Search results for ""Cinnamon Press""

In this prequel to The Standing Ground, we travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and a global pandemic. But, as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin.Weaving together Arthurian legend and exploratory fiction of the near future, The Roots of the Ground explores the human cost of a monoculture that tramples freedom and privacy and asserts with Carl Jung that:'As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.'

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Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, whilst Exploring Rights (2020) confronted ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival. And Then the Rain Came turns to love, physical and mental geographies, well-being and the vitality of the present. Set against the backdrops of the global pandemic and climate crisis, each poem embraces present perception in the awakening motif of rain.

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In this collection brimming, with pared down imagery and crystal sharp language, we are invited to become the hollow bone, the small vessel with space for insight and reflection. Steeped in the natural world and sensitive to how each body interfaces with the world, Ian Marriott''s debut moves us from the quotidian to the mysterious found in the everyday and in the world''s wilderenesses. The poetry is alive with experiences of the forest, the mountains, the vastness of Antartica; the language meditative, spare and precise and the form follows breath - short lines that carry contemplative thought forward with fluid ease. Winner of the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Award, adjudicated by outstanding eco-poet, Susan Richardson, The Hollow Bone is suffused with shamanic sensibilty that is communicated with elegance, from the title poem with it''s thoughfully hone sketches of birds alive and dead to the longer sequence of koan-like fragments in Terra Infirma, it takes the

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Ambitious and prophetic, this new edition of John Barnie's verse novel, Ice, is increasingly urgent as scientist's debate the possible catastrophe that global warming and human intransigence threaten to unleash. Ice asks what it means to be human and how or whether we can retain humanity in the most extreme of circumstances.

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Post-pandemic, a tiny forest community gathers, bringing their ghosts and fears, hopes and secrets. And theirs are not the only voices. The forest also has stories of grief and resurrection, asking us what we mean by a life well-lived, human or non-human.

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A glittering retelling of Welsh myth that asks questions of society as it is today.

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An explorer dreams of a sea and a land beyond that can be found on no map … A naval officer becomes lost inside maps of his own making, his wife lost inside her pleas that someone search for her husband … And, as a singer struggles to make sense of the ordinary things around her, a hitman is trapped in an endless bid to escape … Meanwhile, two complete strangers plod through their day-to-day lives as they pour their hearts into writing a novel — but which one is the fictional character and which the author? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope, by turns moving and funny, intense and tender, Vitus Dreams draws you into a place where our basic assumptions about the real and the concrete are shattered to leave us with no choice but to rely on instinct and the people around us, if they exist.

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A compelling story of political corruption and the will to find a better was of living.

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In eleven beautifully observed stories, told with intelligent and textured prose, we travel far and wide to disparate places and distinctive cultures. Whether the protagonists are dealing with migration or climate change, acts of terrorism or the intricacies of family relationships, each story turns on a moment that touches the human condition, connecting us to a single encounter. With a finger on the political and cultural pulse, Ultramarine is a generous, finely-tuned collection for the times we live in.

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Emily needs friends. Outwardly successful, about to get married, inside she is scared and grieving. When an accident reveals a relative she never knew existed, everything changes. Jim has buried his life in a mundane job at the Ministry of Information, writing manuals to help others and hiding the secrets that continue to haunt his family. Through their distinct voices, Emily speaking from 1993 and Jim from 1915, the link between two intriguing tales emerges. As their stories come together, will Emily finally escape the past to find a life of her own? How to Keep Well in Wartime is a compelling exploration of the human condition and the importance of creating a life worth living.

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Will the past never leave the present in peace? Did you learn family tales at your grandmother’s knee? Just harmless old stories. But what of the reality behind them? The Beauty of Chell Street is the story of a family dominated by its own poisonous mythology; one which outlives them all. Nora Wilson endlessly recounts the story of her betrayal by her husband, Sam, during her heyday as the incomparable Beauty of Chell Street. Her demands to a lost God for Sam’s damnation become her only life force. Long after their deaths, when their great-granddaughter, Francine, discovers old pictures of Nora and Sam, their story obsesses her. As she collects the past, Francine is as single-minded as Nora and as ruthless as Sam. Can she even cheat time and death to get to the people who knew Nora and Sam? As betrayal weaves its way through turnabout time periods and Francine assembles her evidence, the story is told again and again into Francine’s old age while the image of Nora remains frozen, looking out from the photograph that started it all, forever the beauty of Chell Street.

