Books by Michael Symmons Roberts

*A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world.

In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature - Miss Molasses - emerging from the old docks. Mancunia is - like More's Utopia - both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place.

In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

Collects poems that engage in a search for meaning and order in the everyday and in the extraordinary - a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a replica of the world out of matchsticks, and a chance encounter with the French mystic Simone Weil playing video games in a Torquay arcade.

In a country recovering from a brutal and divisive civil war, a young boy, Jamie, is knocked off his bike and dies in a city street. His father agrees to allow one of Jamie's lungs to be removed and flown over the border for a transplant.

When a teenage couple are found murdered in their car, a boy called Adam Sligo is the only suspect. The letter A is found blazoned on the wall at the murder scene and is soon followed, around town, by the other letters of the alphabet, each immaculately painted in red.