Housmans are very excited indeed to be welcoming one of our most beloved authors to the shop, Sarah Jaffe, for the UK launch of her excoriating, thrilling and moving new work of non-fiction: From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. 

Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, and the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.  

Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a contributing writer at In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.

Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these.

Sarah will be in conversation with the brilliant K Biswas, a critic and essayist who has written for the New Statesman, New York Times, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the Director of Resonance FM – Europe’s largest community radio station – and the Editor of Representology: The Journal of Media and Diversity.

ADVANCED BOOKING STRONGLY RECCOMENDED.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ or ‘special bundle’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 7pm, Event Starts 7:30.