Search results for ""Cinnamon Press""

A book of lyrical landscape poetry set in the Cambridgeshire Fens and with a mission to revise and overturn common impressions of this landscape, powerfully revealing the intrinsic interest, peculiarity and dynamism of the Fens. -- Cinnamon Press

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Ruined by the 1929 stock market crash, Tristram finds himself penniless and stranded in Budapest, friendless and far from home. He's given a last chance to save himself-simply deliver an old locket to be repaired. But in a near miss road accident, the locket vanishes and he finds himself on the streets. Befriended by the suave but dissolute Voit, Tristram becomes convinced the locket has been stolen by the ruthless Attar Nox and he and Voit try to steal it back. The robbery goes wrong and Tristram finds himself on the run. Along the way, he meets Alba, Nox's fiancee and former prisoner. As they find temporary refuge in a small basement flat, Tristram is haunted by spectres past and present and, when their safety is finally shattered by the appearance of an unexpected ghost from his past, he is forced deeper into a quest that is stranger and more challenging than Tristram realises. Blending echoes of Celtic myth and Grail legend with an undercurrent of Alchemical thought, A Locket of Hermes is a spiritual quest towards a deeper reality, a deeper sense of self.

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Celebrating an increasingly interesting form that concentrates short prose pieces with the techniques of poetry brought to bear, this is the first anthology of its kind in the UK and features well known proponents of the prose poetry form such as George Szirtes and Pascale Petit, as well as emerging voices. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

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Charting a life spent lost in numbers, is My Life in Receipts a memoir? Too fictionalised. A novella? Too close to the truth. All too recognisable? YES! From chanting times-tables and unlearning old money to discovering the sinking schoolroom ‘Maths Feeling’ that ends a child’s ambitions to be a ‘scientist’. From the promissory note of student days to the hard times of the dole giro. From the exuberance of the first wage packet to the pleasures and limits of being able to pay your way… My Life in Receipts plunges you into the world of bags full of threatening letters, intimidating bailiffs, bankruptcy, eviction—even imprisonment. Revealing the lives of people in a perpetual cost of living crisis, and the work of those who help them fight to reclaim their lives, this is a dark, original and tragi-comic exploration of the past, the future, money, debt: whether to flee, whether to fight. There are some victories, some routs—and, along the way, thoughts on electronic train tickets too. Andrew Dutton will make you laugh out loud, scream with righteous anger and, most of all, make you think.

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It’s the last months of the nineteenth century and twenty-two year old Euphemia Thorniwork, is out of step with the men’s world she lives in. A mathematical research student at Oxford, looked on with suspicion by her her tutor, Professor Milton, she is forced to collaborate with fellow-student, Leo Lazarus, also under suspicion—for being Jewish. At home in London, life is under pressure—for months a toxic fog has engulfed the city each evening, bringing illness to many, including Euphemia’s widowed mother. The fog has been accompanied by a wave of body-snatching and the body of Euphemia’s beloved cousin, Pearl, remains missing. Additionally, money is tight and Euphemia and her mother must move in with relatives who disapprove of her lifestyle. Haunted by dreams of Pearl in which numbers, a red heifer and Biblical purification rites provide insoluble clues, she discovers an article about communicating with the dead using sound waves. Determined to cling to rational explanations, Euphemia returns to Oxford, but when she begins to fall in love with Leo, and learns something of esoteric Judaism, their research takes an unconventional turn and the questions mount. Can Euphemia and Leo find the body snatchers? What is the origin of the toxic fog and can they find a way to defeat it? Will Leo and Euphemia’s love survive their religious divide? Blending Victorian romance and drama with a compelling supernatural story, The Sound of Gematria is an engaging debut novel not to be missed.

