The Rupture Files

The fight for prison abolition is a struggle for collective liberation: a transformative vision of a safer world, in which communities live free from exploitation on a thriving planet.

Drawing connections across social justice movements with a shared abolitionist ethic, this revolutionary book illuminates how harmful ideas of criminality and punishment can manifest in many ways beyond the prison industrial complex. This work is a collaboration with friends, mentors and giants fighting for housing justice, food justice, climate justice, migrant justice, justice for survivors of violence, and more.

With this insightful and generous book, now in its second edition, Cradle Community invites us to explore what it will take to dismantle structures of oppression, and to imagine the future we can rebuild together—brick by brick.

Cradle Community is a collective of organisers committed to radical education and building understanding of prison abolition and transformative justice. Brick by Brick is their first book.

Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power cannot undo his revolutionary birthright: like his mother and grandmother before him, Shahed is an undercover rebel.

When a general arrives at the Sufi institute looking for help with a military assignment, Shahed accepts, all while concealing his own plans for resistance. The mission takes him behind the walls of a prison town, inside a secret army barracks in the Sinai desert, and deep into the murky waters of the past.

As he wades through his mother’s repressed memories and the state’s repressed histories, Shahed grapples with the traumas of the revolution and the weight of authoritarian rule, searching for new ways to revolt for freedom.

Mohamed Tonsy is a queer Egyptian writer and ceramicist. Formerly an architect and a triathlete representing the Egyptian Triathlon Federation, he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Mizna and Epoch Press and was shortlisted in MFest’s 2021 Short Story Competition. You Must Believe in Spring is his first book.

Rage is not just a feeling—it’s fuel.

The Hajar Book of Rage ignites the first spark in the elements anthology series, harnessing the primordial force of fire as a fury that destroys and transforms. Bringing together fiction, poetry and essays by writers of colour, this Fire-themed collection delves into the fierce, animating power of rage as a catalyst for revolutionary change.

Here, rage teaches. It reveals what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. It mobilises us into action, rouses our ideals and refuses to let us compromise. And it is unruly and consuming—a blaze that resists containment.

This is a searing tribute to the fires of anger that fuel our resistance and burn down the worlds that cannot hold us.

The Hajar Book of Rage is the first book in elements, a series by Hajar Press on the politically transformative power of Fire, Earth, Water and Air.

On work and words, and how they contort the world.

Lena is a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, her days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job.

In taut, pocket-sized vignettes, COOP reveals a suffocating lattice of language that makes up a precarious London life. But as each word of her story unravels, Lena discovers interstices between them—to find autonomy and escape.

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Raphaëlle Milone's first novel, a dive into the heart of desires, acclaimed by Simon Liberati as well as by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Raphaëlle Milone (born 1991 in Riom) is a French writer.

Newly discovered in the author’s archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.

Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession—one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love, Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London’s Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

"This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name."—Anna Zett