Scotland-born, London-based artist Caroline Walker is celebrated for her paintings exploring the lives of women, from those living luxury lifestyles to those fleeing oppression. In this publication, which was produced to accompany Walker’s first exhibition with Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in autumn 2020, the artist turns her attention closer to home, presenting a series of paintings in which the focus is the artist’s own mother, Janet, as she goes about her daily tasks: cooking, cleaning, tidying and tending the garden of the Fife home where the artist spent her childhood. The publication features a newly commissioned essay and an interview with the artist by critic and author Hettie Judah. The essay opens by comparing Walker’s works to the Dutch Golden Age, encouraging consideration of everyday domestic scenes. Judah then leads the reader through Walker’s latest series of works, exploring the daily routines and household chores that have filled Walker’s mother’s days for the past forty years, along with the artist’s treatment of these activities. Judah deftly locates this latest body of work within Walker’s wider practice, opening up discussion of women at work in different industries and notions of invisibility. She asserts: ‘While "Janet" extends Walker’s long-held interest in women’s work, the series is also a loving undertaking. The artist offers us her mother with great pride, both in particular, and on behalf of other mothers overlooked and working out of sight.’ The interview offers further insight into Walker’s thoughts in relation to the "Janet" series, and to the working processes behind it.The publication features around eighty illustrations of the preparatory studies and paintings that comprise this new body of work. It has been designed by Joanna Deans, Identity, with photography by Peter Mallet. The publication was produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and printed by Die Keure, Bruges. It was co-published in 2020 by Ingleby and Anomie Publishing, London, in an edition of 1500 copies.Caroline Walker was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1982. She attended Glasgow School of Art from 2000-04, before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham, and participation in the ninth edition of the British Art Show. She is represented in a number of public collections including the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, the UK Government Art Collection, London, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway, and Museum Voorlinden & Kunstmuseum den Haag, in the Netherlands.Hettie Judah is chief art critic of the British daily newspaper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Frieze, Art Quarterly, Numéro Art and The Art Newspaper, and a contributing editor to The Plant. Recent publications include a short biography of Frida Kahlo (Laurence King, 2020) and Art London (ACC Art Books, 2019).

Before Donald Trump was President, he was Donald Trump. The Game: All Things Trump is a journey through the world Donald Trump created for himself starting in the 1980s. His brand, his name, his casinos, his hotels, his products, his everything. Among the 1,000-plus objects (of which 500 are shown here) amassed from auctions, eBay, and word of mouth are some of Trump’s greatest hits including Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks and the Ego sign from the Ego Lounge at the Taj Mahal. The scope of the project is as vast as Donald Trump’s reach has been, showing that long before he became president, Donald Trump wrapped himself around America and called it his.

Gareth Nyandoro is noted for his large works on paper, which often spill out of their two-dimensional format and into installations that include paper scraps and objects found in the street markets of Harare, where he lives and works. The artist’s primary source of inspiration is the rapidly changing urban and cultural panorama of Zimbabwe. Inspired by his training as a printmaker, and derived from etching, the artist’s distinctive technique, 'Kucheka-cheka', is named after the infinitive and present tense declinations of the Shona verb 'cheka', which means 'to cut'. This, the artist’s first monograph, documents selected bodies of work created since 2015 and presented in exhibitions at venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Quetzal Art Centre, Portugal, Tiwani Contemporary, London, Modern Art Oxford, and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. The publication features an introduction by curator Adélaïde Blanc, who curated Nyandoro’s 2017 solo exhibition 'Stall(s) of Fame' at the Palais de Tokyo. The publication also includes a newly commissioned essay from Cape Town-based writer, critic, and editor Sean O’Toole, which discusses notions of ‘cutting’ and ‘spilling’ in Nyandoro’s practice against a backdrop of both Zimbabwe’s colonial past and ‘southern urbanism’ – city life in the global South.Gareth Nyandoro was born in 1982 in Bikita, Zimbabwe. He lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. Recent solo exhibitions include '…Read All About', Van Doren Waxter, New York (2018); 'Stall(s) of Fame', Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); 'Stall(s) of Fame', Tiwani Contemporary, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include 'Par Amour du Jeu', Magasins Généraux, Paris (2018); 'Drawing Africa on the Map', Quetzal Art Centre, Portugal (2018); 'Five Bhobh – Painting at the End of an Era', Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2018); 'Kaleidoscope', Modern Art Oxford (2016) and 'Paper Cut', Tiwani Contemporary, London (2016). Nyandoro won the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices award in 2016 and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, in 2014-15.The publication, launched alongside a solo presentation of work by the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019, is produced by Tiwani Contemporary with generous support from the A. G. Leventis Foundation, allowing for the production of artists’ books and their dissemination to libraries and institutions across the globe. Designed by Joe Gilmore and co-published with Anomie Publishing, the series is distributed internationally by Casemate Art.

