The stellar moments of boxing seem to take place in public, under blinding spotlights and thousands of eyes fixed on tense muscles. But it is not like that... everything begins to take shape much earlier. In loneliness. Sweating to exhaustion in gyms with the smell of "basement armpit", jogging in fields and parks, between shadows and silences of cold dawns. Weight, diet, rest, no nights out. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. That is where success begins to germinate. The staging is nothing more than the accumulation of effort and sacrifice almost always worked in solitude, almost always in the midst of incomprehension. Can a more similar metaphor to life be constructed than those offered by boxing?

A hilarious and heartfelt illustrated memoir of living with specific learning difficulties. In Everything is Going to be K.O., Kaiya Stone writes about her experiences of living with specific learning difficulties: from struggling at school, to being diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia at university, and performing her own one-woman stand up show inspired by her journey. Always funny and unfailingly honest, Kaiya not only outlines the frustrations of having SpLDs, but also the ways in which they have fuelled her creativity. She calls for neurodiversity to be celebrated so that instead of questioning how we are 'supposed' to think, we instead take pride in our cognitive differences. Everything is Going to be K.O. is for anyone who knows, or has wondered, what it is like to live with learning difficulties today.

FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth Lisa Ko’s powerful debut, The Leavers, is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. Told from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.