Search results for ""hopscotch""
£37.00
Capstone Global Library Ltd Finish the Pattern
From the days of the week to playing hopscotch, patterns are all around you. Keep turning the pages to find out how your life is full of patterns and sequences.
£13.92
Capstone Global Library Ltd Finish the Pattern: A Turn-and-See Book
From the days of the week to playing hopscotch, patterns are all around you. Keep turning the pages to find out how your life is full of patterns and sequences.
£8.83
Little, Brown & Company Daddy-Daughter Day
A daddy and daughter can't let this perfect day go to waste-so what will they do and where will they go?Play hopscotch in the park or build a pillow fort and stay inside?Shoot the perfect alley-oop or host a tea party on the half-court line?Frolic like princesses or find a big tree to climb? If life gives them puddles, they'll jump and splash and play!
£13.99
PROFESSOR PUZZLE Sports Day Kit
Everything you need to recreate all your favourite childhood games! On your marks, get set, go! Get everyone up and about with this collection of 50 traditional outdoor games! From the egg and spoon and three-legged race, to hopscotch and stuck in the mud, this great value set is full of fun and action. Guaranteed to get the young, and the young at heart, joining in!
£18.00
Scholastic US Jumpsies How to Hop Skip and Jump with Stretchy Rope
Learn how to play a classic playground game filled with activities for jumping, skipping, and hopping with stretchy rope.Jumpsies is not your ordinary jump rope game! This classic playground activity combines the joy of hopscotch, jump rope, and string games all in one. Played all around the world, Jumpsies has the timeless appeal of Cat''s Cradle. A safety-tested stretchy rope plus a complete instructional book on games can get you jumping in no time. Jumpsies is a fun activity for boys, girls, and jumpers of all skill levels.
£9.99
mineditionUS ′Oh, No′, Said Elephant
All the animals want to play hide-and-seek, but-- "oh, no!" --Elephant isn't very good at that. He's too easy to find. What about leap-frog? He's not good at that, either. What about hopscotch, or skipping, or tag? No, no and no. Poor Elephant isn't very good at many games, and the animals are starting to get frustrated with him. Luckily there is one game Elephant loves to play, and the animals oblige him, though they may have to say "oh, no!" themselves when he wants to play it again. This rollicking, silly, repetitive text will have young readers laughing out loud and asking to read it again.
£15.99
HarperCollins Publishers You're It!: A Hop, Skip and Jump Through Childhood Games
You’re It! is a brilliantly observed hop, skip and jump down memory lane; a celebration of the days when you used to get home from school, hop out of your school clothes, skip over to your best friend's house and jump around all afternoon until Mum called you in for tea. Nowadays, those classic – and universal – games of Hopscotch, Skipping, Bulldog and Hide and Seek are almost forgotten, rarely played, rarely passed on as generations come and go. With You’re It! you can relive those fun and silly games in this beautifully illustrated, wonderfully nostalgic book celebrating the games we remember from our childhoods as well the days themselves.
£6.66
Rising Stars UK Ltd Reading Planet - Run, Jump, Skip and Hop! - Yellow: Galaxy
It's time to play outside! Learn how to play hopscotch, skip rope and leapfrog with your friends. Let's run, skip, jump and have fun outdoors! Run, Jump, Skip and Hop is part of the Galaxy range of books from Rising Stars Reading Planet. Galaxy provides captivating fiction and non-fiction for Pink A to White band. The rich collection of highly decodable books immerses children in a range of cross-curricular topics and genres. Reading Planet books have been carefully levelled to support children in becoming fluent and confident readers. Each book features useful notes and activities to support reading at home as well as comprehension questions to check understanding.Reading age: 5-6 years
£7.62
Brewin Books A Pocket with a Hole: A Birmingham Childhood of the 1940s and 1950s
Brenda Bullock, brought up on a council housing estate in Sheldon, holds up a mirror to Birmingham in the 1940s and 1950s: she tells of the games played then in the streets: hopscotch, queenie, marbles, skipping, roller skating. She takes us back to school life during and after the war, to what it was like to be sick before the advent of the NHS and antibiotics; the struggle to make ends meet and find enough food to put on the table; the pawn shop, hiding from the rentman - all the experiences shared by so many children of the '40s and '50s, all illustrated by line drawings of the old Birmingham landmarks by architect, Matthew Bullock.
