Search results for ""Author Chris Beckett""

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.

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Chris Beckett′s new book on assessment and intervention in social work practice covers the core topics for qualifying social work students. The book provides a thorough understanding of the issues and skills essential for effective practice. Each of the nine chapters defines a key concept, including Assessment; Intervention; Risk and Efficacy. Case studies and ′practice questions′ throughout make the connections between theory and practice explicit. Suggestions as to further reading are made at the end of each chapter. This important book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate social work students throughout all three years of their training, but it will be particularly useful for students who are on on placement, or who are reflecting on their experiences on placement. It is also a useful resource for practice teachers who need a framework for discussing practice with students they supervise on placement.

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You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of Angela and Tommy. You shelter beneath the Forest's lantern trees. Beyond the forest lie mountains so forbidding that no one has ever crossed them. The Oldest recount legends of a time when men and women made boats that could travel between worlds. One day, they will come back for you. You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, in the warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of an alien, sunless world.You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to kill another, the first to venture into the Dark and the first to discover the truth about Eden.

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'Brilliantly and chillingly imagined' Guardian'Explored with wit, thoughtfulness and emotional weight' SpectatorAs a historian in the bleak, climate-ravaged twenty-third century, it's Zoe's job to record and archive the past, not to recreate it. But when she comes across the diaries of Harry and Michelle, who lived two hundred years ago, she becomes fascinated by the minutiae of their lives and decides to write a novel about them, filling in the gaps with her own imaginings.Harry and Michelle meet just after the Brexit referendum when Harry's car breaks down outside a small town in Norfolk. Despite their different backgrounds, and Michelle having voted Leave while Harry voted Remain, they are drawn to each other and begin a relationship.From her long perspective, the way Zoe sees their world is somewhat different from the way we see it now. Two Tribes becomes a reflection on the way our ideas are shaped by class and social circumstances, and how they change without us even noticing. It explores what divides us and what brings us together. And it asks where we may be headed next.

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'An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent... Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed.' - GuardianAmerica, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?

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Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions ...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. "Ethiopia Boy" plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy. Cover painting: "Isao Miura", "Crossing the Water" (oil on canvas). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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''A disturbing descent into a surreal world, written with a deft hand.'' Adrian Tchaikovsky, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016South America, 1990. Ben Ronson, a British police officer, arrives in a mysterious forest to investigate a spate of killings of Duendes. These silent, vaguely humanoid creatures - with long limbs and black button eyes - have a strange psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears. Ben becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but the closer he gets, the more he begins to unravel, with terrifying results...Beneath the World, A Sea is a tour de force of modern fiction - a deeply searching and unsettling novel about the human subconscious, and all that lies beneath.''Beckett is superb at undercutting reader assumptions with a casual line of dialogue or acute psychological observation: the book reads like Conrad''s Heart of Darkness reimagin

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The fascinating new novel from Chris Beckett, the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author.'Tomorrow I'm going to begin my novel...'A would-be author has taken time out from life in the city to live in a cabin by a river and write a novel.And not just any novel. A novel that will avoid all the pitfalls and limitations of other novels, a novel that will include everything. At first these new surroundings are so idyllic that it's hard to find the motivation to get started. And then, in all its brutality, the outside world intervenes...Ranging constantly backwards and forwards in time and space, Tomorrow becomes a restless search for meaning in a precarious and elusive world.

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George Simling has grown up in the city-state of Illyria in the Eastern Mediterranean, an enclave of logic and reason founded as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism that swept away the nations of the twenty-first century. Yet to George, Illyria's militant rationalism is as close-minded and stifling as the faith-based superstition that dominates the world outside its walls.For George has fallen in love with Lucy. A prostitute. A robot. She might be a machine, but the semblance of life is perfect. And beneath her good looks and real human skin, her seductive, sultry, sluttish software is simmering on the edge of consciousness. To the city authorities robot sentience is a malfunction, curable by periodically erasing and resetting silicon minds. Simple maintenance, no real problem, its only a machine. But its a problem for George, he knows that Lucy is something more.His only alternative is to flee Illyria, taking Lucy deep into the religious Outlands where she must pass as human because robots are seen as demonic mockeries of God, burned at the stake, dismembered, crucified. Their odyssey leads through betrayal, war and madness, ending only at the monastery of the Holy Machine...

