Search results for ""parthian""

These creative nonfiction essays consider girlhood, motherhood, violence at home and abroad, violence against women, the consolation in writing, trauma, and redemption. The essays celebrate and interrogate popular and literary culture: for example the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Alun Lewis's love letters, David Bowie's `Life on Mars', or the poet John Burnside's writings about his abusive father. These timely meditations on women, ethics, and writing bring insights that only an immigrant and traveller like Brigley could provide.

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In October 1957 Marlon Brando married a young studio actress called Anna Kashfi. He was thirty-three and at the pinnacle of his beautiful fame having recently won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. The wedding was front-page news around the world. His new bride was twenty-three, claimed to be an Indian princess and was pregnant. The day after the wedding a factory worker living in Wales, William O'Callaghan, revealed that Brando's bride was in fact his daughter, Joan O'Callaghan and had been a butcher's assistant from Cardiff. This book sets out to discover who was telling the truth and who was lying – and, perhaps more importantly, why?

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A Sunday Times bestseller. A miraculous true-life Second World War survival story that is being featured on the BBC's ONE SHOW (The show attracts on average a daily audience of 5 million viewers) with a ten minute dramatised documentary to be broadcast in early October 2018. A Daily Mail true life story feature is in development. Further review and BBC radio coverage Trade Advertising to accompany the release `I could see that still no one had been able to get out from the cockpit. It must have been at this moment that I thought I was going to die because I became remarkably calm'. Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber, 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancee back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the twenty-one-year-old was thrown clear of his disintegrating airplane and found himself parachuting into the heart of Nazi Germany. He was soon to be captured and began his period as a prisoner of war. This engaging and compulsively readable true-life account of a Second World War airman, who cheated death in the sky, only to face interrogation and the prospect of being shot by the Gestapo, before having to endure months of hardship as a prisoner of war.

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Blending the naturalistic and the fabulistic, these elusive, delicate stories fold fable and fairy tale into the everyday, domestic settings of kitchen, garden, car. Women love, and lose, strange creatures they find by the garden gate; dream dogs are liberated from the icy prison of a fridge; bathrooms bloom into rainforests that souls can lose themselves in forever. Seemingly quotidian routines and unremarkable lives are pierced by Kovalyk’s precise, sensual prose, to reveal the magic lurking just beneath the surface of the daily skin of existence.

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Moving On bristles with the talent of writers from Zimbabwe. This collection brings together twenty of Zimbabwe's finest storytellers, from within the country and without.

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One of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century, the Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas is as famous for his poetry as he is for his dissolute, Bohemian lifestyle and tempestuous personal life. In The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, journalist Hilly Janes explores the poet's life and extraordinary legacy through the eyes of her father, the artist Alfred Janes. A member of Thomas's inner circle, he painted the poet at three key moments: in 1934, 1953 and, posthumously in 1964, portraits which are at the heart of Janes' work. Drawing on her own personal archive, including drawings, diaries, letters and new interviews with Thomas's friends and descendants, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas traces the course of the poet's life, from his birthplace in Swansea to his untimely death in a New York hospital in 1953.

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A collection about the fluidity of time and place, Rebel Sun charts our gradual unraveling; the compulsion to transform and shape-shift, to slowly unwind roots from the earth - grow fin and feather, know water and sky.Michael Sheen performed a poem Sophie McKeand had written for the 50th Anniversary of the Abarfan Disaster at Wales Millennium Centre in 2016:http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/michael-sheen-gives-moving-recital-12018594.Following the success of our crowdfunder for Cawl by Sion Tomos Owen in 2016, this is our next crowdfunder in 2017. Support this project here. Sophie McKeand is a mesmerising performer and TED talker. She has gigged regularly across the UK and will make videos and offer some very special perks for those wanting to pledge their support.

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In these poems, women raise their voices and subvert the age-old tales told on their behalf: Roman goddess Salacia explores her tumultuous relationship with Neptune; Gwen Ellis, the first woman hanged for witchcraft in Wales, reflects on her impending fate; a Queen bee is usurped by her daughter and depression visits in the emaciated form of an old and forgotten friend.

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FROM THE AUTHOR OF A VAN OF ONE'S OWN When Biddy Wells's elderly mother is suddenly struck down with a mysterious illness, Biddy moves her into the spare bedroom, little knowing how long the period of convalescence will last. Through the months that follow, the two women have to re-inhabit the close domestic proximity that they'd abandoned decades before and learn how to co-exist within a tangled web of emotional need, resentment and dependence. Eventually, Biddy manages to find a supported flat that's ideal for her mother. She settles quickly and, abandoning her morbidly stoic outlook on life, falls passionately in love with another resident. Biddy can only watch from the sideline as her mother embarks on an unlikely romance. Told with humour, wry insight, and refreshing honesty, Scrabble in the Afternoon examines the complicated, frustrating and ultimately rewarding story of how a daughter can come to terms with caring wholeheartedly for a mother. It also shows how a mother and daughter relationship can change and develop as life continues to offer fresh challenges and joys.