£12.99
Faber & Faber Blossomise
Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, brings new perspectives and energy to a timeless poetic subject.Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of spirited leaps of imagination and language, the twenty-one poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom festival and stand-alone lyrical pieces that take in the stylistic tones of ballads, hymns, songs, prayers and nursery rhymes. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among skyscrapers and urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored here both as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a nervous marker of our vulnerable climate. Angela Harding responds to the poems in wonderful accompanying illustrations.Published in collaboration with the National Trust as part of their an
£10.00
Zondervan The Berenstain Bears Lets Go Play Collection
Get outside and play with the Berenstain Bears! This high-value, six-book collection encourages young readers to get out and explore God’s wonderful world, with inspiring stories filled with adventure, laughter, and fun. The Berenstain Bears Let’s Go Play Collection—part of the bestselling Zonderkidz Living Lights™ series—also features helpful instructions and tips for ten timeless games and activities, including hopscotch, camping, capture the flag, and more!Join the Berenstain Bears as they explore the value of teamwork, active play, and a love of the great outdoors in The Berenstain Bears Let’s Go Play Collection. With six beloved stories and ten activity suggestions, this affordable and giftable treasury for children ages 4-8 is perfect for classrooms, summer reading, story time, or anytime!The Berenstain Bears Let’s Go Play Collection includes six classic favorites:
£12.99
Red Comet Press Is a Book a Box for Words
A STEAM-centered exploration of boxes to spark scientific inquiry in a fun and engaging way! There are so many types and uses for boxes, it’s time to think of as many as we can. In this entertaining book with rhyming text, young children are invited to explore all the different boxes we find in our lives and what they are used for. With a little investigation, boxes are found in so many shapes and have so many uses: from carrying fruit or playing hopscotch, to a house for bees, or a case for a guitar. What constitutes a box? What size is it? What fits inside? What is it used for? Endless amount of discussion will result from this book, and even the titular question will get kids thinking. A perfect book to initiate early-years scientific inquiry in a fun and inventive way and set children on the path to thinking critically, creatively, and reflectively.
£14.83
HarperCollins Publishers Makes for Mini Folk: 25 projects to make for the little people in your life
A stylish craft guide for adults, Makes for Mini Folk covers a range of makes for children from newborn babies to older children with a wide range of original projects from homeware to toys and clothing. Projects for mini minis (6 months and under) include a gorgeous mobile, practical bib and lovable toys, whilst later chapters cover instructions for a range of stylish clothes including an overall and romper. Practical and playtime projects range from a lunch bag to a hobby horse and even a pop-up shop for unforgettable play times. Super-sized projects such as giant cushions and a hopscotch picnic mat bring your handiwork into your home, whilst the teepee project extends the excitement to the garden. Lisa Stickley’s signature style ensures that all of the projects are stylish, quirky and original and guarantee endless enjoyment for both children and adults.
£13.49
HarperCollins Publishers 60 Classic Outdoor Games
The perfect book to get kids out and about. 60 Classic Outdoor Games is a beautifully illustrated and wonderfully nostalgic book, bringing together the best playground games that have entertained generations before. It's a brilliantly observed hop, skip and jump down memory lane. A celebration of the days when you used to get home from school, hop out of your school clothes, skip over to your best friend's house and jump around all afternoon until Mum called you in for tea. Nowadays, those classic – and universal – games of Hopscotch, Skipping, Bulldog, Rounders, Tag, 1-2-3 In and Hide and Seek are almost forgotten, rarely passed on as generations come and go. With 60 Classic Outdoor Games, you can rediscover those fun and silly games and pass them on to a new generation of kids, celebrating the games we remember from our childhoods as well as the days themselves.