The practice of Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College graduate Greg Rook (b.1971, London) explores the rich visual history, curious cultural politics and often complex ideologies of those who seek to start a new life or wish to lead alternative lifestyles. From pioneers travelling to new continents to those wanting to stay put and live self-sufficiently, Rook invites us to join him on his own aesthetic and critical journey through a world of colonies, communities, communes and cults. By means of figurative painting that pushes the boundaries between realism and lyricism, Rook captures something profoundly revealing in terms of the hopes, dreams and successes as well as the disappointments, disillusionment and disasters that radical departures from home life and mainstream society can entail. For some, utopias can turn to dystopias, the Romantic imaginary can turn to tragedy, the sublime can turn to misery. For those fleeing oppression, however, it can be completely the opposite – newfound freedom, affluence and happiness. Rook’s oeuvre, which incorporates cowboys and communists, agrarians and anarchists, believers and book-burners, depicts how the relationship between people and land is regularly fraught with issues, especially when migration and a clash of mindsets or ways of life is involved. What are brave new worlds for some are threatened old worlds for others… This hardback publication, the first monograph to be devoted to the work of Greg Rook, has been co-published by Vento & Associati and Anomie to coincide with a substantial mid-career survey exhibition of the artist’s work being staged by Vento & Associati at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan in spring 2019. Featuring approximately fifty illustrations of paintings and works on paper made by Rook since 2006, along with an introduction by London and Milan-based critic and curator Michele Robecchi and a significant newly commissioned essay by Matt Price, a leading voice in the field of contemporary British painting, the publication offers an engaging and pertinent commentary on Rook’s long-standing painterly investigation into how people choose to live their lives.Vento & Associati is a Milan-based company operating in global contexts that specializes in strategic cultural communication within fields such as public affairs, corporate and social responsibility, and cultural fundraising. Vento & Associati manages a programme of exhibitions at the Fabbrica del Vapore as part of the Spazi al Talento initiative of the City of Milan.

Ever since Linda Nochlin asked in 1971, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, art history has been probing the female gaze. Through scholarship and exhibitions, readings have been put in place to counter prevailing assumptions that artistic creativity is primarily a masculine affair. Fifty Works by Fifty British Women functions as a corrective to the exclusion of women from the ‘master’ narratives of art. It introduces fifty artworks by known and lesser-known women – outstanding works that speak out. Fifty commentaries by fifty different writers bring out each artwork’s unique story – sometimes from an objective art historical perspective and sometimes from an entirely personal point of view – thereby creating a rich and colourful diorama. This exhibition does not, however, attempt to present a survey or to address all the arguments around the history of women and art. Anthologies are of necessity incomplete, and many remarkable imaginations are not here represented. Women artists have been set apart from male artists not only to their own disadvantage but also to the detriment of British art. While there were some improvements for women to access an artistic career in the twentieth century in terms of patronage, economics and critical attention – all the things that confer professional status – women had the least of everything. By showcasing just a few of the remarkable works produced, this exhibition draws attention to the fact that a vision of British twentieth century art closer to a 50/50 balance would not only provide a truer account, but also a more vivid and meaningful narrative.

First published to accompany major retrospective exhibitions at West Cork Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), this full-colour illustrated monograph explores William Crozier’s whole career, taking in the second half of the twentieth century – a key period in the development of British and Irish art. The catalogue is furnished with essays presenting brand new research by renown art historians and curators, Illuminated by unpublished sources and personal memoirs. What emerges is a picture of the continuum that runs through all of Crozier’s work, revealing a fascinating narrative that, far from a story of transformation from darker, earlier imagery into the apparent hedonism of later landscapes, is one of continuity of purpose in Crozier’s mind-set that connects 1950s Britain and Ireland with the concerns of the new millennium. Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. The landscape became the source of visceral paintings: For Crozier, ravaged landscapes symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. Only ten years separate these images of traumatized humanity from the luxuriantly colourful works inspired by the landscape of West Cork. His early skill as a colourist reaches its zenith in paintings that capture the essence and appearance of the West Cork landscape in ways immediately recognisable to the viewer, but they are also concerned to capture a landscape during a period of great physical and social change. Crozier believed that when painting the Irish landscape he must, “Tell the truth. Say it simply.”

