- Table View
- List View
In the Middle of the Wood
by Iain Crichton SmithRalph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened. In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith's case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.
Dust Clouds of War (Simon Fonthill #12)
by John WilcoxSeptember, 1914. The First World War has already broken out on the Western Front. Thousands of miles away, on the border between Northern Rhodesia and German East Africa, Simon Fonthill is preparing for battle alongside his faithful companion ‘352’ Jenkins and his reliable tracker, Mzingeli.As they negotiate their way across foreign lands and hostile territories, the Magnificent Trio come under constant fire from enemy forces and at the bequest of Admiral Herbert King-Hall, they undertake their most dangerous mission yet. Sinking the Königsberg, a German cruiser ship hidden deep in the Rufiji Delta in German occupied waters, will test the trio’s nerve, courage and determination to the limit.Meanwhile, Fonthill’s wife Alice has been conducting investigations of her own in Mombasa – and when she thinks something is amiss within the camp, she takes matters into her own hands. Amidst the chaos of war, treachery is never far away . . .
The Family: The Sean Rooney Psychosleuth Series (The Sean Rooney Psychosleuth Series #2)
by Tom O. KeenanIn Glasgow, the mob is one. The Family, a collective of twelve crime families, has formed to fight the influx of migrant gangs, but Glasgow has a new menace with the arrival of an ISIS cell which has kidnapped a Glasgow cop.The Family has eyes and ears on the streets. Suffering mental illness with godly delusions, can Sean Rooney, erstwhile psychosleuth, inveigle himself with the ‘twelve disciples’ and save the police officer and the city from ISIS? Can Rooney and The Family do Glasgow a favour and ‘set aboot’ them?The Family is the follow up to the critically acclaimed The Father, short listed for the Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger.
The Girl Who Passed for Normal
by Hugh FleetwoodIn an isolated Roman villa, widowed English dancer Barbara Michaels serves as paid companion and tutor to twenty year-old Catherine, whose rich American mother thinks her 'mad.' In Barbara's eyes it's simply the case that Catherine is not 'all there', and dwells too much in the dysfunctional part of her own head. Barbara's sense of what is and is not 'normal', however, is about to be overturned.First published in 1973, The Girl Who Passed for Normal was Hugh Fleetwood's second novel and the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for its year. 'Guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your chair.' New York Times'Shocking... Horridly memorable.' San Francisco Chronicle
Seduction and Betrayal: Women And Literature
by Elizabeth Hardwick'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan SontagSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With her radiant sympathy and wisdom, Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. She asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both timely and timeless, these devastatingly stylish essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life.
Swimming Home
by Mary-Rose MacCollAUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER IN FALLING SNOWThe lone swimmer, turning over now to switch to a perfectly executed back crawl, wasn’t a man. It was a woman, a girl. It was Catherine. Of course it was Catherine.1925. Fifteen-year-old Catherine Quick longs to strike out into the warm waters of her Australian home just as she’s done since she was a tiny child. But now living in London with her aunt Louisa, Catherine feels that everything she values has been stripped away.Louisa, a busy surgeon who fought boldly for women’s equality, wants Catherine to pursue an education to ensure her freedom. Since Catherine arrived, however, Louisa can’t put a foot right and she is finding it harder to block painful memories from her past.A chance encounter leads both women to New York where Catherine can test her mettle against the first women in the world to swim the English Channel, and where Louisa can come to an understanding with her niece and with herself.
Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders: Kitty Peck And The Music Hall Murders And Kitty Peck And The Child Of Ill-fortune
by Kate GriffinLimehouse, 1880: Dancing girls are going missing from 'Paradise' - the criminal manor with ruthless efficiency by the ferocious Lady Ginger. Seventeen-year-old music hall seamstress Kitty Peck finds herself reluctantly drawn into a web of blackmail, depravity and murder when The Lady devises a singular scheme to discover the truth. But as Kitty's scandalous and terrifying act becomes the talk of London, she finds herself facing someone even more deadly and horrifying than The Lady.Bold, impetuous and blessed with more brains than she cares to admit, it soon becomes apparent that it's up to the unlikely team of Kitty and her stagehand friend, Lucca, to unravel the truth and ensure that more girls do not meet with a similar fate. But are Kitty's courage and common sense and Lucca's book learning a match for the monster in the shadows? Their investigations take them from the gin-fuelled halls and doss houses of the East End to the champagne-fuelled galleries of the West End.Take nothing at face value: Kitty is about to step out on a path of discovery that changes everything . . .
