Search results for ""salt publishing""

Shortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prizes 2019Shortlisted for The Betty Trask Prize and AwardsLonglisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2019John is infinite. He can become any book, any combination of words – every thought, act and expression that has ever been, or ever will be, written. Now 800 years old, John wants to tell his story. Looking back over his life, from its beginnings with a medieval anchoress to his current lodgings beside the deathbed of a Cold War spy, John pieces together his tale: the love that held him together and, in particular, the reasons for a murder that took place in Moscow fifty years earlier, which set in train a shattering series of events.Samuel Fisher’s debut, The Chameleon is a love story about books like no other, weaving texts and lives in a family tale that leads the reader on an extraordinary historical journey, a journey of words as much as of places, and a gripping romance.

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For childminder Bobbi, it’s all about keeping your babies safeWhen professional couple Nikki and Rob uncover their childminder Bobbi’s secret everything changes. Bobbi has a child-shaped hole in her life that her ‘silver fox’ lover can’t fill. Now she is seeking out children once more. Troubled young couple, Kim and Connor are battling with social services to keep their baby, Jade – but they needn’t worry, Bobbi soon arrives to help solve all their problems.

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A fast-paced, darkly funny crime novel set in Interior Alaska that follows down-on-his-luck cabbie, Mike Fisher, as he searches for his daughter. Her step-father has been shot in her bathroom, and Fisher thinks she killed him and fled. In a panic he tries to hide the body, but that’s not easy when it’s fifty-below outside. Things get dangerously complicated when it turns out step-dad was part of a local militia, and now they’re on Fisher’s tail. Dead of Winter evokes the harshness of winter in the ­­­sub‑arctic and the intrigue fostered in a bored, trapped and socially circumscribed small-town community.

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‘Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett’s novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years’ Nicholas Lezard, The GuardianMonday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead.Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead.The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it’s funny.‘Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.’ Aiden O’Reilly, The Short Review

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Winner of The Polari First Book Prize 2016Finalist for The People’s Book Prize 2016Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2016Chosen for City Reads 2016Shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prizeELLE Best Books of 2015The Reading Agency: Books of 2015Mickey Donnelly is smart, which isn’t a good thing in his part of town. Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him ‘gay’. It doesn’t help that his best friend is his little sister, Wee Maggie, and that everyone knows he loves his Ma more than anything in the world. He doesn’t think much of his older brother Paddy and really doesn’t like his Da. He dreams of going to America, taking Wee Maggie and Ma with him, to get them away from Belfast and Da. Mickey realises it’s all down to him. He has to protect Ma from herself. And sometimes, you have to be a bad boy to be a good son.

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Set between 1989 and the downfall of Ceaușescu, and 2013, The Squeeze travels between Edinburgh, Romania and Oslo and sees this ­multi‑award-winning and bestselling author at the height of her powers.Marta, a teenager trafficked from Romania in the early 1990s is forced to work as a prostitute in Edinburgh. Mats, a Norwegian businessman, who longs only to be a good husband and father, becomes involved with Marta and both their lives are wrenched – for good or ill – in new directions. Told in a splintered narrative style that allows glimpses into several points of view, The Squeeze explores the transactions that take place between men and women. Sex, money and the desire for love, are at its heart.

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Winner of the 2015 International Frank O’Connor Short Story AwardWinner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Wales Book of the Year: FictionShortlisted for the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story PrizeThe Globe 100: The Best International Fiction of 2017In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.

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These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk. Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

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Sennitt Clough's twisty fen-Gothic narratives are filled with macabre imagery and sexual violence. imagine a monstrous fair that has arrived in deepest Cambridgshire, only to discover that the inhabitants are far more frightening than the carnival. Rich in symbolism and mythology, it's a thrilling read that will leave your mind as black as peat.

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Alison Moore’s debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, gathered together stories written prior to the publication of her first novel.‘The tales collected in The Pre-War House… pick at psychological scabs in a register both wistful and brutal.’ —Anthony Cummins, The Times Literary Supplement‘Moore’s writing is surprising and exact and culminates in the title story, the novella which brings the collection to a powerful crescendo’ —The Arkansas International‘just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse… Moore’s distinctive voice commands exceptional power’ —Dinah Birch, The GuardianEastmouth and Other Stories is her second collection, featuring stories published in the subsequent decade, including stories that have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror, as well as new, unpublished work.