First published to accompany the exhibition, John Golding: Pure Colour Sensation at Piano Nobile gallery, this fully colour illustrated catalogue showcases fifteen years of exceptional paintings by John Golding. Although an acclaimed art historian, Golding considered himself, first and foremost, a painter. His work features in prominent institutions such as the Tate, MoMA, the Scottish National Gallery, the British Council, and the Yale Center for British Art. Golding had numerous one-man shows in the UK and abroad, and also participated in many group exhibitions, including international shows with his close friend Bridget Riley. He was appointed a CBE in 1992 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.The publication presents a survey of works from the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from large scale canvases to both small and large pastels. Golding's work, although abstract, repeatedly returns to the human body. The monumental canvases and the tactile handling of paint through expressive layering of pigment demand a visceral physical reaction from the viewer. Speaking in an interview for Artists' Lives, Golding recollected that his turn to abstraction was in "recognition of what was happening in America in the 1950s…the most important thing going on in painting [of the day]". In his abstract paintings, both intimate and large in scale, Golding sought unadulterated formal brilliance, letting colour and composition take prominence, "so that there is nothing getting between you and the pure colour sensation."Dr David Anfam's introductory essay explores the roots of Golding's abstract work in the early figurative painting he produced whilst living in Mexico. Analysing the influence of the great Mexican muralists during Golding's formative years, Anfam charts the progression of Golding's vision that culminated in the exceptionally accomplished and joyful body of the work produced in the 1970s and 1980s and reproduced in this publication.

Featuring an interview with Sina Najafi, an essay by Martin Herbert, and designed by Dominique Clausen, this is the first major monograph on the British-born, New Yorkbased artist Oliver Clegg. An eclectic, polyphonic and multidisciplinary artist, Clegg’s oeuvre stretches from painting, drawing and printmaking to sculpture, installation, site-specific art, participatory projects and beyond. Indeed, his practice is in many ways a shining example of ‘post-medium’ creativity today, pursuing the essence of art itself beyond any specific medium or artform. The irony is, he’s pretty damn good with each artform too. With his erudite, surprising and striking repertoire, and his diverse materials and methods (from glass, wood and steel to neon, resin and concrete, weaving and casting to engraving and industrial manufacture), Clegg offers the viewer a complex, sometimes playful, other times moving journey into existential and ontological notions of objecthood and matter, images and signs, languageand communication, creation and being. From the studio and gallery walls to the streets of London and New York,from Freud’s house to the Joshua Tree National Park, from foosball tables to state asylums, Clegg turns up to do remarkable things with the fabric of spacetime. And yes, it’s an emotional rollercoaster of a ride – in fact, Clegg’s oeuvre spans a significant proportion of the spectrum of human emotion, his unique trans-Atlantic blend of humour, sarcasm and wit coming face to face with the much more serious matters of memory, psychology, truth, belief, meaning, love, life and death. Nostalgia, childhood, games, play and sentimentality career headlong into the realms of kitsch, Pop and the history of the avantgarde, resulting in a delightful yet challenging range of responses from the viewer, whether amusement, camaraderie, joy, bemusement, outrage, disillusionment or a call to arms. Clegg is an artist with great energy, incredible spirit, and one of the most engaging, curious, cryptic and entertaining oeuvres currently making waves in the world of art. In many ways an exploration of the id, ego and superego, Clegg’s practice plays out the struggle between our basic desires, our rational minds, and the underlying mores that keep us in check. Not unlike Freudian notions of the psyche, Clegg’s practice articulates the battle that takes place inside us all on a daily basis, spilling into the outside world in myriad ways. It is a fight, yes, but it is play too.

First published to accompany a group exhibition at Piano Nobile, Aspects of Post-War Abstraction 1952-2002, this fully colour illustrated catalogue showcases seminal works of abstract art produced in Britain over the course of five decades. The publication features the work of internationally renowned artists including Terry Frost, William Scott, William Turnbull, Joe Tilson, William Crozier, Jack Smith, John Golding, William Pye, Anthony Caro, John Hoyland, Bridget Riley, and Anish Kapoor. Lavishly illustrated throughout, the catalogue presents exceptional paintings and sculptures, created by artists in dialogue with contemporaries and predecessors in Britain, and diverse international centres of abstraction. Highlighting pivotal artistic moments of transition and transformation in abstraction over the course of a half century, the catalogue presents an innovative vision of the international contribution of post-war British abstract art.