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Fleeing London at the outbreak of the Second World War, Merry and her siblings are taken far from home, leaving their father behind and cutting them off from the both the ‘real’ world and contact with other children. Peace takes them back to their life in London until the children grow and go their separate ways. And for Merry married life brings romance and daughters, but her husband’s illness also brings mounting financial pressures. Isolated from the excitement of Sixties London, anxious about money, Merry becomes increasingly aware of the religious, social and cultural family differences that run through generations of her family, silently accepted but constantly exerting their stresses. A fictional pot-pourri in prose and poetry, Say I am Merry explores love and loss and the way the stories of one generation are handed to the next. A poignant, ambitious and compelling debut.

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After a decade trying to accept that London is home, a devastating bereavement pushes 29 year old May to return to the rural Vermont town she fled so long ago. Ignoring her sister’s strong misgivings, she immerses herself in creating a healing garden, bringing people together with the food she loves to cook, and renovating a dilapidated farmhouse until she starts to find a sense of peace and purpose. But as spring turns to sultry summer and she is thrown increasingly together with Harley, the man she loved and left ten years before, May is torn. Will she take a risk and follow her heart, or go back to London where her ever loyal sister is longing for her return? Mish Cromer’s latest novel of love and friendship and the healing power of the natural environment explores the impact of family, trauma and loss, and the powerful need we all have to find the place where we belong. Praise for Mish Cromer’s debut novel: Alabama Chrome You’ll come for the wonderful characters — gruff Cassidy with a dark past, wise Lark, Belle and her beauty parlour, Evangeline the mechanic, Brooke Adler the hard-nosed reality TV presenter... then you’ll be swept away by the fantastic sense of place. Set in small-town Kentucky and focusing on the bar which acts as the town’s front porch where stories are told and secrets are ultimately revealed, Alabama Chrome is a beautifully written page-turner, told in a voice that will stay with you — along with the book's big heart. — Alison Chandler You begin to understand, reading this story, how important it is to allow yourself to be understood, — Joanne Merrison A compassionate and skilful tale of a soulful young man’s struggle, vividly intertwined with the characters of a remote US town who welcomed him, and their reaction to the arrival of a controversial reality TV presenter. A gripping read. — Isabella

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With nothing but a collection of vinyl records without a player, a shoebox of memories, and a lot of secrets, Cassidy is used to being alone. But when his camper-van breaks down in a snowstorm and he is rescued by a kind young woman, Lark, he finds himself working in a small-town bar and becoming part of the community. But with the arrival of an inscrutable new waitress, Reba, Cassidy finds himself unsettled by a sense of recognition. And there are further complications as Brooke Adler, reality TV host and hero of the town's inhabitants, arrives unexpectedly to shoot a new show. Cassidy is drawn into protecting Reba from the ghosts of her past only to discover that his own ghosts are chasing him and that he must find the courage to speak the truth, or risk losing everything, again. A story of family, both given and found, and the long shadow of domestic violence, Alabama Chrome interrogates the masks of the modern world, and what true kindness means.

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Frank Molinari faked his own death in a fire at the fairground he owned with his brother. Now he’s back, in debt, and looking to be bailed out, but as fatal events spin out of control, the past and present weave with mounting tension. For DI Tom Fairfax, whose daughter, Susie, died in the original fire, ghosts and guilt return, while Susie’s friend Leah, a local journalist consumed with blame, sees the mystery as an opportunity to escape the small Northern seaside town at last. 
Complicated by old grievances, dead ends, suspicion and hidden identities, The Weight of Bones is an exploration of the difficulty of finding either closure or justice in a world of intrigue and messy lives. 
What does Dolores, Frank’s lover, who was with Tom when Susie died, really know and what will it cost her? Why does Leah want Frank’s brother, Genaro, to be found guilty? How does Leah’s flatmate, the Rumanian, Mati, fit into the story and what is his connection to the mysterious Eva, and hers to Frank? And why does the arrival of the arrogant Chief Inspector Robert Nardone only add to the confusion, forcing Tom to finally turn to Leah for help?
 As a story of a POW interment camp on Orkney and an old love triangle begin surface, another story of jealousy and greed accompany it, leading back to the fair ground and to the explosive finale. 
A tangled and beautifully textured tale of murder, fires, deceit, blame and guilt. Densely written, with distinctive characters and a mystery that hooks from the opening line to an ending that refuses to be neat, The Weight of Bones is a thrilling debut.

