Search results for ""Muswell Press""

Guilty. One word on a beggar's cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry Copenhagen street, the second homeless victim in as many weeks. Dagbladet reporter Jensen, stumbling across the body on her way to work, calls her ex lover DI Henrik Jungersen. As, inevitably, old passions are rekindled, so are old regrets, and that is just the start of Jensen's troubles

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A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, 'a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth' strips at a gay sex theatre in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction. Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight.

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Life had been looking up – she’s dating a new man and finally getting praise at work. But after the accident everything seems to plummet downhill. In the space of a few days her flat is burgled and her flatmate assaulted - she loses her phone and then her job. Are these events linked? Perhaps what she had seen was something more sinister?

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Settled in a dilapidated house in the Loire they are plagued by calamities (mainly of Tommy's making), excitable neighbors, a destructive puppy and an unexpected pregnancy. When it looks like the money has run out. Tommy has an epiphany. Beer will save him, of course it will, it always has. After all there is a craft beer revolutions sweeping the world. Sadly it turns out that 20 years of drinking beer doesn't qualify you to brew it. Featuring colorful characters, a stunning location, and an inspiring collection of beer recipes, this is an irresistible feast.

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The most important twelve months of her life lie ahead. Success would mean becoming a fully-fledged priest a year from now, something she feels profoundly called to do. Failure would not only prove her father right, but also delight all the antis who consider woman priests an abomination. Can she convince everyone - herself included - that she's more than a five foot eight redhead with a PhD and a penchant for Max Factor's Mulberry Lipfinity?

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It is the 1970s and Oxford’s male institutions are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female ‘Fellow’. Impulsive love affairs – with people, places and the ideas in her head – beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact. Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date.

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Rose Gregory has suffered a devastating blow, a double bereavement from which months later she is still reeling. Sanctuary and rest are prescribed by her doctor. But when she arrives at her refuge, a dank and decaying Monastery, she finds it is not the haven promised. Despite the veneer of calm contemplation, the Monastery turns out to be a hotbed of intrigue and disharmony. Rose witnesses bullying and cruelty and ultimately in defence of the vulnerable turns to violence herself. Sylvia Colley’s extraordinary understanding of a woman’s struggle to deal with grief, the denial, the anger, the loneliness, is described without sentimentality. A beautifully written and moving story.

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As a passionate Londoner, Ken Livingstone has seen London change dramatically over the last 60 years. From playing on bomb sites in an era where St Pauls was the tallest building in the city, to 2019 where the gleaming towers of the Shard and Walkie Talkie dominate the skyline, thanks to new building rules introduced by his administration. With a witty and worldly eye he takes a look at his home town; the people, places and the politics that have shaped the landscape. On this personal journey he shares his views on every aspect of the city from his favourite restaurants and most loved buildings to anecdotes on fellow politicians and the triumphs, and disasters, encountered running the largest metropolis in Europe.

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Growing up in a strict religious family in the 1920s young Annie Lang is witness to disturbing events that no one will explain. Only the family dog may know the answers. Six years on, student Annie returns from France to find her world in disarray. Annie and sister Bea turn detective and unearth a disturbing truth.

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London,1999. Michael Keats is mourning the death of his wife, killed in a hit and run accident in Northern Italy. His discovery that she had been having an affair devastates him and he sets out to find the identity of her lover. That journey leads him to the villages of the Valtellina, where he becomes embroiled in a crime of treachery and revenge. The brutal repercussions of the war are still reverberating, and as Michael uncovers the truth of his wife's affair, he reveals five decades of duplicity and deception.

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Sarah has given up her career and moved to the countryside to bring up her two young children, while her husband works long hours in London. Alone, she explores the fields and the woods near her home and discovers a lake, a memorial bench for a boy who drowned in mysterious circumstances, and Finn, a beautiful troubled teenager who plays truant from school. As Sarah pieces the mystery together, an uncomfortable attraction between her and Finn builds. She knows that this blossoming relationship is wrong but the chemistry between them is difficult to resist. Their relationship reaches a climax over one hot summer, threatening to destroy everything that she holds dear. Woven into Sarah's story are the voices of two other women connected to her family - Maggie, the RAF nurse and Flavia, the Italian girl. As their stories unfold, a secret is revealed, binding Sarah and Finn in a way that they would never guess.