£7.20
Nick Hern Books Adam
If you are born in a country where being yourself can get you killed, exile is your only choice. Frances Poet's play Adam is the remarkable true story of a young trans man having to make that choice and begin his journey. It charts Adam's progress from Egypt to Scotland, across borders and genders, in his search for a place to call home. The play was first performed by the National Theatre of Scotland at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2017, where it won a Fringe First award. It was directed by Cora Bissett, with music by Jocelyn Pook, and starred Adam Kashmiry, whose story inspired the play. A TV movie based on the play, written by Frances Poet and also starring Adam Kashmiry, was made by Hopscotch Films and National Theatre of Scotland, and was broadcast by the BBC in 2021. The film was the winner in the Television Scripted category at the 2021 BAFTA Scotland Awards.
£11.99
Workman Publishing The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid
New York Times bestseller, now in paperback!The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid is a thrilling expedition to 100 of the most surprising, mysterious, and weird-but-true places on earth. For curious kids, this is the chance to embark on the journey of a lifetime—and see how faraway countries have more in common than you might expect! Hopscotch from country to country in a chain of connecting attractions: Explore Mexico’s glittering cave of crystals, then visit the world’s largest cave in Vietnam. Peer over a 355-foot waterfall in Zambia, then learn how Antarctica’s Blood Falls got their mysterious color. Or see mysterious mummies in Japan and France, then majestic ice caves in both Argentina and Austria. As you climb mountains, zip-line over forests, and dive into oceans, this book is your passport to a world of hidden wonders, illuminated by gorgeous art.
£12.03
Walker Books Ltd The Tower at the End of Time
Adventurous, magical and brilliantly funny sequel to The House at the Edge of Magic."Magically warm and wonderfully weird, it's Terry Pratchett meets Diana Wynne Jones" – Louie Stowell, author of Loki: A Bad God's Guide to Being GoodNine and her friends have broken the curse on their marvellous, magical House, and are free to travel the worlds once more! Their first stop: The Wizarding Hopscotch Championships.There's only one problem: the House is nervous about travelling – and gets the hiccups! Bouncing from world to world with every "HIC!", they finally land at the championships, only for Flabberghast to have an unfortunate run-in with square number seven, and find himself faced with the terrible Tower at the End of Time.But maybe here they can find out how to cure the House's hiccups, and Nine might finally discover who left her the beloved music box, and who she really is...A young middle grade novel full of humour, magic and mischief – and the second in a three book series.
£7.03
The History Press Ltd A 1960s Childhood: From Thunderbirds to Beatlemania
Do you remember Beatlemania? Radio Caroline? Mods and Rockers? The very first miniskirts? Then the chances are you were born in the or around 1960.To the young people of today, the 1960s seems like another age. But for those who grew up in this decade, school life, 'mod' fashions and sixties pop music are still fresh in their minds. From James Bond to Sindy dolls and playing hopscotch in the street, life was very different to how it is now. After the tough and frugal years of the fifties, the sixties was a boom period, a time of changed attitudes and improved lifestyles. With chapters on home and school life, games and hobbies, music and fashion, alongside a selection of charming illustrations, this delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this lively era. Take a nostalgic look at what it was like to grow up during the sixties and recapture all aspects of life back then.
£9.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Outdoor Play for 1--3 Year Olds: How to set up and run your own outdoor toddler group
We are all mindful of the increasing news coverage of outdoor play and its benefits, but how can you go beyond the sandpit and hopscotch to create a magical and creative experience for the children in your care? This book provides all the encouragement you will need to set up and run an outdoor toddler group. It provides a step-by-step guide to selecting an appropriate site, resourcing the outside area, devising age-appropriate activities, planning activities and the legal requirements involved. Including an overview of the developmental milestones of babies and toddlers, it shows you how you can meet their specific needs. Features include: An activity bank full of games, suggestions for crafts, Forest School activities and songs and stories Practical advice on risk assessment and health and safety Guidance on working with parents and carers Adaptable planning templates With a strong emphasis on providing fun learning activities throughout the year, this book will be essential reading for all those that want to provide high quality outdoor experiences for the youngest children in their care.