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I’m doing something I’ve never done before. I’m hanging upside down in a circus hoop suspended from the beams of a redundant church in Sheffield. I’m not very far from the floor, but the way I feel I may as well be. What am I scared of? Fear just is. It’s there in the muscle memory… Now, knees gripping the metal hoop I let go with my hands and see the world upside down. Upside Down in a Hoop is memoir about loss and letting go. What is it that keeps us going through the tough times? The joy of dancing as a child? The adventures we dare to take as adults? Through fear and holding on, to freedom.

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Afterlives sees John Barnie engaging with images once again, as he did in his book A Year of Flowers. Here, Barnie deploys his skills of perception to respond to a group of paintings in Peter Lord’s art collection. These are images that have been familiar to Barnie for years, yet he approaches them with characteristic freshness and humanity. There are no mere descriptions here. Rather, Barnie inhabits the images, speaking from within or engaging with their subjects as a persona just outside the frame. And as he does so, we are taken on a narrative journey, gaining insight into not only how poetry and art interrogate one another, but how each image, peered at ‘through thick cracking varnish’, reveals layers of history and the mores that accrete into hierarchies, prejudices, injustices and the inability to read one another across cultural gaps. The poems in Afterlives reverberate with the ghosts from the pictures, whose roles are still being played out in the divisive echo-chambers of today’s insiders and outsiders. Rich with social commentary, delivered with wit, and sometimes a hint of mischief, there is a serious intent at work here: the voice of those who know ‘whose tragedy they are in’—‘their own’. And who know also that they: ‘will defy anything / that gets in their way’.

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On the surface a young professional couple, Sarah and Luke craved a different, more self-sufficient life. They traded the comfort of a two-bedroom English cottage for a derelict house in northwest Italy. The Hazelnut Grove explores the joys and demands of daring to live in search of a dream. Sarah and Luke’s chosen life is part fairy tale, part story of courage and self-reliance, as their new neighbour, nicknamed il Cattivo, the nasty one, decides to make war over the desolate hazelnut grove, a two metre strip of land behind their house. Their story is interspersed with anecdotes drawn from the author’s family’s holiday cottage in rural France. As events unfold that might have driven them away, especially Sarah, who does not share Luke’s Italian heritage, a picture emerges not only of how the Italian life has tested Sarah, but also of how she discovered in herself both a grand obstinacy and a respect for the materials and objects of that life. A chunk of rusting metal becomes, in Sarah’s eyes, an artefact with potential. Sarah becomes an artist. Set in Piedmont, renowned for its wine and food, a story of abundance and thriving slowly emerges against the challenges of a menacing neighbour, the deaths of beloved animals and the loneliness of getting to grips with an unfamiliar language and culture. When asked by English friends:‘Would you ever move back home again?’ Luke and Sarah can only answer:‘We are home.’

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Heartwarming warming and humorous memoirs about growing up in the North of England in the 1940s and 50s, written in the voice of the 11 year-old protagonist.

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From objects imbued with meaning and memory to the places that nurture and anchor us, Denise Bennett's poetry is grounded in a sense of the sacredness of the everyday. There is keen attention to justice and relationships of integrity shine a bright light into dark places. The poetry here is not only accomplished but deeply felt. It comes from a place of listening and seeing with the heart and is delivered in imagery that is lucid, precise and moving.

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When Bard and linguist, Easten wins the right to bear Perori at an Eisteddfod, he little suspects how exceptional this lute really is. Perori' means music in Welsh, but her music does more than soothe and entertain. When Easten's liege lord, Caradoc, comes under attack from an aggressive neighbour, Easten sets off to plead for assistance from Caradoc's relative, High King Cormac of Tara. On his journey from Cymru to Ireland, Easten discovers more of Perori's healing powers and soon the instrument reveals that she can also help him understand even more languages, a skill that helps with his first task of negotiating safe passage from the small Viking colony in the place that will become Liverpool, still part of the Danegeld. There he also meets a young novitiate monk from Birkenhead Priory, who becomes Easten's travel companion. When the ship is attacked by pirates and a violent storm, Perori helps to save lives on both occasions, and continues to rescue the party as they march acro

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When three troubled people find themselves snow-bound in Inverness, it's more than bad weather that they have to come to terms with...

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In this prize-winning, lyrical debut full collection, we encounter poetry that is both delicate and powerful. Yvonne Baker writes in the liminal space between the interior and exterior world, illuminating both with grace and precision.