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Longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018How to be a Kosovan Bride opens up something entirely new to the reader: the history, culture and stories of one of the newest countries in the world. It weaves together Albanian folktale, stories of Kosovan experience of the war in 1999 and a look into the lives of modern-day Kosovan women. The dark undercurrent of Albanian blood feuds underpins a story about the impact of war and the way that new life can emerge from darkness.It is characterised by striking imagery and daring form.

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Shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2012In the house where Marie lives, the cutlery is running wild …Madness and fairy story creep hand in hand in this darkly comic tale. At the top of a narrow driveway there is a shambling Victorian house full of dust and stairs. The walls inside are ancient emulsion, sloughing off the distemper walls in gorgeous ribbons.The mice that infest the dining room chimney-breast are living out their own dreams and nightmares, learning voodoo and the meaning of love and forgiveness. In The Knife Drawer, dead bodies miraculously vanish as if scraped to nothing by pudding spoons. Marie’s mother has rather lost her wits since she did away with her husband. She could swear they’re out to get her; even the house gets messy on purpose, all by itself. Marie’s twin is living in a hole in the back-garden, small and round as a cherry pip, waiting to be discovered.In The Knife Drawer the steak knives grow so hungry that they scream. When the children murder the rent man, things get a little out of hand …

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Odalisque employs the lyric poem to achieve a complicated and layered narrative. It is, on the surface, the story of an L.A.P.D. bomb squad detective who falls for a street hooker. This transgression leads to his dismissal from the force, but it is only one of many instances in the book of “stepping over the line.” There is also the story of a “scrivener” and an “odalisque,” which is interleaved with the cop’s story and is simultaneous with it. Indeed, it seems as if there are the same story, read as palimpsests of each other. The events are not so much set in Los Angeles as imbedded in it, because the city, with its free-floating mythologies of fame, immigration, identity, and transformation, are central to the tale. However, in Odalisque, the mythology does not match up with the reality, and the characters find themselves strung up “between seeming and being.” The book reads as one long poem presented in 14-line panels or tableaux.

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On the hottest day of the year, Ana Sharma and her mum check in to the Hotel Splendid, a place where bells seem to ring all by themselves, jam pots and milk jugs appear on the breakfast table as if by magic, and things go bump in the night. The Hotel Splendid has a problem. When Ana and Sunny meet, they come up with a solution, but one problem leads to another. Meanwhile, the hotel is harbouring an unexpected guest …

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Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book AwardEntertaining Strangers is a tragi-comedy about the eccentric Edwin Prince – a depressive intellectual obsessed with high culture and ants – and the mysterious, homeless narrator Jules, who gradually unravels Edwin’s impossible relationships with his landlady, neurotic mother, psychotic brother, domineering ex-wife, dead grandfather and, above all, his ant-farm. At the same time, Jules continually experiences traumatic memories full of fire and water, and gradually a terrible pre-history emerges from beneath all of the other stories, which seems somehow to shape both Jules’s fiery dreams and Edwin’s obsessions – a great fire, massacre and one girl's drowning in Smyrna, 75 years earlier.

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Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s Transport Advisor, has gone missing. Down-at-heel detective Marguerite is trying to find him. Aware that his every action is being monitored by those reading the novel, Marguerite’s mind and world is at constant risk of disintegration. Disturbed by attempts to understand himself and the nature of the objects he encounters, Marguerite’s minute and comically digressive inquiries threaten his very existence.As he follows and then is followed by Harold’s wife Isobel around the city, Marguerite discovers startling evidence of her involvement in the disappearance and becomes increasingly compromised by his feelings for her. Finding himself cornered by Isobel on a speeding bus, it emerges that Marguerite may be more closely implicated than we think. The resolution of the case brings a discovery that will shatter his world and well-being forever.Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? is a unique take on the world of category, cliché and identity and heralds the emergence of a truly original new voice.

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When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shockwaves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique's birth, and her parents' relationship.Pascale Petit's My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale's Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

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Becky Varley-Winter’s striking debut explores themes of daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world. Complex, hypnotic, memorable – this collection introduces a significant new voice.

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At the International Conference Centre in Geneva, Hannah Rossier, formerly Annie Price, comes face to face with Neville Weir, someone from her childhood whom she never expected, or wanted, to meet again. As Neville’s reasons for attending the conference become clear, the dark waters of Hannah’s past start to rise. Hannah is a psychotherapist, with a specialist interest in memory and how connections are made between past and present. She has reinvented herself successfully, moving from a small northern town in England to Lucerne, Switzerland, with her husband, Thibaut. Nobody, not even Hannah, knows the full truth about herself. Her ‘memories’ consist of glimpses of the place where she played in childhood, known simply as ‘The Wild’. Over the three days of the conference she has to decide whether she can avoid Neville, or whether she should submit to an encounter with him and with her past. And in her keynote lecture about the neuroscience of memory, how much to conceal or reveal. But can her specialism save her from drowning?