£24.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Final Exam
Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled. In a surreal Buenos Aires, a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a college called "The House," meet up with their friends, and, instead of preparing for their final exam, wander the city, encountering strange happenings and pondering life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel. With its daring typography, shifts in rhythm, as well as wildly veering directions of thought and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness writing. Darkly funny—and riddled with unresolved ambiguities—Final Exam is one of Cortázar's best works. Author of Hopscotch and Blow-Up, Julio Cortázar's (1914-1984) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer. He was born in Brussels, lived in Argentina, but moved permanently to France in 1951, where he became one of the twentieth century's major experimental writers.
£15.17
Taylor & Francis Ltd Reminisence Cue Cards 50s/60s: Colorcards
Reminiscence Cue Cards Life events in the 50s/60s Places, items and moments collected from the 50s and 60s to remind and engage. This set of cards looks back to the 50s and 60s - every day moments, possessions and activities that were familiar during that time. The cards are particularly useful when used in conjunction with life history work sessions to facilitate and develop discussion. The cards will help users to recall people, events, experiences and stories from the past - the realistic images bringing memories to life and to share with others. The cards are loosely grouped into: Moments; Places; Possessions; Activities. Examples of cards include: Record player; Reel to reel tape recorder; Playing pat-a-cake; Saturday morning cinema; Hopscotch drawn on the pavement; 50s train carriage; and Black silver dial telephone. Particularly suitable to use in day care centres, memory clinics, care homes and other groups and will provide opportunities for socialising, preserving memory and creating a personal life history. Age: All ages. Contents: 36 A5 cards; accompanying booklet detailing ways to use the cards, boxed.Intended for use in educational settings and/or therapy contexts under the supervision of an adult. This is not a toy.
£45.35
Princeton University Press Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time
Sequel to History offers a comprehensive definition of postmodernism as a reformation of time. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth uses a diversified theoretical approachdrawing on post-structuralism, feminism, new historicism, and twentieth-century scienceto demonstrate the crisis of our dominant idea of history and its dissolution in the rhythmic time of postmodernism. She enlarges this definition in discussions of several crises of cultural identity: the crisis of the object, the crisis of the subject, and the crisis of the sign. Finally, she explores the relation between language and time in post-modernism, proposing an arresting theory of her own about the rhythmic nature of postmodern temporality. Because the postmodern construction of time appears so clearly in narrative writing, each part of this work is punctuated by a "rhythm section" on a postmodern narrative (Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, Cortezar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Ada); these extended readings provide concrete illustrations of Ermarth's theoretical positions. As in her critically acclaimed Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, Ermarth ranges across disciplines from anthropology and the visual arts to philosophy and history. For its interdisciplinary character and its lucid definition of postmodernism, Sequel to History will appeal to all those interested in the humanities.
£43.20
Carnegie Publishing Ltd Our Street: Growin' up in the 1950s
Copenhagen Street was no different from any street in any industrial town or city in the 1950s. Its landscape was identical to streets in Bolton, Birmingham or Bermondsey during this decade. Not only were the streets similar, their inhabitants all had the same tales to tell too. These people were working class, living from week to week, most just managing to pay the rent. Unfortunately, some could not. This book describes one such street, home to a community of ordinary hardworking and poor families. Yes, there was hardship, as they struggled to get by on too little in postwar Britain. But they didn’t give up, instead showing a remarkable resilience, an ability to bounce back in adversity, and often great humour: `Debt, Elsie?’ a woman proclaimed to her neighbour, as she pointed to her headscarf. `We’re in debt up to ’ere, love. I just wish we were taller!’ If your street in the fifties was cobbled, and lined with tiny terraced houses. If its scarred pavements were chalked for hopscotch, and its lampposts used as cricket stumps. If your family hid from the rent man’s purposeful knock, and you asked for a penn’orth of scratchings from the chippy, then this book will help you recall those hard but happy days when you were a kid.