Sensory Systems documents an engaging group exhibition presented at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, in autumn 2015. The exhibition is the first in a new annual programme by the gallery each autumn that will revolve around the theme of light, and timed to coincide with the famous Blackpool Illuminations – a six-mile-long outdoor display of lights that has drawn many visitors to the town each year since it was first switched on in 1912. The exhibition and publication feature works by internationally acclaimed artists interested in the technology and science of light, and how this can be used to affect our perceptual experiences of space. Whether through sculpture, projection or immersive architecture, eachartwork presented in the exhibition invited a dialogue with the viewer, utilising colour, pattern, movement and other factors to evoke a variety of spatial and sensory experiences. The selection of prominent figures working internationally today who feature in the exhibition and publication are: Angela Bulloch, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anthony McCall and Conrad Shawcross. Among these, Anthony McCall was one ofthe early pioneers in the field, alongside figures such as James Turrell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Dan Flavin. McCall, who moved to New York from England in the early 1970s, was highly influential with his ‘solid light’ installations. In this exhibition and publication, McCall presents You and I, Horizontal (2005), a slowly evolving, curving sculpture made of light. The publication includes a foreword by Richard Parry, Curator at the Grundy Art Gallery, an essay by Dr. Luke Skrebowski, Director of Studies in History of Art at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, and has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik. The project has been supported by Blackpool Council, Coastal Communities Fund, Arts Council England, and is co-published by the Grundy Art Gallery and Anomie Publishing. The publication is distributed internationally by Casemate Art.

First published to accompany Piano Nobile's exhibiton at Piano Nobile Kings Place, Thomas Newbolt: Drama Paintings - A Modern Baroque, this fully colour illustrated book presents a substantial publication on contemporary artist Thomas Newbolt. Newbolt's dedication to the figure in art, and the vitality of his work have gained him international recognition.An artist of talent and intellectual integrity, he was Harkness Fellow at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin, and a Fellow-Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a respected teacher at Camberwell, Anglia Ruskin and The Royal Drawing School, London. Recent exhibitions include Ely Cathedral, the Estorick Collection, and a group show, Vital Signs, at Clifford Chance in 2015. His work is held in major international public collections.With essays by Mark Hudson, arts critic at the Telegraph, Professor Maurice Biriotti, and Martin Gayford, critic at the Spectator, this catalogue provides fresh insight into the work of this most enigmati and powerful of artists. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed as a work of art in its own right, Thomas Newbolt: Paintings is a reflection on Newbolt's career thus far, and a testament to the significance of his work. The publication includes three essays, a catalogue of works selected by Thomas Newbolt, a chronologyof the artist's career and an index.

James Turrell is widely acknowledged as one of the most important artists working today. From the mid 1960s onwards his principal concern has been the way we apprehend light and space. His study of mathematics and perceptual psychology, as well as his Quaker upbringing and background as a pilot, inform his practice. His first exhibition in 1967 of ‘projection pieces’ used high-intensity light projectors to give the illusion of a solid geometrical object, often seemingly floating in space. From these investigations of light, Turrell went on to begin his series of ‘Skyspaces’. These are enclosed viewing chambers that affect our perception of the sky. Since then he has continued to create works using light as his medium. Perhaps his most celebrated works are his ‘Ganzfeld’ chambers, whole spaces immersed in light; as well as his more recent ‘Tall Glass’ series, which resemble windows of slowly changing colour. Meanwhile, Turrell continues work on a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona. Here he has created a series of viewing chambers, tunnels and apertures to heighten our sense of the heavens and earth in one of the most ambitious artistic endeavours of modern times. In summer/autumn 2015, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, hosted an ambitious and significant exhibition of James Turrell's light pieces, many collected by the Marquess of Cholmondeley, owner of Houghton, who has long been an admirer of his work. This publication has been produced to document and to accompany the exhibition – a project devoted to James Turrell’s work has been a long-held ambition of Lord Cholmondeley. He first discovered Turrell’s work twenty years ago, and in 2000 invited him to Houghton to install a ‘Skyspace’ amongst the trees on the west side of the house. Soon afterwards, a rusty water tank was removed from an eighteenth-century folly in the park to make way for his atmospheric interior space, ‘St Elmo’s Breath’. The exhibition was centred around works from the Houghton collection, which also includes projections, a ‘Tall Glass’, holograms and prints. The exhibition was complemented by further loans to help illustrate the broad spectrum of Turrell’s work; and a unique, site-specific installation was created especially for Houghton – ‘The Illumination’– lighting the whole west façade of the house that could be viewed from dusk. LightScape follows three highly acclaimed exhibitions by Turrell in 2013/14 at the Guggenheim, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The National Museum of Australia, Canberra has also hosted a major retrospective of his work which closed just as the exhibition at Houghton Hall opened. The publication includes a foreword by David Cholmondeley, a text by Peter Murray, and an interview with the artist by Hiram C. Butler. Designed by Peter B. Willberg and printed in Italy, this hardback, cloth-covered publication is essential reading for all admirers of Turrell’s oeuvre.

