Must Read Books This Month!

When you buy a book from an indie writer, you're not just purchasing a story—you're supporting someone's dream, passion, and hard work. For indie authors, every sale is more than a number; it’s a connection with a reader who believes in their voice.

'Portrait of a Young Girl Falling' is unapologetic in its feminist exploration of desire, consent, identity, and gendered experience. 

Stunning and experimental, this compact debut collection is brimming with fresh strategies of association, productive or interrogative ambiguities, multiplicities of meaning that make space for new ways of thinking.

“'Portrait of a Young Girl Falling' is the feminist poetry I want for my train journey, my bath, my coffee, and my life. This is why I read poetry. We need poetry like this, unexpected as it is confident, hard at times, messy, bodily, but alive with women.”

Wendy Allen, author of Plastic Tubed Little Bird (Broken Sleep Books), co-editor of annie journal

"A powerful read...honest and rich poems that explore feminine trauma and healing."

Ness Owen, author of Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim (Parthian), winner of the Greenpeace Prize Poems for the Planet.

"Intense, visceral, and will leave its teeth in you for a long time after reading. It is a staggering accomplishment."

Briony Collins, author of The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees (Broken Sleep Books), co-editor of Cape Magazine

“The lively inventiveness of these poems is part of the work of making space for new ways of thinking and being, for developing ‘star-stuffed ears’ that might attune us differently to others and to the world." 

Zoë Skoulding, literary critic and poet, author of A Marginal Sea (Carcanet)

Katrina Moinet won Globe Soup's Short Story and 48-hour Flash Fiction prizes. Since joining Globe Soup, Katrina has been a Bournemouth Writing Festival prize-winner, highly commended twice by Hedgehog Press, and work accepted in journals including Raw Lit, Mslexia, annie, The Post Grad Journal, Ffosfforws, Firmament, Wild North Wales.

How well do we really know the people closest to us?

In the burgeoning city of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi, Radha, a young Indian wife, silently chafes against the suffocating strictures of her orthodox in-laws. Yearning to put her education to use, she feels trapped in the role of a dutiful wife, despite her deep love for her husband, Shyam.

Her life takes an unexpected turn when she befriends Mira, her independent and bohemian neighbour.

As their bond deepens, the trio—Radha, Shyam, and Mira—navigate the complexities of love, friendship, and betrayal. The choices they make will reverberate through their lives, challenging their beliefs about loyalty, forgiveness, and the true meaning of family.

Years later, as the characters’ paths cross again, they must confront their pasts and the consequences of their actions.

Set against a backdrop of cultural expectations and personal aspirations, this novel delves into the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of second chances, revealing the profound lessons found within life’s liminal spaces.

Poornima is an award-winning novelist whose short stories have been published in The Guardian and The Telegraph newspapers in the UK. Born and raised in India, she still retains a deep connection to her motherland, which reflects in all her stories and books. Poornima lives in the UK with her family.

My poetry is from the heart, it is about my family, my loves, my loss, my experiences, my hopes, my dreams and in many cases the small things that I have noted along the way. I hope you enjoy Two Willows – a tiny collection of poems.

Foreword written by Jan Sargeant - Author on Amazon and Emeritus Poetry Editor for ‘The Quiver’.

”Justine Engelbrecht writes with a simplicity of style which is not only refreshing but which masks some of the very complex concepts about life with which she is grappling in many of her poems. She herself speaks of poetry as “stripping yourself bare” and that is certainly true of this collection, “Two Willows”, an engagingly honest exploration of family, loves and losses, hopes and dreams.

Engelbrecht explores her own childhood with her late sister in the opening poem, which also provides the title for the collection, returning to the theme of childhood at times throughout, whether through her own memories or her insights as a mother into the lives of her children. In “The Wise Man”, she offers us a glimpse in to what she sees as the wisdom of children and the lost innocence of their knowledge.

If I need one word to sum up “Two Willows”, it would be “rejoice”.