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"Portugal is not all that far away, or exotic, or dangerous, but it felt like a huge stretch for me to leave my partner, family, job and home and just go off. An overland solo trip lasting months in an ancient little campervan was not the kind of thing I did. But it was something I was about to do."In her debut memoir A Van of One's Own, Biddy Wells tells the story of how, propelled by a thirst for peace and quiet, for a modest adventure and, perhaps, for freedom, she left for Portugal on her own, with only her old campervan, Myfawny, and her GPS, Tanya, for company. Having left just about everything behind, her solo trip forces her to face her fears, her past, and herself. The road provides the perfect canvas to connect the dots between a past breakdown and her present need for freedom, as she reflects on her own life, her relationship, her family and the world around her - to see whether her life still has room for her in it. As she meets wise and not-so- wise people, members of the campervan community and friendly locals, her outlook on life begins to shift, and a chance meeting in a bar leads to the person who will put her on the right track.But will she go back home, to Wales?And what is the meaning of 'home? 'A Van of One's Own is a journey through the breath-taking scenery of France, Spain, and finally Portugal, populated by colourful characters and the roar of the ocean, the taste of fresh fish and the grind of the asphalt; but more importantly, it is a journey through past memories and present conflicts to inner peace.

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For around twenty years, Nick Fisk believed that one day he would find a letter on his doormat from Cardiff City FC requesting his services on the football pitch. When he realised it was unlikely he was ever going to be offered the role of groundsman, he decided the next best thing would be to write about the club instead. A former member of the not especially notorious non-hooligan gang, The Sad Crew, Fisk has plenty of experience to draw from, in terms of going to football matches, and coming up with ridiculous chants that nobody ever joins in with. In The Blues Are Back in Town Nick charts the 2014/15 season, following the team and its fans, and trying to rediscover his passion for the recently relegated club, while at the same time, reflecting on the good old days. The blog he kept, The Fisk Report, gave an insight into not just what it's like to be a typical fan, but what supporting The Bluebirds is like through the eyes of a Fisk. It is a funny, enigmatic and personal book about the passion and belief of being a football fan.

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With passion, humour and remarkable insight Gwyn Thomas captures the world of South Wales in the 1830s during the turbulent years of the Merthyr and Newport Risings. As the newly-built foundries enter their first decline, a travelling harpist from the rural north arrives in one of the new towns to find his friends caught in a fiercely-fought industrial dispute, a dispute which quickly spirals out of control. A powerful and sweeping novel by one of Wales's great literary figures, 'All Things Betray Thee', tells the epic story of a people, their joys and victories, but also their sorrows and defeats.

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At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd, and it is from this vantage point in time and space that Alun Richards cast his baleful eye on the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. In this compendium volume, the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, are combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir "Days of Absence" to take us to the core of those incomparable valleys, with their lived experience stripped bare for once of their usual cloak of cliche and sentiment.

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An experiment into the sources of the human brain through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly wrong. She has seen the great god Pan and will die giving birth to a daughter. Twenty years later feted society hostess Helen Vaughan becomes the source of much fevered speculation. Many men are infatuated with her beauty, but great beauty has a price, sometimes you have to pay with the only thing you have left. The Great God Pan was a sensation when first published in 1894. Its author, Arthur Machen, was a struggling unknown writer living in London. He had translated Casanova's memoirs and was living on a small inheritance. He immediately became one of the most talked-about writers of the last years of the nineteenth century, while the publication marked the start of his ongoing influence on modern fantasy and horror. Machen's dark imaginings of the reality behind ancient beliefs feature again in the acclaimed, mesmerising short story 'The White People' and the curious tale 'The Shining Pyramid', also in this volume.

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One of Merthyr's Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town's wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children. Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district's most notorious drinker and fighter until he is 'saved'. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren. In his 1935 novel "Black Parade", writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century.

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The Alone to the Alone unites Gwyn Thomas's lyrical and philosophical flights of narrative in a satire whose savagery is only relieved by irrepressible laughter. It is Gwyn Thomas' most shaped work: the underlying meaning of South Wales' history is not so much documented as laid bare for universal dissection and dissemination. The novel, with its distinctive plural narration, is a choric commentary on human illusion and knowledge, on power and its attendant deprivation, on dreams and their destruction.