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Written during a residency with The Polar Museum in Cambridge, Robbergirls reimagines The Snow Queen as a Sapphic rite of passage. Offered in seven sections that echo the fairy tale’s form, these hot, tender and generous poems search for a lost other who is by turns friend, brother, son, lover, but ultimately an aspect of a fragmented self. In her formally playful and linguistically rich third collection, Benyon suggests that the ache for contact can be tempered by nature, even with disordered seasons. In striking poems that refuse to deny environmental breakdown, the poet holds space for the indigenous people of the Arctic as she considers the devastating impacts of climate change on their landscapes and lives.

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Evie Meyer and her son Alfie flee from her abusive partner Seth to spend New Year with her half-brother Luke at their late father's summer home on the Suffolk Coast, only to find Seahurst abandoned and Luke missing. Evie searches for her brother, filled with a deepening dread that something is very wrong at Seahurst and their father's death may not have been suicide after all. As Seahurst's ancient and sinister secrets unfurl around her, Evie fears the souls of the dead will soon claim another terrible revenge.

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Guy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem. In 1968, JJ’s ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie’s development company have built. When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated. Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics. It’s a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice – opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken – that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand.

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Guy Flood, returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother's funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.

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This collection of short fiction aims to define the sometimes indefinable and to give voice to those struggling to make sense of what life throws at them. There are those who travel in a continuous loop on London’s underground and those who dance at night with the departed. A woman confronts herself in a bedroom mirror after decades of denial and a widow finds comfort in an osteopath’s consulting room. And then there is a strange creature who falls to earth; dreams and portents; crows and folklore, and much more.The stories are tragic and comi-tragic, but all reveal the strength and complexity of the human spirit. They bring poignant insights on grief, loss and longing and the depths and strangeness of the human psyche and how we manage to survive and just about cope.

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A notoriously scary ghost is supposed to haunt the ruined medieval castle where Sunny and his friends are spending the day. But when a troubling visitor arrives at the antique shop, it turns out the danger is closer to home than they thought . . .

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Astral Travel, about a charismatic but troubled Irishman and his effect on his family, explores the way that the secrets forged by cultural, religious and sexual prejudice can reverberate down the generations. It’s also about telling stories, and the fact that the tales we tell about ourselves can profoundly affect the lives of others. In a framing narration that exposes the slippery and contingent nature of story, an adult daughter, brought up on romantic lore about her now dead father but having experienced him very differently, tells how she tried to write about him, only to come up against too many mysteries and clashing versions of the family’s past. Yet when a buried truth emerges, the mysteries can be solved, and, via storytelling’s power of empathy, she finally makes sense of it all.

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Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for PoetryShortlisted The Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2021Heartbreaking detail permeates Hardisty's deftly musical debut. These are love poems, conjuring relationships just beginning, gone astray, turned wrong, or fading from view. The reader is on tour through love's phantasy, a parade of fragments in lost rooms all set within time slips that draw us back and forth across countries and continents – and in dreams that rise and coalesce around absence. Written over a decade, these tightly-accomplished lyrics will delight those familiar with Hardisty's writing and find a wide new readership for those yet to discover this important new writer.

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Poetry Wales: Poetry Books of 2019Cracked Skull Cinema offers poems on culture and society, colonialism and its legacies, media and power. Set between these are homages and reflections on middle age, on life’s loves and losses.

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Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019Kate Keeling leaves all she knows and moves to Haverscroft House in an attempt to salvage her marriage. Little does she realise, Haverscroft’s dark secrets will drive her to question her sanity, her husband and fatally engulf her family unless she can stop the past repeating itself. Can Kate keep her children safe and escape Haverscroft in time, even if it will end her marriage?Haverscroft is a gripping and chilling dark tale, a modern ghost story that will keep you turning its pages late into the night.

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Tom is grieving for his girlfriend. Her powerful family, convinced he is responsible for her death, place a bounty on his head. On the run, Tom seeks refuge in the Bothy, a dilapidated moorland pub run by ageing gangster Frank. Tom tries to keep the bounty a secret, but news travels fast, even in the middle of nowhere.Trevor Mark Thomas’s first novel is a tense, violent drama involving desperate characters with little to lose apart from their lives. Amid moments of black humour and rare tenderness, buried fears and rivalries rise to the surface, creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia that builds to almost unbearable levels.