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Forty-something divorcee Mel is struggling with infertility. But when she has to look after her step-grandson, four year-old Billy, Mel's life begins to change in ways she never expected. A deeply empathic, humane debut, Gratitude asks how we live now and how we make meaning in lives that rarely work to plan.

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Lying on a lounger outside a flyblown café near Naples, Mike reflects on the last few months. He'd set off for the wedding of the charismatic Al, whose closed community is in the Calder Valley. Three months later, Mike's wearing a white robe, standing over an open grave. Alan Newcombe vividly immerses us in the life of Gritstone House. There's no electricity or running water or contact with the outside world. And Al pulls the strings in a house where there's fraud, secret burials, and clandestine murder. Gothic, serious, yet brimming with wit and humour, Gritstone is an impressive debut.

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Arriving in Los Angeles intent on donating her kidney to an unwell friend, She contemplates the powerful magnetism of California. Like the gold-diggers, the health-seekers and the movie moguls before her, She had come to the state as a young woman to seek her fortune in the industry', but her dreams were not fulfilled. What had become of the men who did not strike gold, those who could not be cured of their ailments, the ones who did not find fame? Where are the failures? Where are the women like her?Before leaving London, her brother had said, Most people would give an arm and a leg for a month in LA to revisit their youth. You're willing to give a kidney. Perhaps he was right. There are no heroes. In the lounge of a luxury hotel, observing the clientele, She asks: Why are they so lucky? Why are they so worthy? Why haven't they offered their kidneys, spare bedrooms or a helping hand to the poor, the sick and the needy?There is an opportunity for karmic restoration here.

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Memory, time, love and loss weave through all of G W Colkitto’s poems with a resonance that moves us fluidly from yearning to insight. The master of seeing connections, Shake the Kaleidoscope finds Colkitto taking a view across the whole of life: non-linear, sometimes fragmentary, imbued with whimsy and humour, but above all permeable to the scars and triumphs of loss and love. As the poems range back and forth across the years, one memory provoking another, it is not only the whole of the poet’s life laid out in the pieces of glass to be endlessly rearranged, but the whole of the human condition. Whether examining interior moments or negotiations with the world of work; whether writing astute commentary on political and social inequalities, or simply savouring those small moments of deep joy provoked by the simplest of things, Colkitto holds up a mirror to life—his own, and ours. Shake the Kaleidoscope is a major work from an accomplished poet: lucid, accessible, profound.

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Walking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time's abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more..., these urgent poems carry our collective grief for all that is lost-'there was no one to grieve / so I walked beside them, taking it on.' ('Dead Swans on a Winter Coast') And alongside the losses, cultural and ecological, there is also vision, searing and politically acute. Prophetic in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, but with the lyric compression of William Carlos Williams, whose words provide the epigraph for this collection, Barnie imagines his quiet rural homeland occupied and brutalised in the central sequence, 'Occupied': 'the safety net / so full of holes you couldn't catch a whale in it [...]/ I knew the days of iridescence were lost for ever.' ('Iridescence') While in 'M.A.D.: The Sequel' rhymes skip along with an irony reminiscent of William Blake's use of nursery rhyme metre to convey horror. As the world is incinerated we hear: 'cry if you must / there was no one to gather / the heart's dust.' Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true. Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.

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In all of Robin Thomas’s work there is a subtlety and wit so contained that it invites re-reading. It takes full immersion to savour the linguistic dexterity and intelligence at work, to appreciate that humour often belies the absolute seriousness of life. In reminded of something, this balance is particularly delicate and the poignancy superbly controlled and utterly affecting. With a yearning that can only come of love and loss, the poems use the simplest of metaphors in the most lucid language to convey memories and emotions so complex and heart-breaking that they are almost beyond the scope of words—a collection that is profoundly moving and exquisitely realised.

