Forthcoming Books from Canongate

January 2027

The Cut Up is by Louise Welsh. It's hard to be good when living is expensive. And times are tough on the streets these days. Luckily for Rilke at Bowery Auctions the demand for no-questions-asked cash is at an all-time high, and business is booming. When Rilke hears his old acquaintance Les is fresh out of prison, his inclination is to stay well out of his way. Letting sleeping dogs lie is one thing - but when one of Bowery's customers winds up dead on their tarmac, Rilke needs a bit of help from his friends to tidy things up. If only his friends didn't have such a habit of making things worse.

May 2027

On the Greek island of Vidos the past lingers like salt in the air. The inhabitants - former members of MI6 - are sent here to be forgotten. Exiled. Either too damaged or too compromised to be allowed to live freely. For years, residents make the best of their fate - old enemies reconcile, long-lost friends swim together in the warm sea and estranged lovers share a bed once more. But secrets bind tightly. And when one of their own washes up dead, alliances fracture and a tide of suspicion begins to rise. A vivid reimagining of a real, hidden slice of the British Intelligence Service's history, A Stranger in Corfu is by Alex Preston and is an exquisitely tense and masterfully spun novel about shadowy morality, unravelled secrets and the futility of trying to outrun the past.

June 2027

Buenos Aires. 2015. The President said it was suicide. 400,000 protestors said it was murder. When Alberto Nisman died, all of the facts – his fingerprints on the .22 pistol, the gunshot wound, the locked door – seemed to point to suicide. But Nisman was a federal prosecutor, and just one day away from revealing the findings of a decades-long corruption investigation. Some of the most power- ful people in Argentina, all the way to the President herself, had good reason to silence him . . . This is the true story of a single death that became a national crisis. It led to 400,000 people marching in silent protest through Buenos Aries (many with ‘Todos Somos Nisman’ – ‘We Are Nisman’ – placards), to an election thrown into uncertainty, and to a new civil rights movement. In We Are Nisman, award-winning crime writer Denise Mina unpicks the facts of an extraordinary case with a mystery at its heart – was Alberto Nisman murdered? We Are Nisman: A True Crime Story is by Denise Mina.

The Rarest of Rare: The Noida Killings is by Abir Mukherjee. In the world’s biggest democracy no one cares about the murderers living in the shadows . . . Noida in Mumbai is known as the call centre capital of the world. Billions of rupees turned over every day. But it’s right next to one of India’s biggest slums. When a young girl goes missing, presumed dead, no one lifts a finger. Slum kids disappear every day in India. But when it seems like it might be more than one girl missing, the police are shamed into action. Suspicion falls on the houses that fall along this faultline between rich and poor. But all but the evidence seems to have vanished . . . This nail-biting cold case throws up questions of power, shame and corruption in contemporary India, and how the caste system impacts justice in the world’s biggest democracy. 

Trusted physician. Politician. Hero. Mass murderer. In Vichy France many would give anything to flee the Nazi occupation, the majority of them Jews. The good Dr Marcel Petiot offered a ticket out. But Petiot was many things at once. Trusted physician. Politician. Hero. Mass murderer. And when the door was broken in on Petiot’s house in early 1944, a scene confronted police that would haunt the French nation to this day. A jumbled heap of rotting body parts, a grave pit, a pile of hair, a furnace irrevocably tainted by mass murder and a mysterious triangular room equipped to facilitate both torture and voyeurism. In this staggering true crime exploration of the confounding case of Marcel Petiot, Costa Award- winning author A.L. Kennedy paints a picture of a France haunted by its complicity in its own occupation and the monstrosity hiding in plain sight. Relentless:The True Untrue Story is by A L Kennedy.

A secret cannot stay locked away forever. Bodkin Bell, orphan, pickpocket and survivor, doesn’t know where she came from, but she knows she’s different. Gaslights flare as she walks past. Cutlery spins. Shocks fly from her fingertips. For years, she was ‘Little Spark’, the star of an electrifying travelling act – until it went too far and she ended up in a London gaol. Now she’s been offered a way out. A chance to serve at Point Mote, a vast, desolate house marooned on the misty Kent marshes. There, she will assist a reclusive family of cunning inventors in the creation of automata: miraculous, lifelike machines for which gentlemen collectors will pay handsomely. But this house of wonders hides mysteries too. As Bodkin starts to question why she is really there, she unearths secrets that have been buried bone-deep for years – and a truth beyond all imagining. One that was never meant to be found. Little Spark is by Jess Kidd