First published to accompany the exhibition at Piano Nobile, John Armstrong: Paintings 1938-1958; An Enchanted Distance is a fully illustrated catalogue re-establishing John Armstrong A.R.A. as a pre-eminent Surrealist. Propelled to the forefront of British Modernism as a member of Unit One, Armstrong later rejected the confinement of artistic groups yet was at the heart of inter-war and post-war British art. Consistently producing prophetic, dreamlike paintings of emotional and political insight, Armstrong’s works speak of the universal through his own individual language. The most significant exhibition of Armstrong's works in over thirty years, the catalogue focuses on two decades of immense productivity, creativity and innovation.

Nathan Coley is a publication documenting a public art project in London byGlasgow-based contemporary artist Nathan Coley (b.1967). At a time when housing and the property market are at the centre of much social, political and economic debate, Coley's project is a pertinent and thought-provoking exploration of issues of housing,ownership, history and activism. In the mid-late 1960s, the Greater London Council moved local authority tenants out of their run-down terraced houses in the Freston Road area of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and into newly built blocks of flats nearby. The council was planning to knock down the terraced houses and to regenerate the area, but the plans were beset by delays so the houses lay derelict for almost a decade. During the 1970s agroup of squatters began moving into the old houses – there were around 150 people living in 35 houses at one point towards the end of the decade.In late summer 2015, on the site where Frestonia once stood, the first phase of apartments designed byHaworth Tompkins Architects and built by the charitableorganisation The Peabody Trust was completed. With one third of the properties for sale, one third for rent, and one third under the management of the Housing Association, the complex, called The Silchester (More West) development, consists of 112 apartments. Nathan Coley was commissioned to make new artwork for the site. Based on the form of an apple tree – inspired by the history of the Bramley apple that gave its name to the Frestonia residents – Coley has not only made a striking steel and gold leaf rooftop sculpture, but also 112 small versions of the same sculpture that have been given to each of the residents as a house warming present. In doing so, Coley not only connects the new housing complex and its residents with its local history, but to wider discourses of modernism and sculpture, art and society, capitalism and alternative modes of living. The publication, which forms part of the artist's commissioned project, presents a variety of texts, images and documentation relating to the new housing development, to the history of the Bramley apple and to Frestonia – including a selection of archive photographs of Frestonia taken by former resident Tony Sleep.