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For years Bonnie Thurston has written short poems that focus on a single image or one revelatory idea. They were not sonnets, but were all fourteen lines long. The great sonneteers wrote sequences, often several on one topic and in this Bonnie Thurston follows in their footsteps, leading the reader on a gentle journey from home and through the seasons of the sequence, one that beckons or disturbs the imagination after setting it free to roam through daily experiences that, in the words of , Wordsworth are 'reflected in tranquility'. In these insightful, honed and precise poems you will discover the extraordinariness of the ordinary life and, mirabile dictu, wisdom. This is a collection to savour.

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Light Airs confirms Mick Evans as an exceptional poet whose linguistic dexterity in making every phrase work on multiple levels is matched by his impressive range of references. Whether the metaphors are of love or change, hubris or the banality of evil, the control and voice is always unerring, the precision always honed and intelligent. There are poems here that will chill and unsettle the reader and poems of exquisite tenderness. What unites them is there is never a complacent, sentimental or glib word. These are poems of depth and passion threaded with humane humour. Pushing at the boundaries of form, Light Airs is an inventive, honest and distinctive collection that will resonate long after reading.

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Opening a conversation with paintings and sculptures from the 16th Century to the present, this second collection by Nigel Hutchinson displays all his hallmark wit and insight. Artists as diverse and Brueghel (elder and younger), Lautrec, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth and Cezanne find themselves taking a skewed but searching view of the points at which life and art rub together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes with greater friction. Humane, wry, always spirited, Do Not Enter Alarmed Area is a testament to the power of both words and images.

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Willoughby's new landlady at Gladstone Terrace is not what he expects. The flamboyant Ruby Hoffman wears a green beret on which she's pinned a velvet bird by its feet, explaining that she busks with her cousin, Gregor - Ruby playing accordion while Gregor dances. Ruby and Gregor, born nine years and one country apart, are bound to each other by a family weighed down with sacrifice in the Dutch resistance on one side and Nazi collusion on the other. While Ruby's colourful persona hides a brittle fragility, Gregor's burden of guilt is channelled into caring for others, feeding their strange group of tenants, each barely clinging to the edges of society. But when the enigmatic Leda Godwin turns up, wanting to know Gregor's story, the delicate balance of their lives is shaken. Peopled with intriguing and memorable characters and told with exquisite precision, The Dancer at World's End explores the legacy of violence, whether perpetrated by those committing genocide or those opposing them and how the stories handed down to us of who we are or should be, who we should love or hate, go on shaping lives across generations. An extraordinary sequel to the powerful events recounted in The Green Table, this is a courageous, heart-rending and important story. Set in mid-seventies London, the story goes back to Nazi Germany, as replete with pomp and ambition as it is with horror, and to post-War Netherlands, building a complex tale of identity, survival and grace.

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Charting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm Muller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on Muller's poems. The poems here become an "assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe..." and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.

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70s rock bands — Led Zep, Sabbath, Free, Skynyrd, Taste… 70s rock guitarists — Page, Blackmore, Trower, Santana, Gallagher… Mickey Hunter? Forgotten by Classic Rock fans, Crown & Kingdom are the lost gods of 70s music. Led by the mercurial Mickey Hunter, they powered across the rock scene, with phenomenal, platinum-selling albums and scorching live gigs. But with great heights come great falls and as the fame grew toxic—especially for Hunter—C&K’s ultimate destruction was inevitable. Fifteen years after his song played out, Rock God Complex tells Mickey Hunter’s story in his words, revealing the turbulent truth of a man who became a god among guitarists. Tracey Iceton is a novelist and rock historian. Her unique relationship with the elusive Hunter granted her privileged access to the guitarist’s story. Rock God Complex is an extraordinary book.

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Joseph Schneider grows up in a Cherokee-Jewish family in the Smokey mountains of North Carolina. He dreams to be a cook on the biggest ship there is in the world but his attachment to his mother Rachel and his rootedness to the little mountain village keep him from moving on. When his mother falls ill she reveals she stole him from a Palestinian girl Aliya in the 80s when she volunteered at a hospital in Gaza. Joseph refuses to know anything more about his biological mother, but later when Rachel dies, Joseph honors his promise to her and embarks on a painful pilgrimage to the holy land, a walk in the footsteps of his American mother and a search for Aliya.