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Read Regional 2019 – ‘Discover brilliant Northern writers’Aidan Wilson’s misfortune is to be hard as nailsIn this darkly hilarious and seriously horrifying book Williams tells the story of Aidan, a vigilante and young offender from one of Sheffield’s roughest estates. At breakneck speed, we see Aidan’s world unravel as he goes from hero to outlaw, fighting against all-comers and the circumstances he can’t escape. But is he a victim or architect of his own demise? A brutal and breathtaking account of living with violence in the English city.There are lots of crime novels, but Nutcase is something different: a novel about crime which isn’t interested in the conventions of crime fiction. The novel is based on a specific Icelandic saga: the Saga of Grettir the Strong.Nutcase explores the lives of people who live with violence on a day-to-day basis – how it shapes and distorts their lives, and ultimately becomes part of the normality that they live with.

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The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its seventh year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.Featuring stories by Jay Barnett, Peter Bradshaw, Rosalind Brown, Krishan Coupland, Claire Dean, Niven Govinden, Françoise Harvey, Andrew Michael Hurley, Daisy Johnson, James Kelman, Giselle Leeb, Courttia Newland, Vesna Main, Eliot North, Irenosen Okojie, Laura Pocock, David Rose, Deirdre Shanahan, Sophie Wellstood and Lara Williams.

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The Guardian: Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read nowStanly is frustrated. Having set himself up as London’s protector, he’s finding that the everyday practicalities of superheroism are challenging at best, and downright tedious at worst. So it’s almost a relief when an attempt is made on his life and Stanly finds himself rushing headlong into a twisted adventure, with enemies new and old coming out of the woodwork. However, even with his friends and his ever-increasing power behind him, he may have bitten off more than he can chew this time. The monsters are coming … and nothing will ever be the same!

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Long-listed for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story PrizeFly Away Home is Marina Warner’s third – and eagerly-awaited – collection of short stories. Inspired by fairy tales, legends, and mythology, this timeless selection explores the themes of love and war – in families, and between generations. In ‘Mélusine’ a gorgeous mermaid encounters disaster in love and visits her aunt, Morgan le Fay, to pour out her woes ; in ‘Breadcrumbs’ a hospital patient overhears a night nurse recounting an extraordinary tale of family torn apart under terrifying circumstances. ‘Out of the Burning House’ introduces an elderly actor recalling an unusual case of heartbreak at the hands of a TV personality; in ‘The Difference in the Dose’ a young mother becomes increasingly anxious about the rift between herself and her adoptive mother. And in ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ a thirteen year-old girl writes a heartrending second letter to an older brother away at war, having had no reply to her first…Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner’s stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear. An elegant mix of the poignant, the caustic, and the bizarre, Fly Away Home will be treasured by fans and new readers alike.

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Christmas 2015: The top 10 debut fiction books, The IndependentMaddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they’ll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we’ll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it’s darker than it should be.

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Lydia, a woman in her early thirties, lives in London. She lacks a purpose and loses herself in a string of affairs. When she meets Rabia, a convert to Islam, the Moslem rituals and the Arabic language offer her a new beginning. Lydia becomes Kauthar. She falls in love with Rafiq, an Iraqi-born doctor, and her life seems complete. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 tests their relationship. While Kauthar becomes increasingly fundamental in her beliefs, Rafiq returns to war-torn Baghdad to work in a hospital. Kauthar follows her husband – and the consequences are terrifying.Kauthar charts the life of a white British woman who converts to Islam. The story explores the reasons why and analyses the psychological factors that lead her to distort and misuse her religious faith. Ultimately, Kauthar is a novel about how longing for love can result in violent delusion.

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Visiting Thailand to marry a sex worker, Raymond is informed that his father’s body has been discovered in an isolated villa on the Belgian coast. While his bride embarks on a career in the Dutch and German porn industries, Raymond moves into the villa with the intention of renovating the property.Life by the sea, however, does not go according to plan.The Beginning of the End marks the arrival of a bold new talent.

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Heat Wave is a form of poetic cabaret,‘What good is sitting, alone in your room?/ come hear the music play!’ If a cabaret is full of high jinks it can also land punches – truth can be masked by the burlesque and the grotesque: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’.Luke Kennard has said of Stannard’s writing, ‘I know of few other poets who can write of cruelty, hysteria and disappointment with such levity and grace.’ Will Eaves speaks of a ‘comic vitality’. Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain. Critics have noted ‘a tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful.’ The reader might weep and laugh on the same page. The lyrical and the demotic might walk hand in hand.

