: in-haus events

Ten Trips – The New Reality of Psychedelics launch with Andy Mitchell: Monday 25th Sept 6-8pm Tickets £5

Neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell punctures the hype around psychedelic drugs while providing the fullest picture yet of their limitlessly fascinating possibilities.

Psychedelics have made a comeback but remain a mystery. They are now a ‘breakthrough therapy’ for mental illness but in truth we have only a vague idea how they work and there is a limit to what the science can reveal. To have any hope of understanding them, we must broaden our view – dramatically – of what they actually are.

In this daring, perception-shifting odyssey, clinical neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell takes ten different drugs in ten different settings, journeying from a London neuroimaging lab to the Colombian Amazon via Silicon Valley and his friend’s basement kitchen. His encounters with scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and con men, psychonauts and shamans, as well as with the drugs themselves, reveal the reality of psychedelics in all their strangeness, hilarity, darkness and wonder.

Andy will be in conversation with Mike Jay (author of Psychonauts, Mescaline and High Society). Tickets cost £5 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £2 off the book.

Uprooting launch with Marchelle Farrell: Wednesday 11th October 6-8pm Tickets £6

From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden. Winner of the Nan Shepherd Prize, moving between Trinidad and an idyllic English country garden, this lyrical and reflective book is about the search for home.

What is home?
It’s a question that has troubled Marchelle Farrell for her entire life. A longed-for career in psychiatry saw her leave behind the pristine beaches and emerald hills of Trinidad. Until, disillusioned, she uprooted again, this time for the peaceful English countryside.
The only Black woman in her village, Marchelle hopes to grow a new life. But when a worldwide pandemic and a global racial reckoning collide, the upheaval of colonialism that has led her to this place begins to be unearthed. Is this really home? And can she ever feel truly grounded here?
Drawn to her new garden, Marchelle begins to examine this complex and emotional question through the psychotherapeutic lens of her work. As her relationship with the garden deepens, she discovers that her two conflicting identities are far more intertwined than she had realised.
Full of hope and healing, Uprooting is a book about finding home where we least expect it, and which invites us to reconnect to the land – and ourselves.

Marchelle will be in conversation with Lucy Jones (author of Matrescence) at bookhaus. This event forms part of our Black History Month program. Tickets cost £6, which includes £2 off the book and a glass of wine or a soft drink.

Empire Windrush event with Onyekachi Wambu: Monday 16th October 6-8pm Tickets £6

In June 1948, the SS Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, carrying with it the hopes and dreams of hundreds of young men and women from the Caribbean.

Their arrival was to have far-reaching effects on Britain, signalling not only the beginning of mass migration to the UK, but also the unravelling of the Empire which they and their ancestors had lived under for almost 400 turbulent years. It was a landmark moment which influenced generations of writers, artists and thinkers.

In this ground-breaking anthology, journalist and writer Onyekachi Wambu collates some of the best and most significant writing to mark 75 years since the arrival of Empire Windrush. Through poetry, fiction, journalism, essays and memoir, writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia – including Bernardine Evaristo, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, V.S. Naipaul, C.L.R. James, Salman Rushdie, John Agard, Stuart Hall, Ben Okri, Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, amongst others – explore the Black British experience.

Empire Windrush conjures a unique and powerful journey through the British past, present and future, via the prism of the Black imagination.

Onyekachi will be in conversation at bookhaus as part of our Black History Month programme. Tickets cost £6, which includes a glass of wine or soft drink and £2 off the book.

Red Africa launch with Kevin Ochieg Okoth: Tuesday 24th Oct 6 – 8pm Tickets £6

Excavating the history of Marxism and Black revolutionary politics

Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls ‘Red Africa’.

The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised – instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.

Kevin will be in conversation here at bookhaus. Tickets cost £6, which includes a glass of wine or a soft drink. This event is part of our Black History Month programme.

The Astral Geographic launch with Andy Sharp: Monday 30th of October 6-8pm Tickets £6

This terrific book is a guide to the occult world, featuring 10 itineraries and maps of magical tours across the globe. Spanning countries and continents in pursuit of occult themes, it is meant to be pursued by the astral or armchair traveller rather than on the ground, although we expect readers to be inspired to plan epic trips of their own. It takes a fantastically fresh approach to the occult, with a nod to the retro Shell Guides in the use of collage artwork and humorous, on-point suggestions of places to stay and eat. Expand your occult horizons by trying these tours – and many more!

