Author: GRB

We’ve been keeping the eagerest of eyes out for Wimmy Road Boyz’ publication, so it’s a genuine honour for us to be hosting Sufiyaan.

The novel recounts a seminal night in the lives of three young British Pakistani men on Manchester’s Curry Mile. Told in a truly ingenious, unfettered, pulsating style all of its own, you will not have experienced much writing that comes close to the linguistic energy and thought-provoking force of Sufiyaan’s work. As publisher, Penguin imprint, #Merky Books puts it: ‘Wimmy Road Boyz is a blistering story of masculinity, violence and love set over the course of a single, surreal night from a wholly original new British talent.’

We expect tickets to fly out for this. Don’t leave it too long before nabbing one for yourself!

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‘Compulsive, raw and searingly honest.’ Nussaibah Younis

‘An energetic-livewire masterpiece’ Nikesh Shukla

‘Wimmy Road Boyz has a rhythm and style all its own, pushing the boundaries of language, full of storytelling energy and voices that feel true to the lives Salam has expertly created.’ Derek Owusu

‘The energy of Salam’s work was beyond . . . dazzling in its daring and reach’ Jacqueline Crooks, author of Fire Rush

‘Freewheeling, risk-taking and ceaselessly fun, this intense, multi-voiced novel is immense in its ambition and singular in its achievement. It really is one hell of a ride ’ Gurnaik Johal

‘Riotous. . .raucous, wildly inventive’ The Observer

‘Inventive and highly enjoyable’ BBC Books of the Year

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Sufiyaan Salam is a writer and former animator from Blackburn. He’s working on several TV & feature projects, and co-wrote the short film MAGID / ZAFAR, which won the BIFA award in 2025 and was shortlisted for a BAFTA for Best Short Film. Wimmy Road Boyz, winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ prize, is his first novel.

Multi-award-winning, Nikesh Shukla, is the author of seven novels for adults and children. He is also the editor of the bestselling and highly influential essay collection, The Good Immigrant, and co-editor of The Good Immigrant USA. He wrote the 2023 Spider-Man India miniseries, ‘Seva’ for Marvel, has won several awards for writing the short film, Two Dosas, and worked in multiple writer’s rooms including on projects for Apple TV, Amazon Prime, HBO and Sky.

Sufiyaan Salam photo credit: Alina Akbar

PLEASE NOTE THE START TIME IS 7.30PM

We’re thrilled to announce that the brilliant Fiston Mwanza Mujila and his acclaimed translator, Roland Glasser will be joining us to discuss Fiston’s latest novel, The Villain’s Dance,under the stewardship of Ruth Bush, who will be chairing the event.

Here’s more on The Villain’s Dance from its publisher, leading indie press, And Other Stories:

“Zaire. Late 90’s. Mobutu’s thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . .

“Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the ‘Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines.’ Things are drawing to a head, but at the Mambo de la Fête, they still dance the Villain’s Dance from dusk till dawn.”

Tickets have been selling very quickly for this year’s events so don’t delay too long before securing a seat for what will be a fascinating evening.

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‘Mujila’s virtuosic narrative shifts, feverish magical realism, and dizzying chronological leaps make for an intoxicating reading experience. This complex tale bears exquisite fruit.’ Publishers Weekly

‘Fiston Mwanza Mujila… writes novels and poetry that move to an infectious, syncopated rhythm. His latest work, The Villain’s Dance, especially revels in this spirit.’ New York Times

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Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1981 and lives in Austria. His writing – including the International Booker longlisted Tram 83 – responds to political turbulence in his native country and frequently foregrounds its debt to jazz.

Roland Glasser has published over 25 translations from French (fiction, art, travel, and trade non-fiction) alongside literary editing and theatre lighting design.

Ruth Bush is Professor of Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, where she also co-directs (with Dr Leighan Renaud) the Centre for Black Humanities.

This is one of those rare creatures – a book that all five booksellers here have read and love. Libby is emoting her feelings about the novel above, and below is Leah’s review.

This debut novel by Polly Barton announces an extraordinary new talent in fiction whose probing, inquisitive voice simply fizzes with intelligence and charisma. At GRB we must confess to being good friends with Polly Barton. I even had the privilege of hearing an early draft of a section of the book (which went in pretty much unedited), and in what seemed like just a year later the book was done. I knew it would be good but was still blown away by just how good it was.