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Vital Signs draws on the inspiration of the medical vital signs in three parts-'Body', 'Pulse' and 'Breath'-each with nine poems that explore romantic love, death and the experiences of grief and loss in a poetry that is as embodied, pulsing with life and rhythmically breathing.

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Poignant poetry pamphlet exploring fertility and its absence.

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A thought-provoking collection that delves into the depths of human emotions, relationships, and the power of language and art.

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In the initial sequence of this pamphlet, and following short lyrics, the writer explores the experience of living with long-term, and severe mental states. There is no safe haven of medical ‘pathology’ here, but an urgent rite of passage for the damaged and conflicted soul. A form of modern Purgatory—escaping the grasping jaws of Inferno, to find itself stumbling towards a rarefied, yet earthy, Paradiso. Ian Marriott’s marvellous poems inhabit rather than observe nature — in fact they do both — but are as much concerned with the human condition. They work in the area of what Hopkins called instress. The voice is calm, contained and precise, as when he watches a Pond Skater, “So perilous / this thin meniscus — / six legs spread out”. The poems too seem to tremble on the water of their vision. — George Szirtes

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Max Falkland finds herself on a new mission, this time posing as a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation. Out of her comfort zone with an assignment that reminds her she is the daughter of a viscount, and out of her depth with the silent men in her life, she takes refuge in an archeological expedition, but a chance meeting leads to a trip that will force Max to face the most frightening moments of her career while trying to protect those she loves. The unmissable conclusion to the Max Falkland Trilogy.

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In a near-future world without privacy or freedom, life is unravelling for Luke, a teenager whose questions and individuality have no place in surveilled society. A virtual encounter with a girl who claims to live beyond the all-controlling grip of E-Government sets him on a quest not only for answers, but for escape. But is Alys real? Why are there echoes of her world in his father, Nazir Malik’s home, especially since Nazir is a celebrity artist trusted by E-Government? And what role can characters from Celtic Arthurian legend possibly play in saving the future? Most urgently, can Luke overcome the threats that surround him and find the Standing Ground?"A wonderful novel… a fresh rendition of the future that draws on technologies that are currently emerging… and on Arthurian legend… akin to Philip Pullman’s street-smart, other-worldly creations, complete with convincing, humorous and likeable characters… a gripping read."Anna Kiernan

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n Cold Crash, when Archaeologist Max Falkland, the Anglo-American daughter of a British peer, meets American John Knox in London in April 1952, her already troubled life takes on mystery. As the Cold War thriller progresses, Max finds herself in increasing danger, but three weeks after the events of Cold Crash, the point at which The Running Lie begins, Max has found an archaeological dig in London and John Knox has entered her life. But even now, can he be trusted? Max encounters both skulls and sexism on the dig site at the bombed out shell of St. Bride's Church in London. A family request sends her to the Berlin International Film Festival, away from the dig and her growing relationship with John Knox. But after she sees John in Berlin with another woman, Max forces him to confess he is an American spy. When his current case collides with her family life, Max has to find a way to navigate layers of lies. As fireworks explode for the Fourth of July party, Max must make a dangerous choice if she wants to save both John and her family. The Running Lie is a page-turning Cold War spy thriller that reboots old school cloak and dagger — Max Falkland is the James Bond of the 21st Century.

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In this fifth collection Omar Sabbagh establishes himself as a mature and distinctive voice in poetry with an extraordinary facility for language, an intense gift for observation, and a reflective and intuitive grasp of connections, especially to others. But It Was An Important Failure is an insightful, lyrical and confessional harvest of engaging poetry; the cultivation of a language garden for ‘the rigor and flow in the happiness of gardening.’

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In The Third Sister Speaks Liliana A Pasterska immerses us in the voice of Anne Brontë—a frontierswoman and trailblazing writer of the mid 19th century who stepped out of ‘female’ territory to expose the taboos of her age, including gender inequality, marital abuse, the terrible conditions in which many women teachers worked and the effects of alcohol and substance abuse. A woman at the margins of her time, Anne Brontë lived for only 29 years, yet left a wealth of acute observation and sharp insight in her writing, as well as poetry that witnesses to her personal, spiritual and literary intelligence. For all of this, her voice is the one not often heard amongst the extraordinary Brontë sisters. But here is a corrective to this. In lyrical poetry originally commissioned for a programme of music and words celebrating Anne Brontë’s bicentenary, we enter Anne’s world. In this careful and beautifully achieved debut pamphlet, the voice of the poet reaches into the voice of a young woman still calling to the modern reader across time: elegant, spare, leaving space for silence and allowing its questions to resonate long after reading:I am a teller of truth a seer—can you hear me?

