novel.

Jenny Parrott is publishing director of Point Blank, the literary crime imprint at prize-winning independent publisher Oneworld, and she teaches creative writing. She also writes WW2-set sagas under the names Kitty Danton and Katie King, with series currently at Orion and HarperCollins.

Huma Qureshi is an award-winning author, journalist and blogger. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, as well as several other national publications including The Times, The Independent and New Statesman. Her first book, In Spite of Oceans, a collection of short stories, won The John C Laurence Award from The Authors' Foundation. Her blog, Our Story Time, is a collection of her personal writing.

Peggy Riley is a playwright and writer.  Her novel, Amity & Sorrow, is about how we make families, however strange they might appear.  Her short fiction has been shortlisted for prizes including Bridport and the Costa Short Short prize.  Her work for theatre has been produced off-West End and on the fringe, on tour and in community, for radio and site-specifically.  Originally from Los Angeles, Peggy lives on the North Kent coast with a husband and an enormous golden retriever. You can find her at www.peggyriley.com

Michelle Tea is the author of ten books, the founder of literary non-profit RADAR Productions, the co-creator of Sister Spit, and the curator of Amethyst Editions, a collaboration with the Feminist Press. Her most recent book is Against Memoir.

Tiphanie Yanique is a poet, novelist and essayist, and Professor of English and of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Born in the Virgin Islands, she lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her family. Her 2016 poetry collection, Wife, won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for a first collection. She has written for publications including the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal, and American Short Fiction.

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Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon by Dr Rahul Jandial

World-leading neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr Rahul Jandial blends cutting-edge research and beautiful storytelling to offer a vital resource on the best ways to boost your memory, control stress and emotion, unleash your creativity, raise smart kids and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.

'A powerful and trustworthy insight into the brain. You will love his playful storytelling and guidance' - Dr Rupy Aujla - author of ‘The Doctor's Kitchen' and 'Eat to Beat Illness'

‘Your brain’s best buddy… You’re amazing …. I could talk to Rahul all day’ – Chris Evans

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Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon
The New Science and Stories of the Brain
By Dr Rahul Jandial
Penguin Life / 6 Feb 2020 / £9.99

From the operating room, where he performs some of the riskiest surgeries around, to the lab, where he works on leading clinical trials, Dr Rahul Jandial is on the cutting edge of the latest advancements in neuroscience.  

For years he has transformed the lives of his neurosurgery patients by putting them through 'brain rehab', his specially developed boot camp for restoring brain function. In this eye-opening, informative and accessible guide, he uses his years of expertise to show how healthy people can rewire their brains to work in a higher gear.

Mixing smart brain hacks with case studies and storytelling from his own experiences on the operating table, learn how to train your brain with America’s top brain surgeon.

Tips that work and are backed by real science

• Harness creativity by utilizing your dream states– this will improve creativity. Unstructured free play in childhood is the foundation of adult creativity.

• Sleep well with simple strategies – when you sleep you transform short term memories stacked up during the day into memories that can last a lifetime. After studying for a test students will actually remember more after a nap or a night’s sleep than if they had stayed awake and kept studying for an extra few hours.

• Practice meditative breathing – a new study of patients living in hospitals with electrodes inserted and measured shows this ancient technique has a modern scientific basis, it improves the structure, physiology and function of your brain. During mindful breathing connections are strengthened between the amygdala, and area where strong emotions (both positive and negative) are processed, and the prefrontal cortex. Therefore, mindful breathing helps the frontal lobe stifles negative emotions.

• Eat a MIND diet to help your mental health. The major approach to stave off dementia and maybe even fight off depression. Older adults who eat fruits, vegetables and whole grains are less likely that those who don’t to develop depression—based on a new field called nutritional psychiatry.

• Skip breakfast and try intermittent fasting - going without food for a day increases your brain’s natural growth factors, which support the survival and growth of neurons. It helps stave of neurodegeneration.

• Build your neuroplasticity – use your non-dominant hand, acquire a new language and don’t rely on sat nav (using your internal compass rather than looking at google maps is a great way to develop valuable spatial orientation skills).

• Try a ‘surgeon’s workout’ - surgeons who perform complex/long operations need to be in top shape to have steady hands! A master surgeon has the shoulder of a pro quarterback, arm of tennis player and fingers of guitar player. Dr Jandial says ‘Go to fatigue and then THREE more reps. The only way the brain tells muscles to plump up (hypertrophy) is when muscles tell the brain we are tired and overworked. Its less about how many reps you do and more about doing those extra reps after one hits their individual fatigue point.’
   

MYTHS that should be shattered

• Melatonin is not the sleep hormone

• The gut is not your second brain

• The brain can’t rewire, but it can repurpose

• Our brains are “gray”, quite the opposite think opalescent and iridescent

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ABOUT DR RAHUL JANDIAL

Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD. is an American dual-trained neurosurgeon and scientist at City of Hope, a research centre, hospital and postgraduate training faculty in Los Angeles. When he isn't performing surgery he is leading a team of scientists in Jandial Laboratory, named after him and known for its cutting-edge approach to brain surgery and neuroscience. In addition to being a world-class surgeon and scientist, Dr Jandial is the author of ten academic books and over 100 papers, but Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon is his first book for a general audience. For more information, have a look at Dr Jandial’s SHOW REEL.

‘Want to be happier, feel younger AND stave off dementia? Then try a leading neurosurgeon's brilliantly simple workouts for your little grey cells with this ingenious BOOTCAMP FOR YOUR BRAIN' - Daily Mail

‘Forget supplements and pricey potions – these easy, doctor-approved exercises and lifestyle upgrades can help boost your brain at any age’ - New York Post

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