What Am I, a Deer? follows its protagonist to Germany where, despite not being into gaming, she takes up a job in a world-famous games company. Embarking on what she hopes will be a first step toward a career as a Japanese translator, she is also lured by the prospect of her own personal reinvention, to break free of the turmoil social dynamics plays on her mind. She parses out memories of school and cliques from college that have made her feel interminably at odds with her peers, who respond to glimpses of her scintillating inner-world with either awe or mockery. Her new life in Frankfurt offers a reset, maybe she will find an ease to her body and mind, maybe even amongst the alternative set of social values set forth by her gamer colleagues she will find her people?

One of the many wonderful aspects of this book is the style of writing that reads as if intrinsic with the shape of the young woman’s mind, and having established herself as a kind of ecstatic—an impassioned deep thinker—when she encounters a beautiful stranger on the tram in Frankfurt we know she’s in trouble. Hope for her reinvention falters as she falls into old obsessive patterns. She dives back into her mind, colouring her dreamscape by stealing glances at the stranger as she listens to music on her headphones and revels in the grip of desire, how it heightens her senses and sharpens her mostly dull days at the company.

The flowing prose of Barton’s writing is like a propeller, effecting what it is to be in this endlessly curious mind that turns over a broad scope of themes enlightening each it touches upon. As readers, we are rewarded along this journey by very funny anecdotes woven through what becomes a kind of logic of both her mind and the book. Connections come about from the feverish mode of thinking that continues to tap at the screen in order to reach what makes sense to her and her world. Most poignant, and entertaining, are the connections made between her practice of translation and her love of karaoke. Song lyrics splice up the chapters like jolts from the unconscious, they perform a kind of ‘karaoke logic’, that is, an invitation of her own making to succumb to what it is to be wild, desiring, naive, unselfconscious, enraptured, or possessed. This book is a spellbinding enquiry into the self and one’s place in the world and remains wholly authentic throughout even at its most playful and outlandish.

We’re honoured to announce that in a rare UK appearance the celebrated Greek poet, Phoebe Giannisi, is coming to the shop next month to discuss and read from her sumptuous new publication, Goatsong. And to add to the excitement, Phoebe will be in conversation with the book’s translator, Brian Sneeden; a multi-award-winning poet as well as a celebrated translator.

Here’s more on the book from Fitzcarraldo:

‘The ancient Greek word for tragedy (τραγωδία) is a compound of goat (τράγος) and song (ᾠδή). In Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong, the seam that connects human and animal, myths and history, is the body.

‘In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still. From Homer to Donna Haraway, Derrida to state archives, klephtic ballads and rebetiko, to Parmenides and Giannisi’s dog, Ivan, the many human and animal voices of Goatsong form an incantatory lyricism and layered engagement unique in literature.’

This is an unmissable opportunity to hear from a towering presence in modern poetry.

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‘It abounds with imaginative, unexpected phrasing, and is suitably full of light, reflections on memory, home and loss, all with a syntactical velocity.’
Declan Ryan, Irish Times

‘I was immersed in Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong. I grieved with her as a mother, and rejoiced with her as a lover of all wild and wonderful places. Her work lives in me and inspires me to work harder to capture the truth – as the best poetry always does.’
Sasha Dugdale, author of The Strongbox

‘Goatsong intoxicates with its animality of language, gorgeous lyric and off-kilter metamorphoses, by turns wry, ecstatic and strange. Reading Phoebe Giannisi is like reading pre-Socratic philosophy on all fours, where flies buzz on and off the page and the polyphony of species and elements is both dazzling subject and all-encompassing medium.’
Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

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Phoebe Giannisi is the author of eight collections of poetry. A 2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is a professor of architecture at the University of Thessaly, and co-editor of the literary journal frmk. She has translated Ancient Greek lyric poetry as well as the poetry of Barbara Koehler, Gregor Laschen, Jesper Svenbro and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She lives in Volos, Greece.

Brian Sneeden is the author of Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018). His poetry and translations have received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and other recognitions. He is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.