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When Clementine and Edouard's last child leaves home, the cracks in their marriage become impossible to ignore. Her work as a perfumer is no longer providing solace and her sense of self is withering. Then, her former lover resurfaces, decades after the end of their bisexual affair, and her world tilts irreversibly. Set in Paris and Provence, this is an intimate portrait of a woman navigating conflicting desires and a troubled past whilst dreaming of a fulfilling future.

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In Search of the Missing Eyelash is a novel about home and love and what can become undone when we try to make it all better. It's also about gender and sex and it flips from heart-breaking to hilarious within the stoke of an eyelash.

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Both a celebration and a lament for Ukraine, a moving personal memoir taking us from Katya's idyllic childhood with her siblings: holidays in Crimea and carefree days working the land at the Dacha; to the sickening impact of Putin's invasion and its effect on Katya, her friends and family - the anxiety, fear and heartache. The desperate attempts to make contact with friends and ensure loved ones are safe. Throughout it all bestrides Babushka, Katya's 'favourite person on earth' still living in the family's apartment block in Kyiv. Babushka learned fortitude at an early age when her own mother was taken by the Germans and she was rescued by a Jewish doctor whose identity was kept secret. When she is not growing vegetables and making vats of borsch, she is reading the sexy bits from novels out loud to her granddaughter. But in this last year she has turned her hand to a recipe of a different type - Molotov cocktails - in preparation for an attack on her apartment block. Combining prose, poetry, collage, maps and illustrations this is a truly immersive memoir - an authentic portrait of the impact of war.

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1953. Eli is nineteen years old and lives alongside a cursed field with his strange aunt Dreama. Six months before, his mother disappeared during the North Sea flood. Unsure of his place in the world and of the man he is becoming, Eli is ready to run. Shane Wright is a man with plenty to hide. Caught in a complicated relationship with Eli, Shane is desperate to maintain the double life that he has created for himself. Then Jimmy Smart appears. Jimmy Smart, the mysterious showman who turns the gallopers at the fair. Under his watchful gaze, Eli discovers a world he knows nothing about with rules he cannot understand. Three men bound together in a blistering story that spans 30 years, from 1953 into the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic, The Gallopers is a visceral and mesmerising novel of deceit, desire and unspeakable loss.

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July 2016. Margot Goodwin arrives as the new curate at St Mark's, Highbury. She's one part exhilarated, ten parts terrified.

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This third collection of poems by Shaun Traynor maintains his high standard of perfection in verse. It is an emotional narrative of love lost, love regained. It is a love story, but there are also poems of truly beautiful pastoral observations. The title poem shows the poet's ability to be gritty when an urban landscape demands.

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A huge figure in the history of British espionage and one of the models for James Bond, Sidney Reilly was born in Russia in 1873. To his employers, the British Secret Service, his background was a mystery yet his immense charisma took him into the epicentre of British establishment. Reilly lived for danger, he spoke seven languages and was rumoured to possess eleven passports and a wife to go with each. Among his exploits in the early twentieth century were the infiltration of the German General Staff in 1917 and the near overthrow of the Bolsheviks in 1918. His reputation with women was a legendary as his genius for espionage. Reilly: Ace of Spies was adapted into a BAFTA-winning television series in 1983, starring Sam Neill as Reilly and Ian Charleson as RH Bruce Lockhart. Originally published in 1967, this edition has a foreword by Dugald Bruce Lockhart, the author’s great-nephew. Dugald is a successful actor and author of The Lizard, published to acclaim in 2020.

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A headless corpse a missing person case closed? June, and as Copenhagen swelters under record temperatures, a headless corpse surfaces in the murky harbour, landing a new case on DI Henrik Jungersen s desk just as his holiday is about to start.

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Settled in a dilapidated house in the Loire they are plagued by calamities (mainly of Tommy's making), excitable neighbours, a destructive puppy and an unexpected pregnancy. When it looks like the money has run out. Tommy has an epiphany. Beer will save him, of course it will, it always has. After all there is a craft beer revolutions sweeping the world. Sadly it turns out that 20 years of drinking beer doesn't qualify you to brew it. Featuring colourful characters, a stunning location, and an inspiring collection of beer recipes, this is an irresistible feast

Read more less

It is the 1970s and Oxford’s male institutions are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female ‘Fellow’. Impulsive love affairs – with people, places and the ideas in her head – beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact. Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date.