• Necromancy through the Ages Tour: Travel from Ancient Nineveh to northern England, tracing sites of necromantic practice.
• Crowley & Choronzon Desert Tour: Hike across the Algerian desert in the footsteps of the magicians Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg, invoking angels and meeting the terrifying demon Choronzon.
• The Descent & Rise of Witchcraft Tour: Visit the temples of Hekate and Circe in Turkey and Italy, the Spanish sites of the Inquisition’s witch-hunts, and the haunts of the Norse sorceresses.
• Curse, Protect and Divine Tour: Travel across Europe to the United States and Kenya unearthing buried curses and counter-magic, from tiny frog coffins in Finnish churches to sinister village hexes.

After completing the journeys, the book offers the unique Geonomicon – a simple divinatory and meditational tool that invites the reader to develop their own creative approach to magical practice.

Andy Sharp (The English Heretic) will be in conversation at bookhaus. Tickets cost £6 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £2 off the book.

If We Burn launch with Vincent Bevins: Wednesday 1st of November 6-8pm Tickets £6

Our very first event after opening the shop in August 2021 was with Vincent Bevins to discuss his masterpiece of History writing, the Jakarta Method. It was also the very first bookstore event he had done since publishing over a year earlier. Now we are delighted to announce he is coming back to launch the book he was working on when we last met him.

From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Why has success been so elusive?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, the second decade of the twenty-first century was propelled by explosive mass demonstrations. But few people got what they wanted. In too many cases, the protests led to the opposite of what they asked for.

If We Burn is a stirring work of global history built around that strange but fundamental paradox. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins interviewed hundreds of people around the world, and weaves their insights and recollections into a fast-paced, gripping narrative. We follow his own troubling experiences in Brazil, where a protest movement ignited by leftists and anarchists led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

In the mass protest decade, humanity demonstrated a deep desire for change, and brave individuals started something that has been left unfinished. In this ground-breaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors offer urgent lessons for those who wish to understand geopolitics today, and create a better world tomorrow.

Vincent will be in conversation with our manager Darran. Tickets cost £6 and include a glass of wine or soft drink and £3 off the book.

SPORTS BANGER Lifestyles of the poor, rich & famous launch with Jonny Banger: Wednesday 8th November 6 – 8pm Tickets £6

Published to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the anarchic, genre-bending cult fashion house, Sports Banger.

Sports Banger is a genre-defying, boundary-breaking fashion collective run by Jonny Banger, who interrogates British pop culture, fashion, class and politics through the subversion and (mis)appropriation of branding. Sports Banger: Lifestyles of the Poor, Rich and Famous tells the story of the first ten years of the irreverent brand, from its foundation in 2013 to the present day. It charts the rise of the brand from an underground bootlegging operation to an all-inclusive, internationally recognized fashion house, record label and socially conscious satirist in the mould of a modern-day Hogarth.

In a layout created by the Sports Banger studio, the book’s images reflect the anarchic story: photographs of studio ephemera, fashion shows, collaborations with iconic brands including Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, and Sports Banger T-shirts rub shoulders with images of defaced government letters, raves and food banks. The book also features essays from influential figures from the worlds of fashion, art and music, including Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, writer and curator Anastasiia Fedorova, and fashion writer and curator Nathalie Khan

Jonny Banger will be in conversation with us at bookhaus. Tickets cost £6, including a glass of wine or soft drink (unless we have to move it off site to a bigger venue), and £5 off the book.

What are Animal Rights for? launch with Steve Cooke: Wed 15th Nov 6-8pm Tickets £6

How should we treat animals? The long-held belief that other animals exist solely for human use has undergone
radical challenges in the past half-century. How much further do we need to go to minimise, and even eliminate,
animal suffering? The field of animal rights raises big questions about how humans treat the other animals with which we share the planet. These questions are becoming more pressing as livestock farming exerts an ever-greater toll on the planet and the animals themselves, and we learn more about their capacity to think and experience pain. This book
shows why animals ought to have greater rights and what the world might look like if they did.

This event is part of University Press Week 2023, which this year celebrates the many ways that university presses help authors to Speak UP and share ideas that shape conversations around the world. Bookhaus is proud to partner with Bristol University Press and other university presses to amplify voices like Steve Cooke and Catherine Oliver this week and year round.

Steve will be in conversation with Catherine. Tickets cost £6 and include a glass of wine or soft drink and £2 off the book.