Availability update · 7 September 2026
Kindle, paperback and hardcover are now live on Amazon. Kindle is £4.99 under ASIN B0HHYBWY65. The 106-page paperback is £9.99, ISBN 978-1-0669240-0-4. The 106-page hardcover is £15.99, ISBN 978-1-0669240-4-2. KDP confirmed the hardcover available to buy on 7 September 2026. Amazon advises that format linking may take 48 hours and up to five days. The wide EPUB remains in preorder for 15 September 2026, which remains the formal Cereark Press launch date.
LONDON — 20 August 2026.
Cereark Press announced its first title, The Word Family: Stories from their strange lives, by Onosoji O. Ononuga.
The book begins with seven families of words and the ordinary human acts or relations that sit behind them: knowing how, making, trusting, caring, steering, gathering and witnessing. Part One turns those families into literary characters and scenes. Part Two returns to them as companion essays and asks what happens when direct human judgement is compressed into credentials, procedures, controls, evidence and other portable institutional forms.
Its argument is not that origins dictate what words must mean today. Instead, the book uses word history as a way of exposing distance: the distance between an old human act and the modern apparatus built in its name.
From words to institutions
The seven families range from sophia, auctor, credo and cura to kubernetes, legere and testis. Their descendants lead the book into questions about wisdom and expertise, authority and authenticity, trust and credit, care and assurance, governance and control, collection and knowledge, and witnessing and evidence.
“The book is interested in what institutions have to do in order to scale human judgement,” Ononuga said. “Abstraction is indispensable. The problem begins when the portable form survives but the capability it was meant to carry has thinned out or disappeared.”
A different kind of first book
The Word Family reflects Ononuga’s professional background in programme assurance, software quality and institutional capability, but approaches those concerns through language and literary form rather than a conventional management text.
The first edition is dated 2026. The paperback, ISBN 978-1-0669240-0-4, was published on Amazon on 4 September 2026. The Kindle edition was published on 5 September 2026 under ASIN B0HHYBWY65. The hardcover, ISBN 978-1-0669240-4-2, was confirmed available to buy on Amazon on 7 September 2026 at £15.99. EPUB ISBN 978-1-0669240-1-1 remains in wide preorder for 15 September 2026.
About Cereark Press
Cereark Press is an independent publishing imprint within the Cereark group. It publishes rigorous, useful work on ideas, institutions, assurance, judgement, technology and public life, with an emphasis on clear provenance, controlled editions and publication status that is stated precisely.
The Press now has two current books in its publishing programme: The Word Family and What Remained of You: Five rooms, and what was left in them.
Media enquiries
For review copies, interviews, excerpts, rights and other media enquiries:
Cereark Press
press@cereark.com
press.cereark.com/media/