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At the time of his death Eric Hobsbawm was the most famous historian in the world. He not only wrote history was also witness to it, from the Communist uprising in Europe to revolution in Cuba where he was Che Guevara's interpreter. He was instrumental in the birth of New Labour and was also a jazz journalist for The New Statesman. This is the story of his family life. Marlene Hobsbawm grew up in a comfortable middle class Jewish home in Vienna but that life was shattered by the rise of Nazism. Age five she fled the country with her family and settled in the UK. A talented linguist, Marlene worked post-war for the UN in Italy helping to rebuild the country and then onto war torn Congo. Returning to the UK she met Eric Hobsbawm. This is the story of their roller coaster life together, much of it spent under the scrutiny of M15.

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Obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Alistair Haston heads off to Greece, where she is on holiday. Mugged on arrival in Paros, he loses everything. So when a charming Aussie, shows up and offers Alistair a job recruiting tourists to pose for his wealthy boss, Alistair accepts.It doesn't take long to discover that it is not just painting the boss has in mind. Swept along on hedonistic tide of wild parties, wild sex and plentiful drugs, he revels in the pursuit of pleasure. But when the body of a missing tourist is found, all evidence points to Haston. Arrested but allowed to escape, the body count piles up and Halston finds himself on the run by land and sea on a journey more breathtaking and more frightening than he could ever imagine.

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A veteran freedom fighter and friend of Mandela is forced to break all his loyalties and oppose the ruling ANC party - a party he's been a member of all his life - to confront corruption and venality at the very top. As he faces political attacks and sinister threats from a faction in the SA security services the ageing veteran finds his life is now endangered. Recognising the need for help, he recruits a young 'Born Free' idealist to assist him. She too is soon drawn into danger as together they stumble upon a clandestine plot at the highest level of government to poach and kill rhino and export their lucrative horns to South East Asia. Intent on catching the poachers and exposing the trade, they manage to install a GPS tracking device inside a perfect replica of a horn which they follow through a diplomatic bag into Vietnam. Anxious that intimidation by the security services will prevent them from exposing the truth, they decide to break cover in UK using a sympathetic British MP to reveal all they know in a House of Commons speech, under parliamentary privilege. But first they must establish the truth. Will they be able to do so, or will they be killed before they can? The stakes are high. Has Mandela's 'rainbow nation' been irretrievably betrayed by political corruption and cronyism? Can the country's ancient rhino herd be saved from extinction by poachers supported from the very top of the state

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Burt, the devil dog, has risen from the dead, Gadget the miniature horse has moved into the kitchen and Tommy is thinking about distilling gin, what can possibly go wrong? With Brexit looming, a second baby on the way, and sales of IPA beer plummeting, trouble is brewing. But just as Tommy hits rock bottom inspiration arrives.

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In the small city of Wharton, Connecticut, lives are beginning to unravel. A husband betrays his wife. A son struggles with addiction. A widow misses her late spouse. At the heart of these interlinking stories is one couple: Freddie and Greg Tyler. Greg has just been diagnosed with a brutal form of cancer. He intends to handle this the way he has faced everything else: through grit and determination. But can he successfully overcome his illness? How will the Freddie and their daughter cope if he doesn’t? How do the other residents of Wharton learn to live with loss and find happiness again? Celebrating the grace in everyday life, this powerful debut immerses the reader in a community of friends, family, and neighbours and identifies the ways that love and forgiveness can help us survive even the most difficult of life’s challenges.

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When two more victims are attacked, the police lament a rise in violence against the elderly, but who is the young girl in the photo found by DI Henrik Jungersen on the scenes of crime? Impatient to claim her inheritance, Irene's daughter hires former Dagbladet reporter Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav to find the necklace.Questioning his own sanity, while trying to fix his marriage, Henrik finds himself once more pitched in a quest for the truth against Jensen - the one woman in Copenhagen he is desperate to avoid.