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Translated by Marta Ziemelis Narcoses (translated from the Latvian Narkozes) is a collection of fresh, powerfully feminine and open poetry, never derivative nor contrived, but inspired by Gruntmane's direct and honest personal experience. Full of life and love, joy, and pain, Narcoses is written with keen psychological insight and a courageous amount of self-awareness, to establish an intimacy and trust between poet and reader. Narcoses is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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Marius Burokas' collection for Parthian, Now I Understand, translated and selected by Rimas Uzgiris, reveals the unbreakable connection he feels with Vilnius, as well as the comfort he finds within literature: books are my/ paths/ and garden/my shelter /and clinic.

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Censored in Latvia until 2003 Translated by Jayde Will. Originally written in 1967 and not released in its uncensored form until 2003, Bels’s infamous novel, Insomnia, has become a classic of Cold War writing and continues to exert a major influence over Latvian literature. The story is filtered through the thoughts, emotions and fantasies of the main character, a man of detachment who is content to observe his fellow tenants and the wider world around him from the tired luxury of his apartment and daily routines. When a young woman, fleeing some unknown threat and in desperate need of help, comes into his orbit, he’s forced out of this inertia and into the active role of protector. There begins a quest which, for both of them, has the power to jolt them into a new way of being and living. This edition contains the official transcripts of the investigative reports regarding the banning of the book, as well as a statement by Bels himself. Translated from the Latvian by Jayde Will. Insomnia is part of the Parthian Baltic project which was launched on time for the London Book Fair 2018. The poetry collections were launched at the Wheatsheaf Parthian Poetry Festival in April 2018.

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From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir

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A story of time slipping, desire just out of reach, like memories lost

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Bill Rees has been living in the south of France for ten years working as an itinerant bookseller in Montpellier. The one thing he misses about England is table tennis. Then he sees an advert to join a club for “experienced players only” and veterans. He starts training immediately, he’s forty and not as fit as he used to be but Bill Rees is returning to the game à la carte. Covering one Sunday tournament in the depths of Languedoc when his team bids to make the National Finals, Bill Rees produces a deeply felt and deeply funny homage to the beautiful game of ping-pong. Rees shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, fast (especially when his club mate Alain is at the table), consuming. All of which is revealed from the perspective of a Brit playing in French amateur leagues. Conveyed is the pain of competition, the agony of losing and the joys of victory. The reader is also regaled with a Zen-like insight into the sport. For all those athletes who dream of glory being around the corner and never too late. Contains illustrations by the Monpellier based artist Beachy.

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Cheval 9 contains a selection of the best work submitted this year to the Terry Hetherington Award, which has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales.

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Cheval 7 presents a selection of the writing submitted by the talented young entrants to this year's Terry Hetherington Award, and includes new work by previous winners.Some of these writers are appearing in print for the first time; others have already begun to make their mark on the literary scene.

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A coming of age late tale as a jaded PR man seeks meaning and love in his life and addresses past, present and future along with a misfit cast of mystics, tramps, bar flies and copywriters.

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A young man's quest for beauty through literature, love, drugs and dreams becomes a mystical, lyrical classic from the father of supernatural horror. There is a foreword by Catherine Fisher one of whose acclaimed "Oracle" trilogy was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and is an international bestseller translated into over 20 languages. Originally published in 1907, it is widely regarded as Machen's finest lyrical work.

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Hereditation tells the story of the Sloane family. Living in New York in the middle of the 20th Century, brothers Erwin and Maynard share their brownstone Harlem house with their mother, a perpetually ill woman who has recently suffered the indignity of being abandoned by her philandering husband, Ezra.

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1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs; Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt.

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Beca Lewis was so hoping for the fluffy toy pony she had seen in the shop window. But on her birthday there was only an envelope from her parents on the table. She didn't know that she would soon be hugging her own real live pony. Siani the Shetland is black and furry, with quite a mind of her own. To Beca she is a dream come true.

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Chronicles the poet's experience of being diagnosed with prostrate cancer, of undergoing surgery and then of entering recovery. This collection of poems summarises how many people feel towards a disease which is regarded with dread. It contains material, which is unsettling yet informative and thought provoking.

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Insightful and informative, this volume of essays offers a fresh outlook and critical appraisal of contemporary plays.

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Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging off her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. Tracy's thinks that if Anita's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work.

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In these linked short stories Sonia Edwards' characters spin out their interwoven lives; the shifting perspective of each story serving to illuminate another facet of truth and experience.