‘Breathless’ is the first monograph on the emerging British painter Benjamin Senior. His paintings conjure up a world that is delightful, curious, quirky, and distinctly his own. It is a world in which bathers lounge around pools and swimmers limber up before finally diving in; where we find people doing yoga and various exercise routines both indoors and out; where walkers and joggers take us out into the countryside, or into the city with their dogs. These physical activities – both leisure and sporting – would undoubtedly leave some of their protagonists out of breath, as the title of the monograph suggests, and may well inspire some viewers to shake off any lethargy and get physical too.But despite their clear iconography and endorphin-rousing semiotics, Senior’s paintings are no mere campaign to get, or to keep, art lovers fit and healthy. For they are also carefully conceived and meticulously executed studies of the human body, of shape, line and form, of colour, tone, light and shadow. They are engaging explorations of composition and colour, pattern and geometry, textures and materials, the natural and the manmade. This interplay between the natural and synthetic is played out in surprising juxtapositions, such as blue rubber exercise balls in dialogue with various-sized cacti, or between the materials and designs of sports clothing in contrast to the rolling hills of a spring landscape, or to autumnal trees at sunset. There are many other intriguing tropes, devices and recurring motifs within Senior’s repertoire, from cast iron grilles to unorthodox hats and hairstyles, perhaps leading his stylised vocabulary into the realms of nineteenth-century symbolist painting as much as into the health clubs, spas, leisure centres and parks of today. Indeed, there is a strange sense of timelessness to Senior’s practice that is matched by a captivating sense of silence, loneliness and isolation, despite the figures often being present in couples, clusters or small groups. Behind their toned physiques, stripy towels and goggles, underneath their winter coats, cagoules and peaked caps, there are, perhaps, some small glimmers of inner lives – of sentient, intellectual, cultured, emotional, sexual beings trapped within. Senior’s oeuvre is, in many ways, preoccupied with repression and expression, freedom and conformity, motion and stasis, balance and inertia, engagement and disengagement. One might even describe it as a bittersweet analogy of the human body for human states of mind, for energy versus futility, effort versus relaxation, health versus decline. Benjamin Senior completed a BA in painting at Wimbledon School of Art before graduating with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include at Grey Noise, Dubai, Studio Voltaire, London, Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan, James Fuentes, New York, and BolteLang, Zurich.Featuring an introduction by art critic, writer and curator Sacha Craddock, an essay by art historian, museum educator and writer Ben Street, and a text by curator, writer and lecturer Gabor Gyory, this 100-page hardback monograph has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik, edited by Matt Price and published by Anomie.

‘Three Books’ by Tamara Tracz is a very special three-hardback-volume slipcased book. It is, first and foremost, a story that follows several generations of a family as their lives unfold in various cities, countries and continents during the course of the twentieth century. It is a story with a cast of characters, some strong, some exceptional, some familiar, some curious. It is a story of births and deaths, of lives led and of the forces that shape them.The family in ‘Three Books’ is a Jewish Family, and their story is one of emigration and persecution that was, almost inescapably, profoundly affected by the Holocaust. It is a story that is shared with the stories of many countless thousands of other families – of taking flight from the Nazi regime, of German forces arriving in towns and villages and searching out the Jewish inhabitants, of summary executions and mass graves. It is a story of branches of the family destroyed, and of the survival of others. It is as distressing, disillusioning and disheartening a story as one might fear to read of the plight of the Jews last century.But ‘Three Books’ is not written in the usual form of family biography, and is not only the story of this family’s history. It is also a story about stories, about the passing on of information between generations, and between different branches of a family over time. It is a story about the impossibility of ever being able to tell a complete or truly objective family history. It is a story of fragments and recollections, of oral histories and letters sent, of trying to piece things together and to fill in gaps. Perhaps just as importantly, it acknowledges the absence of information, or the chances of ever being able to know certain things that transpired, and how this can shape the directions of subsequent generations. The dark, gaping holes of knowledge were often deliberately left unspoken by those who were once in a position to reveal the details.‘Three Books’ is also partly autobiography, as it is Tracz’s own family that is the subject of the story. Indeed, the reader can glean much about the author’s life as Tracz consciously lets us in to her immediate family circle, to their happy family life today. With a particular focus on her young children, Riva and Constantin, Tracz gently shares her inner fears and anxieties about being a mother, of the thought of losing her children. These are the thoughts of almost any mother, especially any mother who has heard the stories of mothers, daughters and sisters in her own family’s past who experienced such separations and losses through oppression and genocide. It is, in many ways, a story of women, of female intergenerational relations, experiences, actions, thoughts and emotions. It is a story about living and loving, of family and the meaning of the things that happen to them, the things that remain and that the things that slip away.But while Tracz is in some respects every woman, every mother and every daughter – and a Jewish woman in particular – she is also, quite inimitably and indubitably, Tamara Tracz. A unique, remarkable and inspiring person, a writer, filmmaker and artist based in London, she does things in ways that perhaps only she can. For every word in this book has been handwritten, and reproduced as she planned, designed and drew it. The text does not, therefore, flow as regular lines and pages, but in all manner of configurations and arrangements, systems and patterns, and in such a way as to enhance the meaning of the text – or rather to emphasise the mind’s reading of the text just as the sound effects or ambient sound might for a film, or the drama and nuances of the voice add when reading a story aloud. As such, ‘Three Books’ is a form of artist’s book, a creative work that sits at the interface of non-fiction and radical typesetting experimentation. Designed in collaboration with Herman Lelie, and beautifully produced in Verona, Italy, ‘Three Books’ is a story, a journey and an experience that is not easily forgotten.