Severance: What goes through a person's mind before they are beheaded?
by Robert Olen Butler'In concept, Severance is brilliant. In execution, it’s even better – beautiful, hilarious, horrifying and humane' – Dave EggersThe human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by this, Robert Olen Butler wrote Severance, sixty-two vignettes each exactly 240 words in length, that capture the flow of thoughts that go through a person’s mind after their head has been severed. Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures — Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner.‘Severance is a dazzling tour of history and humanity as told by those who have lost their heads. From the moment of death, we are given sixty-two perfect testaments to the joys of being alive. Robert Olen Butler has once again proven himself to be one of the most profoundly creative voices in fiction today’ - Ann Patchett ‘With Severance, Butler has one-upped himself… he has brought the dead back to life, through the limitless will of his imagination’ - New York Times
Tiger Boots
by Joe O'BrienThe third Danny Wilde book 'Enjoy your football and you'll always be a winner!' yelled the coach. The Crokes are doing well in the football league this season, but off the pitch things aren't so good; Danny's dad, the Crokes' coach, is having a hard time - he's worried about his job, and his friends' daughter, Clara, is sick and needs an expensive operation. But GAA is like one big family, and when Danny and the Crokes hear that Clara is the captain of her GAA team in Boston, they're determined to raise money for her. Despite some hitches along the way - like trouble with Trinity, the girl he has his eye on - between training, school and a fundraising football marathon, Danny and the Crokes make this a season to remember!
The Cleansing Flames
by R. N. MorrisEaster, 1872. Fires burn in St Petersburg, a prelude to the revolutionary turmoil that will shake Russia a generation later. As the springtime thaw begins, a body rises to the surface of the Winter Canal. Following an anonymous tip-off, magistrate Porfiry Petrovich is drawn into an investigation of the radical intellectuals who seek to fan the flames of revolution. In the meantime, junior magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky plays a dangerous game of his own. Following a chance meeting with a man he suspects of being an arsonist, he volunteers to infiltrate a terrorist cell. But the young man's loyalties appear divided, his motives conflicted. Will he track down the killers, or to use his position as a magistrate to further a cause with which he sympathises? The issue comes to a head in a shocking and violent confrontation between two generations.The Cleansing Flames is the fourth book in R. N. Morris's acclaimed series featuring the investigator from Crime and Punishment.
Brother
by Matthew Dickman Michael DickmanThe multi-award winning Dickman twins are from America's outstanding generation of younger poets. Their poetry lives take different expression. Matthew writes with the ebullience of Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; Michael with the control of William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson. But they are unified by the unflinching, remarkable verse they wrote when their older brother took his own life. It is these moving, grieving but life-affirming poems that solely comprise this dual-authored volume.
Oliver Loving: A Novel
by Stefan Merrill Block"An exquisitely moving novel of sorrow, love, and the miracle of human connections." Kamila Shamsie, author of Home FireOne warm night Oliver Loving joins his classmates at the annual school dance, hoping for a glimpse of the girl he's long been in love with. But as music fills the gymnasium and students timidly approach the dancefloor, a young man enters with a gun, leaving five people dead and Oliver in a coma. A decade later, Oliver remains in limbo, wordless and paralyzed. His brother has long since fled. His father has turned to drink in the Texan desert. His town has withered, its people unable to forget. Only his mother, buoyed by the result of fresh neurological tests, holds onto the unshakeable hope that Oliver will soon wake up, and finally answer the questions that have slept with him for ten long years.
Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz
by Maxim BillerA masterful novella about one of the great writers of the 20th century"It is now certain that the false Thomas Mann must be an agent of the Secret State Police," wrote Bruno, after he had opened his notebook again, laid it neatly on the table, and bent over it like a cat with its back arched, "and I suspect he will not leave our town until we have all lost our wits."Bruno Schulz has foreseen catastrophe and is almost paralysed by fear. His last chance of survival is to leave the home town to which, despite being in his late forties, he clings as if to a comforting blanket. So he retreats into his cellar (and sometimes hides under his desk) to write a letter to Thomas Mann: appealing to the literary giant to help him find a foreign publisher, in order that the reasons to leave Drohobych will finally outweigh the reasons to stay.Evoking Bulgakov and Singer, Biller takes us on an astounding, burlesque journey into Schulz's world, which vacillates between shining dreams and unbearable nightmares - a world which, like Schulz's own stories, prophesies the apocalyptic events to come.Includes two stories by Bruno Schulz: 'Birds' and 'The Cinnamon Shops', from The Street of Crocodiles.Maxim Biller (b. Prague, 1960) is the author of several novels, plays and collections of short stories, whose work has been compared to that of Philip Roth and Woody Allen. He is also a columnist and literary critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit.Bruno Schulz, the fictionalised protagonist of this novella, was a Polish-Jewish writer, artist and critic. Born in Drohobych in 1892, he was one of the world's great authors, although a substantial part of his work was lost following his murder by a Gestapo officer in 1942.