£8.42
Highlights Press Jumbo Book of My First Hidden Pictures
Perfect for the youngest puzzlers ages 3 and up, this activity book is jam-packed with more than 115 hilarious Hidden Pictures puzzles. Kids who love to figure it out will love this truly jumbo book, featuring 256 pages of world-famous Highlights Hidden Pictures scenes, along with mazes, drawing prompts, tracing activities and more activities that extend the puzzle experience.This book is specially designed to entertain emerging puzzle-lovers. Little ones will love the underwater unicorns, animals playing hopscotch and other funny scenes. The hidden objects include cleverly hidden bananas, lollipops, pizza, pineapple and so much more. Loaded with surprises, this jumbo book of fun makes a great gift for all Hidden Pictures fans and will keep puzzlers busy at home or on the go.Hidden-object games are so much fun for kids—and grown-ups!—and this Hidden Pictures book makes a fun activity for family game night! Searching for objects in Hidden Pictures scenes helps develop vocabulary, concentration and attention to detail—all skills necessary for school. Crafted by the puzzle pros at Highlights, every Hidden Pictures puzzle encourages independence and persistence that are reinforced by humor and fun. It all adds up to a good time and positive learning experiences.
£10.79
Octopus Publishing Group What Would Unicorn Do?
Unicorn took the world by storm with his sweet nature, sunny outlook and positive attitude in the best-selling feel-good book Be a Unicorn. Now he is back with this little book of life lessons. Looking for some guidance on how to live a happy, sparkling life? Or just wondering which path to trot along? Look no further than Unicorn, the best (and probably only) four-legged, one-horned happiness guru. With enlightenment on every page, let Unicorn teach you how to hopscotch over all of life's trials to a place where the grass definitely grows greener.With adorable quirky illustrations and wise, thoughtful and often completely hilarious life advice, this is a little book to keep firmly in your pocket, ready to be consulted whenever life gets a little bit tough.UNICORN WOULD:Wear the jumper that Granny knitted with pride.Sing Pharrell in the shower.Walk in someone else's flip-flops.Try new things... uhm beetroot juice... pink, yummy.Make every day count.UNICORN WOULD NOT EVER (NO THANK YOU MA'AM):Worry about a bit of dust.Eat someone else's chocolate.Blame others - 'my Panda made me do it'.Dwell too much on the past.Take things for granted.
£7.78
Harvard University Press Dictionary of American Regional English: Volume IV
Every page in this new volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English makes it wonderfully clear that regional expressions still flourish throughout the United States.Depending on where you live, your conversation may include such beguiling terms as paddybass (North Carolina), pinkwink (Cape Cod), or scallyhoot (West); if you're invited to a potluck dinner, in Indiana you're likely to call it a pitch-in, while in northern Illinois it's a scramble; if your youngsters play hopscotch, they may call it potsy in Manhattan, but sky blue in Chicago.Like the popular first three volumes of DARE, the fourth is a treasure-trove of linguistic gems, a book that invites exclamation, delight, and wonder. More than six hundred maps pinpoint where you might live if your favorite card games are sheepshead and skat; if you eat pan dulce rather than pain perdu; if you drive down a red dog road or make a purchase at a racket store; or if you look out your window and see a parka squirrel or a quill pig.The language of our everyday lives is captured in DARE, along with expressions our grandparents used but our children will never know. Based on thousands of interviews across the country, the Dictionary of American Regional English presents our language in its infinite variety. Word lovers will delight in the wit and wisdom found in the quotations that illustrate each entry, and will prize the richness and diversity of our spoken and written culture.
£102.56
Faber & Faber Sex Power Money: The Sunday Times Bestseller
** THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 5 BESTSELLER **** FEATURED ON BBC ARTS' BETWEEN THE COVERS **Award-winning comedian Sara Pascoe turns her attention to the things that really matter to humans - sex, power and money.'A genuinely hilarious explanation of the science of sex' FRANKIE BOYLE'I've never read a book so fast and laughed so loudly while learning so much. Pascoe is a sage for our times.' DEBORAH FRANCES-WHITE, The Guilty Feminist Following her hit book Animal, Sara Pascoe decides to confront her fear of the male libido, and turns her attention to the things that really matter to humans, delving into such questions as:Why don't people care about the welfare of the people they masturbate to?andWhy is there such stigma around those who work in the sex industry?when Some women still want men to buy them dinner?In this comedic and educational hopscotch over anatomy, the history of sexual representation and the sticky way all human interactions are underwritten by wealth, Pascoe explores whether we'll ever be able to escape the Conundrum of Heterosexuality. Drawing on anecdotal experience, unqualified opinion, interviews and original research, Sex Power Money is thought-provoking and riotously funny: a fresh take on the oldest discussion.'Important, timely, poignant, mind-blowing and VERY FUNNY. Written with kindness, bravery and ridiculous attention to detail, it will make you feel cleverer without all the usual effort.' AISLING BEA**SUBSCRIBE TO THE AWARD-WINNING SEX POWER MONEY PODCAST**
£9.99
Duke University Press Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm
Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism. Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences. Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.
