New Sally Rooney pre-orders & a new event with Ruth Allen

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Intermezzo will be published in hardback on September 24th. We are now taking pre-orders to be collected in store or for home delivery. Click the link below, or just reply to this email to reserve your copy.

7pm Thursday 18th April

Ruth is an outdoor psychotherapist who uses movement and nature-based practices with her clients. She trained as a geologist and has a doctorate in Himalayan mountain-building.

In Weathering Ruth draws together insights from both fields to reflect on how engagement with the Earth can help us endure life’s storms. What might the natural processes of weathering of ancient natural landforms have to teach us about resilience and change? Ruth will discuss how a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet could better serve ourselves and the world about us. Hear how this different take on geology, deep time and ancient landscapes can help us navigate our own grief and experience of our lives during this time of profound environmental, climate and political changes.

As Ruth notes in Weathering: “As a species we are all, collectively, beyond the point of pristine, wilderness thinking. We are all in some proximity to wounded and depleted places, both outside and in. Where there are wounds, there is also richness, community, recovery… We need to love because of and not in spite of, which is the work of time, something that geology has plenty of, but we do not. It might be brief, but what else is time for, if not to love.”

More on Weathering from publisher, Ebury Press:

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet – gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we’re transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?

In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology – which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy – can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries.

Ruth Allen PhD is a qualified psychotherapist, writer, and an experienced trainer and facilitator. Originally trained as a geologist, with a doctorate in Himalayan mountain-building, she now specialises in movement and nature-based practice, nature connection and relational embodiment. She is a supervisory director for ‘Rooted for Girls’, a unique woodland-based psycho-educational programme for teenage girls in the North of England, and is influential in the UK outdoor therapy field, offering training to new practitioners and trainees as well as offering expert consultation. In her spare time, she is a keen mountain adventurer. Her first book, the illustrated title Grounded, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim.