With the passing of the New Year, in the era of accelerated polycrisis, it can feel like time is getting away from us. 

These books interrogate the fight for free time outside of domestic work and wage labour, our conceptions of radical histories and futures, the tech enabled culture of speed, and more!

In 2025, escape doomscrolling through insubstantial content, and spend your time slowly digging into books that will expand your radical imagination. 

All the titles below are 40% off until February 2nd; add 2 or more to increase your discount to 50% off.

Terms and conditions:

• All titles featured on this page are 40% off, with your discount increasing to 50% off when you add 2 or more books from the list to your cart. These discounts end February 2nd 2025 11:59pm EST.
• The discount will be applied during the check-out process.
• The discount applies to the editions shown below, and cannot be extended to other formats that the book may be available in (eg ebook format).
• Some books may be out of stock in your region. This will be displayed on the product page if applicable.
• All print books come with a free edition of the ebook (where available).

The Verso Radical Diary + The Verso Notebook

These tools will help you organise your time effectively this year, while also giving opportunities to reflect on key revolutionary moments throughout history.

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Slowdown reads

Life under capitalism pushes us to consume things quickly - from our food, to our entertainment, to our understanding of world events. These books will allow you to slow down, because political engagement and learning takes time.

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History

Featuring the histories of Black British feminists, the Arab Spring, and the Communist International.

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Art

Who has the time to make art? Who has the time to enjoy art? And how can artists outline more liberating ways of conceiving, organising and experiencing time.

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Further Radical Reading

Including books on police and prison abolition, the climate crisis, and reproductive justice.

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Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner 2025

by Verso Books UK

The 2025 Verso Radical Diary is a week-to-view planner for keeping track of the year ahead. Alongside illustrations and book excerpts, it features significant radical dates from throughout history—...

Verso V Notebook

by Verso Books UK

Celebrate your favourite radical publishing house with our official branded merch! The Verso V Notebook beautfully celebrates our logo, is fully lined in the signature Verso red and in a handy port...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...

Someone Else's Empire

by Tom Stevenson

SOMEONE ELSE’S EMPIRE dispels the myth of a ‘Global Britain’ that punches above its weight in the world. The reality, argues Tom Stevenson, is that Britain lacks even the barest outline of an indep...

Georg Lukàcs

by Michael Löwy

Translated by Patrick Camiller

The philosophical and political development that converted Georg Lukács from a distinguished representative of Central European aesthetic vitalism into a major Marxist theorist and Communist milita...

Immanent Critiques

by Martin Jay

Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treati...

Leaving the Twentieth Century

by McKenzie Wark

The Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the...

Late Capitalism

by Ernest Mandel

Introduction by Cédric Durand

Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine ...

Learning from the Enemy

by Marco Bresciani

When democracy is under threat from authoritarianism, models of resistance must come to the fore. Giustizia e Libertà, founded by the Italian thinker and activist Carlo Rosselli in 1929, is one int...

Lula

by Fernando Morais

One of seven children raised in abject poverty by a single parent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva acquired his politics on the hard road of personal suffering, inspired by the selfless example of his mo...

You Can't Please All

by Tariq Ali

The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to w...

Who Will Build the Ark?

Edited by Benjamin Kunkel and Lola Seaton

In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key di...

Pharmanomics

by Nick Dearden

In Pharmanomics, investigative journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences.Big Pharma is more int...

Tokens

by Rachel O'Dwyer

Longlisted for the FT Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2023 - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GQ, Los Angeles Times, WiredWherever you look, money is being re- placed by tokens. Digital platforms...

The State of Capitalism

by The EReNSEP Writing Collective and Costas Lapavitsas

The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has c...

The Fall and Rise of American Finance

by Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher

The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance be...

The Autonomous City

by Alexander Vasudevan

The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, H...

History Made Conscious

by Geoff Eley

During the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the va...

Speak Out!

by Brixton Black Women's Group

Introduction by Jade Bentil

Edited by Milo Miller

"We came to Britain in search of better opportunities or to get some of the wealth which had been misappropriated from the Caribbean, but what in reality did we find?"Speak Out brings together the ...

Loved Egyptian Night

by Hugh Roberts

Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 an...

Travellers of the World Revolution

by Brigitte Studer

The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of thi...

The Panthay Rebellion

by David G. Atwill

Foreword by Tariq Ali

The Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873 held the armies of the Qing dynasty at bay for nearly two decades. This account by David Atwill offers a remarkable panorama of the cosmopolitan frontier society ...

Napoleon's Cursed War

by Ronald Fraser

Introduction by Perry Anderson

In this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808–14), Napoleon's six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor’s devastating defeat against the popular opposition...

The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...

The Reckoning

by Robin Blackburn

The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...

The Vote

by Paul Foot

The culmination of a lifetime’s work by the celebrated journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of how the universal franchise was secured in Britain, and the slow ero...

The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

by Andrew Drummond

'The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the mas...

The Man Who Closed the Asylums

by John Foot

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, r...

Natopolitanism

Edited by Grey Anderson

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fortunes of NATO - pronounced "braindead" only a few years prior - have been miraculously revived. The alliance, buoyed by surging European military b...

Gandhi's Assassin

by Dhirendra Jha

Dhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationali...

The Twilight of Unionism

by Geoffrey Bell

The fissures that have split the United Kingdom in the last decades have run through Northern Ireland. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the fragile peace has been threatened by Brexit, the ris...

Red Friends

by John Sexton

China's resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the 'red 1930s', along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the li...

Love and Money, Sex and Death

by McKenzie Wark

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relati...

Viewing Velocities

by Marcus Verhagen

How have artists responded to our market-driven, tech-enabled culture of speed? Viewing Velocities explores a contemporary art scene caught in the gears of 24/7 capitalism. It looks at artists who ...

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” In recent decades,...

Writers and Missionaries

by Adam Shatz

Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remai...

Class War

by Mark Steven

A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the...

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

by Walter Benjamin

Introduction by George Steiner

Translated by John Osborne

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seve...

Marx's Literary Style

by Ludovico Silva

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expressio...

Charles Baudelaire

by Walter Benjamin

Translated by Harry Zohn

Walter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. ...

Only a Voice

by George Scialabba

In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals...

Own This!

by R. Trebor Scholz

Winner of the First Prize in the Joyce Rothschild Book AwardsPlatform cooperatives reimagine a world where domestic workers can double their income by establishing their own platform—an internet wh...

Human Capital

by Laura Robson

Historian Laura Robson unveils the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into disposable migrant labor, Ro...

Troublemaking

by Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock

There has been an explosion of organising among workers many assumed to be unorganisable, from delivery drivers in London to tech workers in Silicon Valley. The culmination of years of conversation...

They Call It Love

by Alva Gotby

They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...

After Work

by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleanin...

Lean on Me

by Lynne Segal

Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?Questions of care, intimacy, educatio...

Free Them All

by Gwenola Ricordeau

Foreword by Silvia Federici

Translated by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge

How does the criminal justice system affect women's lives? Do prisons keep women safe? Should feminists rely on policing and the law to achieve women's liberation?The mainstream feminist movement h...

The Jail is Everywhere

by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Judah Schept

Foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Nearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. Jails ...

Not By Politics Alone

by V. I. Lenin

Edited by Tamara Deutscher

This vivid selection, compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, written by Lenin and those who knew him, brings us the revolution in his everyday life – the man who lived by politics but not by ...

Fighting in a World on Fire

by Andreas Malm

Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are m...

On Extinction

by Ben Ware

On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching...

Bluebeard's Castle

by Anna Biller

When the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young wom...

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...

Systems Ultra

by Georgina Voss

Systems Ultra explores how we experience complex systems: the mesh of things, people, and ideas interacting to produce their own patterns and behaviours.What does it mean when a car which runs on c...

Bodies Under Siege

by Sian Norris

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...

What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

Quick Fixes

by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...

The Last Man Takes LSD

by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora

How Michel Foucault, drugs, California and the rise of neoliberal politics in 1970s France are all connectedIn May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described ...

Conversations with Allende

by Régis Debray

Introduction by Camila Vergara

Translated by Peter Beglan and Ben Brewster

The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide s...

Abortion Beyond the Law

by Naomi Braine

Drawing on years of research with activists around the world, sociologist Naomi Braine describes the strategies, politics, and tactics of direct action feminists bringing abortion pills, informatio...

Contraventions

Contributions by Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Peter Gowan, Tom Hazeldine, Dylan Riley, Susan Watkins, Tony Wood and JoAnn Wypijewski

Edited by New Left Review and Susan Watkins

From 9/11 to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, the eurozone crisis to the Brexit vote, the Great Recession to the Arab Spring, the rise of China to the annexation of Crimea, the passage from O...

The Hidden Injuries of Class

by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett

In this reissue of the 1972 classic of social anatomy, Richard Sennets adds a new introduction to shows how the injuries of class persist into the 21st century. In this intrepid, groundbreaking boo...

Magical Urbanism

by Mike Davis

Foreword by Román de la Campa

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. ...

After Black Lives Matter

by Cedric G. Johnson

Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itse...

Deadly and Slick

by Sita Balani

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...

Towards the Abyss

by Volodymyr Ishchenko

Towards the Abyss presents searching analysis of a decade of war and upheaval in Ukraine. Volodymyr Ishchenko has been among the left’s most significant commentators on Ukraine since 2014, when pro...

The Party's Over

by Phil Burton-Cartledge

Today, it is not a question of if, but when? What we are watching is the collapse of the most successful political party in Europe. Despite winning the December 2019 General Election, the parliamen...

Ruling the Void

by Peter Mair

Introduction by Chris Bickerton

The age of party democracy has passed, argues Peter Mair in Ruling the Void. The major parties have become so disconnected from society that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in i...