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Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2023 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2022 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.This new anthology contains stories by Alinah Azadeh, David Bevan, AK Blakemore, Gabriel Flynn, Jim Gibson, Lydia Gill, Miles Greenwood, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Philip Jennings, Sharon Kivland, Alison Moore, Georgina Parfitt, Gareth E Rees, Leone Ross, John Saul, DJ Taylor, Briony Thompson, Matthew Turner, Mark Valentine and David Wheldon.

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Addressing the loss of the poet’s mother – as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death, and the natural world – Scenes from Life on Earth explores how we grieve and remember those we love. Simmonds continues to write through the prism of her faith, offering insights and wisdom on the circuit of life, of life’s endings, and the promise of reconciliation.

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Winner Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for PoetryShortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2009Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised – ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives – raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.

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Morning Star Best of 2018: FictionEsther, a pregnant amputee, and her husband, Dan, are seeking a new life, setting up home – restoring an abandoned railway station called Rosgill, far away in the Scottish Highlands.Spanning the course of a week, Bee Lewis’s gothic fantasia follows Esther as her marriage, life and body begin to dramatically change. By day, she is isolated physically and mentally within her marriage and her new environment. By night, she explores a forbidding forest, pursued by a shadowy figure.Symbolism, dreams and violence abound in this spellbinding unsnaring of a soul.

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The Best British Poetry 2014 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem.

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Short Circuit fills a real gap in the text book market. Written by 24 prizewinning writers and teachers of writing, this book is intensely practical. Each expert discusses necessary craft issues: their own writing processes, sharing tried and tested writing exercises and lists of published work they find inspirational. Endorsed by The National Association of Writers in Education, it became recommended or required reading for Creative Writing courses in the UK and beyond, including Goldsmiths, The University of Kent at Canterbury, Glasgow University, John Cabot University in Rome, Stockholm University in Sweden, Sussex University, Brighton University, Edge Hill University, Chichester University, The National University of Ireland in Galway, and University Campus Suffolk, at Ipswich.

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Deaf at Spiral Park is a book about a bear that shaves off his fur to join humanity. The novel uses a range of generic approaches, such as comedy and philosophy, to question the humanity of the bear, and conversely the animalistic behaviour of those around him. A cast of characters such as a clown, an invalid, a farmer and a philosopher transcend their stock types and become involved in the complex world of the bear. The antagonist, a recruitment consultant, dies several times, and, ultimately, this teaches her nothing. This is a fresh and original novel which remains accessible and funny in spite of its experimental and philosophical concerns.

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Peter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a range of forms.

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The shadow line' is a term Royle uses to describe the faint line on the top edge of the text block that allows him to see whether a book on a shelf contains an inclusion those items inserted into books and long forgotten.The shadow line is a constant reminder of how Royle started to think of books as more than just the printed stories or information they contain. He is always looking for shadow lines when scanning the shelves of second-hand bookstores, charity shops, hotels, Little Free Libraries and Airbnbs.He's no longer only looking for books that are just books. He's looking for the book that contains a hand-drawn map of an unnamed town in Ireland that he can try to identify so he can read the book while walking the streets depicted on the map. He's looking for the book that contains a 1957 delivery note for an address in Bristol, so that he can send the book, complete with delivery note, to whoever lives there now and invite them to welcome it back into its former home.He''s also

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Martyn Crucefix’s new collection of poems trace the forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. Both places are vividly evoked – the coffee shops, traffic tailbacks, shopping malls, tourist-dotted hillsides and valleys of modern Britain appear in stark contrast to the hilltop villages, church spires, deep gorges, natural history and Classical ruins of Italy. Both landscapes come to represent psychic journeys: closer to home there is division everywhere – depicted in both tragic and comic detail – that only a metaphorical death of the self seems able to counteract. Closer to the Mediterranean, the geographical and personal, or romantic, divisions are also shown ultimately to offer possibilities of transcendence. The poems of the longer sequence, ‘Works and Days’, are startlingly free-wheeling, allusive – brilliantly deploying source materials and inspiration from Hesiod’s original and the 10/12th century Indian vacana poems – all bound together by the repeated refrain of bridges breaking down. The Italian poems, as a crown of sonnets, are more formally controlled but the repeating of first and last lines of the individual poems likewise serves to suggest the presence of an overarching unity. In the end, both sequences travel towards death which – while not denying the reality of human mortality, the passage of time – is intended to represent a challenge to the powerful dividing walls between Thee and Me, the liberation of empathetic feeling, even the Daoist erasure of the assumed gulf between self and not-self: ‘these millions of us aspiring to the condition / of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water’.

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