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The sense of place and of senses porous to land and sea bring to life this stand-out sequence of poems. The voice, at once conversational and distinctive, is enraging and personal. There's an ache at the core of the beauty here, not of self-pity or of indulgence, but of empathy, of griefs, both human and beyond human, that held to the light, recognised, and invite compassion. This is clear-eyed but gracious poetry.

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The final part of the explosive Celtic Colours Trilogy When the big men get around the table on Good Friday of 1998 and sign up to peace in Northern Ireland nine year old Cian Duffy’s story should have ended. Instead it is the beginning of a decade of Troubles for him. Haunted by his mother’s IRA past and chased by present day violence sectarianism, Cian ends up being forced to flee peace-torn Belfast. Facing a life in exile, he reconciles himself to the past and makes a new life for himself, somewhere he feels he belongs. Then Britain votes for Brexit; the old adage of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity is tabled yet again and Cian has to confront the past and the future. White Leaves of Peace is a stark reminder that ending a war takes more than the signing of a treaty. Peace is hard won. You have to fight for it.

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Lyrical, personal, but always accessible, Sea Poetics is imbued with a deep feeling for the natural world. Wooldridge approaches poetry as though it is a painting, inspired by an experience of light or a moment that focuses attention, words are her canvass and the sea and sky her frequent themes, often leading to explorations of how individual experience relates to the macro scale of the universe. Her fresh images distil moments with skill and delicacy, pulling the reader into a shared emotional response. Skilful, evocative and compelling, Patricia Helen Wooldridge is an elegant debut voice.

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Growing from a year-long commitment to write one haiku a day, Catstrawe ranges through family history and female relationships, the stimulation of travel and the inspiration to found in the immediate environment, politics and the world situation, but always, at its heart, the experience of living with cancer. Quickly outgrowing the limitations of seventeen syllables to explorer more extended forms, this is a book about living life to the full in the face of the inevitability of death.

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Brimming with wit, moments of acute observation and imagination, and written in a wry, self-deprecating Billy Collins-esque style, Will Kemp's third collection is replete with refreshing images for the things that enrich life, from clouds to sport, art to music. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

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Hong Kong - a teeming city where ritual, religion, the spirits of the dead and the spirit of enterprise meet, sometimes clash. For Reini it''s a home that sometimes is strange, sometimes familiar, a place of contrasts - even her name: Reini to close friends, Kim to her colleagues. When she meets an Buddhist environmental activist, she finds Hong Kong''s many contradictions come into sharp focus as her own past, her friendships and her work begin to knot, pull tight, threaten to unravel completely.A rich and astoundingly evocative debut novel, Red Affairs, White Affairs weaves a path through the mysteries of relationships and friendship, of commitment and compassion. Immersive and mesmerising, this is a novel as vivid as the extraordinary city that forms its backdrop.

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All the Different Darknesses explores our sense of what lies within or beyond the everyday, taking inspiration from the lives of objects, as well as familial memories and disturbances emerging from '... the different darknesses'.

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Poetry about politics and society

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Based in part on the author’s mother’s handwritten memoirs, this novel is an act of bricolage in which the narrator keeps finding gaps in the materials. We desire to regain the past, but every time we attempt it we fabricate it anew. Through various narrative voices, the author discovers a different sense of her mother than she held during her lifetime. This is a type of biographical revisionism. We cannot know the past, especially that of our mothers, but we can re-member them. Meticulously researched, this book constitutes an extended meditation on memory, the strength of memory and its fallibility.

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Alfred Wayman is an enigma: solitary, strange and with no past. All that is known of him is his hatred of falsehood and obsession with the night sky. 
Friends and enemies speculate on his character and history; some aiming to understand him, others to destroy him. In doing so they reveal their stories and the loves, hates, jealousies and rivalries that make them who they are.
 Wayman thrives in darkness, but every night must come to an end and the night-creature must face the triumph of the light.