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The selected stories of one of Wales's leading writers, "Outside Paradise" is a testament to women of all ages. Sometimes bright and uplifting, sometimes dark and moving, Sian James's work celebrates life.

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This publication is a collection of poems, often provocative, sometimes funny. The words trace a development from ferocious performance poetry to an increasingly bittersweet seam of writing, challenging and honest.

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Jo is a young woman with a little girl. Life is a council estate and a married man who loves her. She begins as an intelligent single mother determined to get out of the poverty trap, but after her married lover gets her pregnant and leaves, she experiences a descent through love into hell.

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A romance that tells the story of a refugee named Gregor who has to find his way through a world of half-real and half-fantastic territories in a quest for his past and future. The book has won the National Eisteddfod Prose Medal as well as the BBC Wales Writer of the Year Award.

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Joe England explores the possible constitutional meltdown of a divided UK and its consequences, reflecting on Wales' position as the poorest nation of all. As a constitutional crisis looms, this book contemplates a reimagined Wales and what that would mean for its people.

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Feral Monster follows Jax and her noisy, opinionated brain as they navigate love, identity, class and family. Mashing up grime, R&B, soul, pop and rap, the soundtrack takes us from the high highs to low lows of the hormonal rollercoaster ofadolescence.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018) including work by John Sam Jones, Sian James, Rhys Davies, Deborah Kay Davies, Aled Islwyn, and Kate North. New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. An accessible but scholarly introduction places the writers and their stories in their historical and literary contexts. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.

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"Dear Adolf. Don't start anything. It's the Coal Trip." The dark clouds of war are gathering over Europe yet the inhabitants of the south Wales town of Penddawn have other things on their minds. There's rugby, of course, and religion, too, not to mention work, or the lack of it. Not to mention the annual trip to Tenby, and a chance to get sand in your shoes, and forget about both poverty and Hitler. But for one small boy the worlds of warfare and welfare mean very little: his mind is crammed full of books and the wonders they contain: he can dream of little else... The Last Coal Trip to Tenby is drenched in the warm sun of nostalgia, a heartwarming tale of abiding friendships, and a portrait of a community that's as close knit as an old cardigan. It's a novel written with vim and vigour and oodles of good humour, about a cast of endearing characters who will stay in the mind.

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The Crossing bridges the past and the present and connects Wales with America, as it tells of coal owners and coal workers in the age of great transatlantic liners and fortunes to be made. At its heart is a father’s search for his daughter in Welsh valleys no longer proud, where creaming off regeneration grants has replaced coal mining as a way of life and development parks now stand where once did pit head wheels. It follows a lifetime’s search for lost love, the sinking of a great ship in a great war, misplaced family and forlorn hopes where individual lives are shaped and fated in the shadow of modernity and the cold hand of progress. This brave, bold and challenging work conjures a vivid cast of characters into being and offering – with ready vim and ample vigour – their compelling, complex and ultimately telling story.

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This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written by an acclaimed biographical historian, the essays not only challenge expectations about how women's lives were lived in the last two centuries, they also explore different ways of approaching biographical writing and understanding, as well as raising issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland and internationally. Lady Rhondda and Edith Picton-Turbervill championed women's equality at the centre of power in Westminster, whilst Myvanwy and Olwen Rhys saw education as the key to change. Women's suffrage played a prominent part in the lives of these women and was especially central to Margaret Wynne Nevinson's thinking, writing and actions. The intelligence, determination and grit of these women is revealed through their stirring stories. Taken together, the essays critically investigate the challenges, setbacks and hard-won achievements of feisty women who rocked the boat over a period of 150 years.

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A remarkable new selection in translation from the preeminent Turkish poet, Haydar Ergulen. The poems have been translated by a team of 13 translators, who include the co-editors of the book.

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Casablanca, 1992. In a white Art Deco villa, a man is pushed down the marble staircase to his death. His murder, never truly explained, fractures a family, a way of life, and the minds of both his wife and his daughter. To survive, his nine-year-old granddaughter carefully suppresses her memories until twenty years later, when her life is once more ripped apart, this time by a disastrous love affair. Returning to Casablanca, she relives the tragedy of her grandfather's murder and the events surrounding it. But now she sees it all not simply through the eyes of an innocent child, but with an adult's awareness that things - and people - might not always be quite as they seem. In a beautifully constructed first-person narrative that shifts in time and place, young French-Moroccan writer Ma -Do Hamisultane weaves a delicate web of fact and fiction. Her prose - sometimes luminous, often powerfully cinematographic - has drawn comparisons with Marguerite Duras, one of France's most famous novelists and experimental film-makers.

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