Bandanna
by Paul MuldoonFollowing his highly-praised Shining Brow (1993), which was also written as an opera libretto for the American composer Daron Aric Hagen, Paul Muldoon's Bandanna takes us into very different territory. Its action is set in a small town on the Mexican border; it includes illegal immigrants and corrupt law officers among its dramatis personae; but at its heart is an old-fashioned tale of sexual jealousy and murderous revenge. The drama is powered by a strong emotional thrust, most of it conveyed in the form of popular song, and leading to a devastating climax. Bandanna demonstrates yet again the ever-increasing range of this most versatile of poets.
Tersias
by G.P. TaylorMagnus Malachi, a magician, is guarding his latest moneyspinner - Tersias, a blind boy who can see into the future. But as Tersias's powers become known, others who seek to use them are drawn from the shadows: Jonah, a teenage highwayman, and his companion in crime Tara; Solomon, a crazed zealot who has bred a new species of giant flesh-eating locusts; and Lord Malpas, a keeper of mysterious powers.They all want Tersias - but is he a force for good or evil? And can he ever rid himself of the dark spirit that torments his soul?
The Lightkeeper's Wife
by Karen ViggersElderly and in poor health, Mary has lived in Hobart a long time. But when a letter is delivered to her house by someone she hoped never to see again, she knows she must return to Bruny Island to live out her last days with only her regrets and memories for company. Years before, her husband was the lighthouse keeper on Bruny and she raised her family on the windswept island, until terrible circumstances forced them back to civilisation. Now, the secret that has haunted her for decades threatens to break free and she is desperate to banish it before her time is up. But secrets have a life of their own and, as Mary relives the events of her life, she realises her power over the future may be limited. Back in Hobart, Mary's adult children are respectively outraged, non-committal and sympathetic about her escape from their care. But no amount of coaxing will shake her resolve. Her youngest son Tom loves Bruny, and can understand her connection to that wild island, a place of solitude, healing and redemption for them both. As Mary's secret threatens to tear her apart, both she and Tom must face their pasts in ways they couldn't even begin to imagine. Mary finds that the script she's written to the end of her life has taken a few twists of its own.
The Eddie Dickens Trilogy (The\eddie Dickens Trilogy Ser. #1)
by Philip ArdaghAWFUL ENDWhen both of Eddie Dickens's parents catch a disease that makes them turn yellow, go a bit crinkly round the edges and smell of hot water bottles, it's agreed he should go and stay with relatives at their house Awful End. Unfortunately for Eddie, those relatives are Mad Uncle Jack and Even-Madder Aunt Maud, and it doesn't look as if the three of them are ever going to reach their destination ...DREADFUL ACTSEddie Dickens narrowly avoids an explosion, a hot-air balloon and arrest, only to find himself falling head-over heels for a girl with a face like a camel's, and into the hands of a murderous gang of escaped convicts who have 'one little job for him to do'.TERRIBLE TIMESEddie had been given the task of travelling to America to look after his family's interests there. But his life is never that simple; especially with a potential stowaway in his trunk, and Lady Constance Bustle at his side. She's a professional 'travelling companion', whose previous employers seem to have died under the most remarkable and unfortunate circumstances ...
Walk in Silence
by J. G. SinclairKeira Lynch may be a lawyer, but that doesn't mean she plays by the rules.She has been summoned to give evidence against an Albanian hit man. She was there the night he murdered the mother of a five-year-old boy. She remembers it well - it was the same night he put three bullets in her chest and left her for dead.But there are powerful people who want the hit man back on the streets. When they kidnap the boy, she is given a choice: commit perjury, blow the trial and allow the killer to walk or give evidence, convict him and watch the child die. Keira must make a decision. This time, does she have to cross a line to win?