£22.99
Duke University Press Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm
Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism. Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences. Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.
£82.80
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Godmother and other Stories
Covering more than four decades in the lives of Guyanese at home or in Britain and Canada, these stories have an intensive and rewarding inner focus on a character at a point of crisis. Harold is celebrating the victory of the political party he supports whilst confronting a sense of his own powerlessness; Jacob has been sent back to Guyana from Britain after suffering a mental breakdown; Chuni, a worker at the university, is confused by the climate of revolutionary sloganizing which masks the true situation: the rise of a new middle class, elevated by their loyalty to the ruling party. This class, as the maid, Vera, recognises, are simply the old masters with new Black faces.The stories in the second half of the collection echo the experience of many thousands who fled from the political repression, corruption and social collapse of the 70s and 80s. The awareness of the characters is shot through with Guyanese images, voices and unanswered questions. It is through these that their new experiences of Britain and North America are filtered. One character lies in a hospital in London fighting for her life, but hears the voices of her childhood in Guyana – her mother, African Miss K, the East Indian pandit and the English Anglican priest. Once again, they 'war for the role of guide in her life'. In 'The Godmother' and 'Hopscotch', childhood friends reunite in London. Two have stayed in Guyana, while one has settled in London. The warmth of shared memories and cold feelings of betrayal, difference and loss vie for dominance in their interactions. These stories crystallize the shifts in Guyana's uncomfortable fortunes in the post-colonial period, and while they are exact and unsparing in their truth-telling, there are always layers of complexity that work through their realistic surfaces: a sensitivity to psychological undertones, the evocative power of memory and a poetic sense of the Guyanese physical space.Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born in Guyana and now lives in Sussex, U.K. She is writing her fourth work, a family saga spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; set in China, Europe and the Caribbean.
£8.23
Nine Arches Press Retellings
Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Andrew Frolish's debut collection, Retellings, finds its foundation in the stories we tell of love and loss, of the stories passed on to us and those narratives of life we write ourselves. Fathers and forbears loom large in poems that find them working long and unforgiving hours on the factory shop-floor, bringing wild animals in from the cold, and notable both by their presence and absence in Frolish's poignant and measured poetry.Moving between East Anglia's stretching seascapes, childhood's sometimes lonely landscapes and the wider world we venture into as we grow, each poem by Andrew Frolish unearths a story like a treasure find and brings it, clear-eyed and succinct, into a razor-sharp focus."This first collection brims with the hidden pressures of history. Poems range widely, from rural and industrial tradition, through a lovely sequence of stone-skimming, to that mysterious exchange of energy between what is said and unsaid. Boundaries are pushed back, levitation is underwater. And Andrew Frolish knows too, how to let simplicity fall, like a blessing."Pauline Stainer"Andrew Frolish s first book is in thrall to the physical world. There are factories where things and people are transformed; hospitals, crematoria, places in which the human creature is reduced and rendered. And there is the world of nature, rich, treacherous, full of surprises. Mechanical and organic metaphors wrestle with one another like Jacob and the Angel. And the imagination moves through this world aware of its incarnate being, its skin and sinew, in love, in awe, lamenting, celebrating. Time passing is registered in the extended rhythms of Frolish's resourceful and evocative language."Michael SchmidtAndrew Frolish was born in Sheffield in 1975. After studying politics at Lancaster University, he trained to be a teacher in the Lake District. His poems have been published in a variety of magazines, including PN Review, Acumen, Envoi, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter's House, Pulsar, Iota, Orbis and The Agenda Broadsheet. He has received prizes in several competitions and won the Suffolk Poetry Society Crabbe Memorial competition in 2006.His poems for children have been published by Hopscotch. He now lives with his family in Suffolk, where he is a headteacher.
£8.99