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When her adoptive mother died in 2009 Donna Freed set out to track down her birth mother. What she discovered was truly shocking - she was the daughter of a pair of infamous con artists, at the heart of one of the biggest true crime stories to grip the USA in the 1960s. Previously redacted records from the infamous *Louise Wise Services in New York revealed that Donna s mother (27, Jewish and single), her father (40, Catholic, married with 4 children), had hatched a plan to defraud an insurance company and run off to Spain to raise Donna. Further investigation revealed that in 1967, Donna s mother, Mira Lindenmaier, faked her own death in a drowning accident off City Island in the Bronx for the double indemnity insurance money. Donna loved her tricky, unconventional adoptive mother, but was now keen to meet her birth mother and find out how and why her parents abandoned her. How would she feel towards Mira, her real Mum. How has becoming a mother herself impacted on her feelings towards her two mothers? Gripping and fast-paced, this extraordinary memoir is also incredibly moving tackling fundamental questions about motherhood and identity, nature vs nurture.

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Beautifully written, with sumptuous and enchanting descriptions of Indonesia, this is a haunting, menacing novel that completely transports you to a specific time and place and perfectly portrays that shared sense of guilt in all of us about mistakes or inactions of the past.

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Leading politician and anti-apartheid campaigner turns the spotlight onto Lion poaching in South Africa. Gripping and pacey this is an epic tale of corruption, collusion and courage and the final book in the Conspiracy trilogy following the highly acclaimed The Rhino and Elephant Conspiracy

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As the lead singer of Modern Romance, he toured the world, as the screenwriter of Kinky Boots he conquered Hollywood, now comes Geoff Deane s latest act as a quite brilliant and witty ranconteur in his memoir From Mohair Suits to Kinky Boots .

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When ninety-year-old Irene Valborg is found brutally murdered in an affluent suburb of Copenhagen, her diamond necklace missing, it looks like a burglary gone wrong. When two more victims are attacked, the police lament a rise in violence against the elderly, but who is the young girl in the photo found by DI Henrik Jungersen on the scenes of crime? Impatient to claim her inheritance, Irene’s daughter hires former Dagbladet reporter Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav to find the necklace. Henrik finds himself once more pitched in a quest for the truth against Jensen, the one woman in Copenhagen he is desperate to avoid.

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In the Essex marshlands, twelve women are found abandoned in the back of a truck. Armed with knives but with nothing to say, except Grace. She will only speak to DI Stanley Low. Flown in to assist and aid his ex-colleague, and sometime lover, Met detective Ramila Mistry, Low finds himself confronting a global trafficking ring. They must hurry. Another truck is being prepared. Another twelve, vulnerable women are being groomed. Low can only find them by uncovering the ugliest of truths.

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'A nice slice of creepy Scandi-noir' Daily Mail Copenhagen is a mysterious city where strange and sinister things often happen. Menacing and at times darkly humorous there are echoes of Roald Dahl and Daphne du Maurier in these stories, many of which have been specially commissioned for Radio 4.

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Betty Trask Award winning author of In Search of the Missing Eyelash (Vintage). Female identity, sexuality and familial ties explored. Lifting Off will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered who they really are or has taken a job that diverts them from who they thought they would be.

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1970. Fourteen-year-old Tony is seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of racist violence and bizarre ritual. It's a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is explosively risky. 2003. James a young TV researcher, becomes obsessed with Neo Nazis and British Movement activist Nicky Crane in particular. As he becomes immersed in research, he begins to receive threatening phone calls. Two different worlds, two different eras but two lives that will ultimately and unforgettably collide.

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In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing The result is Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Peel Me a Lotus, the companion volume to Mermaid Singing relates their move to Hydra where they bought a house and grappled with the chaos of domestic life whilst becoming the centre of an informal bohemian community of artists and writers. That group included Leonard Cohen, who became their lodger, and his girlfriend Marianne Ihlen. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.

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‘My story starts and ends at railway stations, though of course I can’t know this yet as I clamber off the boat-train at Victoria that warm May afternoon… ‘ Growing up in a strict religious family in the 1920s, Annie Lang is witness to disturbing events that no one will explain. Only the family dog may know the answers. Six years on, student Annie returns from France to find her beloved brother in a mental hospital and her ally, the Sunday school teacher, vanished without trace. With the help of her childhood diary, and sister Beatrice, Annie turns detective to unearth the truth. Her journey leads to a discovery so disturbing that she believes it will ruin all their lives, unless they can atone for the past. Ros Franey beautifully captures that point when a child can sense, and indeed dissent against, secrets that adults think they are too young to grasp. Impulsive, brave and lovable, Annie Lang is formidable when she takes matters into her own hands.

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