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Second poetry collection by the American author, resident in the UK, exploring the imperfections and failures of memory found in private and public life and in the Arts themselves. -- Welsh Books Council

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Honza Pernath’s life is barren. The person he loves is gone and his friends, even his dreams, say she will not return. When a chance meeting sets him on a search for his lost love, the path is neither straight nor easy and Honza comes to doubt everything, including the one he searches for. A single image—a star rising over the sea—calls him on, but that image is more than it seems and as Honza nears its source, his search reveals more than he could have imagined. A sequel to the mysterious and beautiful short story, ‘Marietta Merz’ (now an illustrated chapbook), Child of the Black Sun is an exploration of the living symbols at the core of everyday life; a visionary evocation of the internal journey.

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Poems inspired by the life of Vitalie Rimbaud, mother of the radical poet Arthur Rimbaud.

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How do we relate the different parts of our lives, our identities and roles? In Notes from a Eucharistic Life, Manon Ceridwen James explores the range of stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us—Mother, woman, Welsh, priest, lecturer, sports fan, consumer… Each call for attention, sometimes integrating, sometimes competing for space. There is a sense of movement in the service of the Eucharist that is captured in these poems—from welcome, through confession and listening to the ‘Word’, to the final dismissal—and these elements are not only present in a religious life. Confession in the poetry of Notes from a Eucharistic Life becomes a tool for exploring truth, with humour as well as precision; the ‘Word’ opens up questions of voice and language… Above all, what unites the pieces in this collection is the sense that all of it can be given thanks for, all of it is sacred.

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“We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long,” writes John Barnie in one of his ‘observations’ (‘Art in the Flatlands’). And bite he delivers. Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more… Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality. Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we “…live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void.” (‘Varieties of Meaning’) Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.

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Composed in three movements—preludes, variations and fugue—Daughter is an exploration of what being the daughter means for the poet and her parents, recognising that there is so much of our parents’ lives that is barely glimpsed, that is pieced together from stories. What was it like to live through the Second World War beside the Thames in London? How can the writer celebrate her parents’ lives and mourn their deaths through her own development as a poet? How can she express love for those she thinks of constantly? For Patricia Helen Wooldridge, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past, the answers are acts of imagination, merging memoir with poetry. Lyrical, seasonal, walking in landscape, soaring with birds and full of flowers, Daughter paints the world of parents and poet through a collage of memories. Tender, poignant, balancing the enormity of loss with the vastness of love and, crucially, demonstrating the grace of poetry to meld past and present, this is an exquisite and heart-felt collection.

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Tough teen Riz Montgomery plays high stakes roulette as London burns. With bugs in her skin and noise in her head, Riz is real and the rest are fake. What matters to her: Mark Rothko’s art. So despite the horror of family time, it’s a fine thing that a major Rothko show coincides with the global conference where her so-called Dad is such a big wheel. Holed up with VIPs at a heavily guarded hotel, Riz collides with a sharp-dressed assassin she calls The Man. As she plunges into a world of covert deals and power plays, Riz is befriended and betrayed by Russian and Syrian agents. And emotionally bruised by the leader of a violent anti-capitalist group in town to protest the conference. Told in Riz’s breathless, insistent voice, the edgy friendship between the isolated teen and the travelling killer drives a thrill-ride through riot-torn London.