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'For we are all of the dust of stars, reborn hunter and hunted, to soar splay-winged across the moon or shadow the lonely light of angler fish.’ The final lines from the opening poem in David Underdown’s new collection hint at what is to follow, poems that range from the cosmic to the domestic, but all characterised by acute observation. The reader will also find a sense of the surreal and, above all, an empathy and relish for the many oddities and poignancies of existence. The book concludes with a sequence of poems dedicated to ‘the grandfather I never knew.’

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Eleven year old Simeon Isherwood is locked inside himself — can neither walk nor talk. When he undergoes a radical new gene therapy, it seems as though he can finally make contact with the world. But Simeon, used to the tranquility of his inner world, finds himself in agony, the anxiety of new sensations and experiences catching the attention of a mysterious entity — a being god-like and aloof from humanity, which to heal the pain of a young mind it sees as its offspring. When it does, the results are catastrophic.

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Haunted by memories of a Tanzanian childhood abruptly ended when her parents were deported, Jane Bryce returns in search of the past only to be ambushed by the present. As she retraces her own and her parents’ footsteps she is surprised by unexpected connections, reaching back into the colonial past, and further, to a time of myth and legend. The key to understanding what holds these together comes to her in the form of ‘zamani’—the Swahili sea of time where spirits inhabit places and landscape, memory animates the everyday and voices from the past speak to the present. Collectively these voices paint a picture of social and political change in Tanzania over the last 50 years, and invite the author to take her place in it.

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What is the connection between the tenth century Moorish princess, Casilda, and a young Jewish woman, Miriam, completing a Masters degree in contemporary Toledo? What links both to the Spanish singer, Casilda Faertes and to her mother, another Miriam, born in Budapest and raised in Nice? Spanning a thousand years and bringing together the stories of three generations of women in North-east England, Budapest and Spain, For Hope is Always Born, follows on from This is the End of the Story and A Remedy for All Things to ask huge questions about identity and the nature of love and loss.

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A very varied and colourful collection. There are numerous poems about love, both personal and perhaps fictional. There is a strong awareness of the real world and Nature in all its varieties (not least in that very fine and unexpected poem ‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’), but nevertheless it is the sense of a strong imagination at work that transforms the Real into Poetry that is so striking about this book. This is not another volume of careful observations that have been workshopped out of existence, but something altogether more wild and meaningful. — Fred Beake What I enjoy most about Clive’s poetry is its capacity to surprise, to lull the reader into the promise of the familiar and then completely change their understanding, their expectations, their view of life itself. These are poems of nuance and feeling, tactile descriptions and human emotion, imagination and inventiveness. — Robert Garnham

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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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What is a life without Art and Beauty? 
Not one that Julia chooses to live. And so she searches the world for both, discovering happiness through the lens of a camera. A fictional account of pioneer photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, and her extraordinary quest to find her own creative voice, The Glass House brings an exceptional photographer to life. From the depths of despair, with her relationships strained and having been humiliated by the artists she has given a home to, Julia rises to fame, photographing and befriending many of the day’s most famous literary, artistic, political and scientific celebrities. But to succeed as a female photographer, she must take on the Victorian patriarchy, the art world and, ultimately, her own family. And the doubts are not all from others. As Julia’s uneasy relationship with fame grows into a fear that the camera has taken part of her soul, her search leads her full circle, back to India, in her lifelong quest for peace and beauty. A poignant, elegant and richly detailed debut from Jody Cooksley.

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We become like the river reflected, both light and dark. Struggling artist Sylvia is offered an unusual commission by the mysterious Victor, acting on behalf of a secret sponsor, who wants to engage her for a year to produce art depicting the Holocaust. She accepts the project on trust and discovers an enigmatic thirteen-year-old girl, Nina, who becomes her model and pupil. As the months pass, Sylvia begins to unravel the truth about Victor, the secret sponsor and Nina, while unearthing more about history and identity than she was ever prepared for. A family drama that champions the structures and beliefs that underpin a civilised society, The River Reflects faces the darkest shadows of human nature. With the Thames winding relentlessly through this compelling story, Sylvia, Victor, Nina and those around them progress from fear and isolation to seek love and fortitude and the redemptive power of the human spirit.

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