Anna Macdonald

A restless woman upends her world, leaving home to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. On the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier: the story of a traumatised widow who threw herself into the Thames, and of the shell-shocked soldier who gave his own life to save her.

A Jealous Tide

A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in time as well as place, the woman begins imagining her own presence in the lives of these two strangers entwined by fate. But as her days blur together, as her intrigue becomes obsession, and as her sympathies grow to encompass all manner of souls lost to water-drowned, shipwrecked, cast adrift, or driven to the poles of the planet-she feels her restlessness returning with all the power of a tide in flood. In this mesmerising début novel, Anna MacDonald finds a language of perpetual motion for an almost static experience of interior life. Lyrical, lilting, and melodious, her gentle words rise into rhythms that surge forth, then break and recede, leaving treasures in their wake. Hers is the poetry of alienation embodied: corporeal and sensory, spatial and recursive, making magic from a tilt of the head, a turn of the gaze, a stride, a halt, an interplay of gesture and orientation. In her dizzying proliferation of spirals and orbits, trajectories and bearings, her every sentence is a search for traction on a world that bewilders anew with every daily revolution.

Is it possible for an experience of literature to be an experience of life? Can we think of words as existing in three dimensions, as things we move through, in much the same way that we move through the world? And how can we account for their effects beyond the page as we carry them with us, in our bodies, in our selves, holding on to them over the course of our years? In Between the Word and the World, Anna MacDonald sets out on an eloquent exploration of these questions and the issues they raise. Drifting with ease from fiction to philosophy, from digital ephemera to psychogeography, from archival voyages to personal correspondence, her essays repeatedly probe the mysteries of writing and its power over our moods, our perceptions, and our sense of being. Whether turning her attention to the poetic musings of Esther Kinsky, the sinister imagery of Cynan Jones, or the fragmented politics of Valeria Luiselli, MacDonald enacts new and provocative ways of thinking about reading, writing, and living, so that "the worlds dreamed on and beyond the page bleed into one another."

Between the Word and the World

Tim Allen

Henry Radice

The field of humanitarianism is characterised by profound uncertainty, by a constant need to respond to the unpredictable, and by concepts and practices that often defy simple or straightforward explanation. Humanitarians often find themselves not just engaged in the pursuit of effective action, but also in a quest for meaning. That is the starting point for this book. Humanitarian action has in recent years confronted geopolitical challenges that have upended much of its conventional modus operandi and presented threats to its foundational assumptions and legal frameworks. The critical interrogation of the purpose, practice and future of humanitarian action has yielded a rich new field of enquiry, humanitarian studies, and many thoughtful books, articles and reports. So, the question arose as to the most useful way to provide a critical overview that might serve to bring some definitional clarity as well as analytical rigor to the waves of critique and shifting sands of humanitarian action. Humanitarianism: A Dictionary of Concepts provides an authoritative analysis that attempts to rethink, rather than merely problematize or define the issues at stake in contemporary humanitarian debates. It is an important moment to do so. Just about every tenet of humanitarianism is currently open to question as never before.

Anna Macdonald

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