Dead Image: An Inspector Best Mystery 1 (Ulverscroft Large Print Ser. #1)
by Joan LockThe explosion was heard twenty miles away. It killed boatmen and wrecked the exotic villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John's Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regents Park explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal? And whose was the other body found in the canal? An artist's model? The missing King's Cross barmaid? Or another victim of the so-called Thames murderer? As he struggles to find the answers, Scotland Yard's Sergeant Ernest Best straddles the conflicting worlds of art, wealth and privilege and that of the poverty-stricken canal boatmen in an intriguing mystery that will change his life forever.
Good Riddance (G - Reference, Information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Elinor Lipman'A vastly entertaining screwball comedy’ WASHINGTON POSTDecluttering her tiny New York apartment, Daphne Maritch decides to throw out any belongings that do not spark joy.These include a high-school yearbook inherited from her school teacher mother, June, to whom the class of ’68 dedicated the volume. June in turn attended every class reunion, scribbling notes and observations – not always charitably – after each one.When neighbour Geneva Wisenkorn finds the discarded book and wants to use it for her own ends, Daphne realises she wants to keep it after all. Fighting to reclaim it, she uncovers some alarming Maritch family secrets and sets in motion a series of events that prove to be both poignant and absurd.Good Riddance is a vastly entertaining screwball comedy from the Jane Austen of modern New York.'A caper novel, light as a feather and effortlessly charming. It inspires a very specific kind of modern joy.’ NEW YORK TIMES‘I’ve been a huge fan of her novels for so many years. Her writing is witty, astute and deliciously dry.’ JILL MANSELL‘An exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist.’ FAY WELDON
Lampie
by Annet SchaapSHORTLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE AWARD 2020AN OBSERVER BEST BOOK OF 2019'An astonishing, mysterious seaswept story... Dazzles with darkness and glitters with light' Cerrie Burnell, author of Harper and the Sea of SecretsEvery evening Lampie the lighthouse keeper's daughter must light a lantern to warn ships away from the rocks. But one stormy night disaster strikes. The lantern goes out, a ship is wrecked and an adventure begins.In disgrace, Lampie is sent to work as a maid at the Admiral's Black House, where rumour has it that a monster lurks in the tower. But what she finds there is stranger and more beautiful than any monster. Soon Lampie is drawn into a fairytale adventure in a world of mermaids and pirates, where she must fight with all her might for friendship, freedom and the right to be different.
The Marvellous Land of Oz: The Oz Books #2 (classic-illustrated) (Oz #2)
by Frank L. BaumThe sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sees our hero, a young boy named Tip, escaping from evil witch Mombi and fleeing to the Emerald City.
Borgon the Axeboy and the Dangerous Breakfast
by Kjartan PoskittA dangerously funny new series for boys and girls age 7-9 from bestselling author Kjartan Poskitt, illustrations by the one and only Philip Reeve.Borgon the Axeboy is the last barbarian in the Lost Desert and he's on a mission to track down the MOST DANGEROUS breakfast ever! He sets out to find the scariest dragon on the plains, but his annoying neighbour insists on tagging along. Grizzy is a little savage and far too nosey for her own good! But their adventure turns to peril when breakfast draws near. They'll have to learn to get along if they're ever going to survive . . .This series is set to have you rolling in the desert with laughter.
The Paris Architect: The stunning novel of WW2 Paris and the German Occupation
by Charles BelfoureA beautiful and elegant account of an ordinary man’s unexpected and reluctant descent into heroism during the Second World War.1942,Paris.Architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him huge wealth – and maybe a death sentence.He has to design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined of Nazi soldiers won’t discover it. When one of Lucien’s designs fails horribly,the problem of hiding a Jew becomes person,and he can no longer deny the enormity of his project.What does he owe his fellow man,and how far will he go to make things right?
Spartacus: A Novel (Polygon Lewis Grassic Gibbon Ser.)
by Lewis Grassic GibbonRome, 73 BC. Kleon, a Greek slave, wakes early, cuts his master's throat, and flees south by a back road, clutching a copy of Plato's Republic. His destination is Capua, where he hopes to join the burgeoning rebel army of Spartacus, an escaped gladiator. So begins the definitive telling of one of the most famous stories in history. Spartacus and his companions, having burst out of the ludus where they were held, defeated every Roman force sent against them, are plundering the countryside and gathering to their ranks thousands of fugitives, brigands and itinerants. They seek to create a new world, one where men are not owner and owned. But they must first escape Italy, and the vengeful Roman legions already marshalling against them. Brutal and uncompromising in its depiction of the ancient world, Spartacus masterfully evokes the violence, hope and despair of the war that shook Rome to its very foundations.