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How does a family survive when their sixteen-year-old son is diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, a condition that comes with episodic paranoid schizophrenia: hallucinations, delusions…? When the family is that of Marie Dullaghan and her son Aidan, the willingness to negotiate the strangest behaviour, and resilience to live with the shadow that suicidal ideation might become a knock on the door whenever Aidan took off, was extraordinary. And just as extraordinary was the fact that Aidan somehow made his way through A levels and a BA in Fine Art, while his mother did her own degree in photography. With a degree show to prepare for, Marie began to reconstruct some of the worst and most bizarre moments with Aidan’s help. The conversations and healing that came from this adventure in art were remarkable. The images, always more art than biography, became a sequence of re-imagined narratives going beyond any pretence of historical accuracy to give viewers a rare and authentic insight into this journey of mother and son. The powerful images were shown at exhibitions and then put away. Until, Marie revisited them whilst in lockdown in Malaysia, this time through the medium of poetry. The resulting book opens a deep and poignant conversation around mental health. Moving across the emotional range of despair, terror and bewilderment, it becomes a testimony to healing, empathy and hope. Mother and Son is a triumph of both art and poetry, but most of all a triumph of the human spirit.

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Thrust into a hostile world, and unable to comprehend the language, Heike, an immigrant and ‘enemy’ child, struggles to understand the English islanders as she adjusts to the new identity demanded of her. Intent on escaping the traumas of growing up in fascist Germany and the horrors of its post-war desolation, Heike’s mother will marry the charismatic English officer she met during the Allied occupation of Lüneburg. Her daughter, who will be known as ‘Susanna’ from now on, must be kept innocent of her mother’s past and grow up to be English. As this memoir of displacement, national character, and misunderstandings unfolds, S M Saunders becomes the detective in her own story, searching for the truth that will reconcile her double identity and conflicting emotions. But this is far from a misery memoir. This is a tale of love—the narrator’s intense love for the extraordinary and eccentric English people whose positive influences not only shaped her and her mother, but also lent her the strength to come to terms with both her own identity and with her mother’s complex, harrowing story. Susanna: the making of an English girl explores a childhood that is sad, beautiful, funny, rich in detail and marked, above all, by love.

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Justin, a popular Leeds professor, seeks redemption in the ashes of youthful idealism. Holding together his family is already a struggle as his son, Sanjay, is drawn into radical politics by his lover Farida, who joins a Kurdish Women's militia to fight ISIS. With nerves already frayed, Justin's wife, Harpreet, is devastated when revelations of his past as an urban bomber come to light, turning his life upside down. Can love and loyalty prevent this family from imploding?

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Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. When life unravels for Beth after the break up of a long marriage, she finds herself reaching back for answers. Into her past as a troubled, pregnant teenager in a home rapidly falling apart. Into the life of her great-grandmother, using her skills as a researcher and psychoanalyst to find the truth behind family secrets. Moving between past and present, through parallel stories of family disintegration and lives knocked off course, and exploring how secrets resonate with shame down through the generations, Britannia Street is a story of how a woman carries trauma to her family and the world. A story with which so many will empathise. Will Beth be able to discover the lost parts of herself buried beneath the roles of daughter, wife, mother, nurse? Can she learn to understand and forgive herself? Will she emerge to find love again, and with who? Sometimes we have no idea why we make the choices we do, but for Beth, there is the chance to make the right choice. Family secrets and resilience weave together in this compelling story of how we deal with loss of so many kinds, even the loss of self. From historical fiction author, Beth Cox, Britannia Street is a vivid, compassionate fictionalised biography that will grip you from beginning to end.

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When Shabtai Zvi of Smyrna, a 17th Century man of piety, if eccentric and unruly, proclaims himself Messiah, euphoria and devotion ripple through Jewish communities worldwide. Imprisoned for sedition by the Ottomans, Shabtai converts to Islam to escape the death penalty, but his story doesn’t end there, as true believers follow their messiah into conversion, creating a unique hybrid religion that survived in secret for centuries, and inspiring Jacob Frank to claim, a century later, to be Shabtai’s reincarnation (the subject of Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 winner, The Books of Jacob). A work of fiction that melds poetry, prose and play, Unbridled Messiah is constructed from eyewitness accounts (real and imaginary), letters and historical sources, delivering an extraordinary and spell-binding narrative enlivened by Shinebourne’s chorus of Heavenly Sisters, who play with the ‘facts’, adding irreverent and mischievous interpretations. Long-listed for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2020, Unbridled Messiah, is an ambitious, intelligent and inventive exploration of the multiple ways we approach and find salvation.

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