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'A disturbing descent into a surreal world, written with a deft hand.' Adrian Tchaikovsky, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016Deep in an unnamed, unknown rainforest, Ben Ronson, a British police officer, investigates a spate of killings of a local, vaguely humanoid species. With long limbs and black button eyes, the Duendes are strange and silent creatures that have a deep psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears. Ben rapidly becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but as his inquiry unfolds so too does he. Beneath the World, A Sea is a tour de force of modern fiction - a deeply searching and unsettling novel about the human subconscious, and all that lies beneath.'Beckett is superb at undercutting reader assumptions with a casual line of dialogue or acute psychological observation: the book reads like Conrad's Heart of Darkness reimagined by JG Ballard.' Guardian

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Mother of Eden has been shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award, 2015.'We speak of a mother's love, but we forget her power. Power over life. Power to give and to withhold.' Generations after the breakup of the human family of Eden, the Johnfolk emphasise knowledge and innovation, the Davidfolk tradition and cohesion. But both have built hierarchical societies sustained by violence and dominated by men - and both claim to be the favoured children of a long-dead woman from Earth that all Eden knows as Gela, the mother of them all. When Starlight Brooking meets a handsome and powerful man from across Worldpool, she believes he will offer an outlet for her ambition and energy. But she has no idea that she will be a stand-in for Gela herself, and wear Gela's ring on her own finger. And she has no idea of the enemies she will make, no inkling that a time will come when she, like John Redlantern, will choose to kill...

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Angie Redlantern is the first to spot the boats - five abreast with men in metal masks and spears standing proud, ready for the fight to come. As the people of New Earth declare war on the people of Mainground, a dangerous era has dawned for Eden. After generations of division and disagreement, the two populations of Eden have finally broken their tentative peace, giving way to bloodshed and slaughter. Angie must flee with her family across the pitch black of Snowy Dark to the place where it all started, the stone circle where the people from Earth first landed, where the story of Gela - the mother of them all - began. It is there that Angie witnesses the most extraordinary event, one that will change the history of Eden forever. It will alter their future and re-shape their past. It is both a beginning and an ending. It is the true story of Eden.

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Arthur C. Clarke Award-Winning Author'An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent... Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed.' - GuardianAmerica, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?

Read more less

George Simling has grown up in the city-state of Illyria, an enclave of logic and reason founded as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism that swept away the nations of the twenty-first century. Yet to George, Illyria's militant rationalism is as stifling as the faith-based superstition that dominates the world outside its walls. For George has fallen in love with Lucy. A prostitute. A robot. She might be a machine, but the semblance of life is perfect. To the city authorities, robot sentience is a malfunction, curable by erasing and resetting silicon minds. But George knows that Lucy is something more. His only alternative is to flee Illyria, taking Lucy deep into the religious Outlands where she must pass as human because robots are seen as mockeries of God, burned at the stake, dismembered, crucified. Their odyssey leads them through betrayal, war and madness, ending only at the monastery of the Holy Machine...

Read more less

The fascinating new novel from Chris Beckett, the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author.'Tomorrow I'm going to begin my novel...'A would-be author has taken time out from life in the city to live in a cabin by a river and write a novel.And not just any novel. A novel that will avoid all the pitfalls and limitations of other novels, a novel that will include everything. At first these new surroundings are so idyllic that it's hard to find the motivation to get started. And then, in all its brutality, the outside world intervenes...Ranging constantly backwards and forwards in time and space, Tomorrow becomes a restless search for meaning in a precarious and elusive world.

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Finalist for the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. This is the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry in English, packed with all the energy, wit and heartache of a beautiful country and language. From folk and religious poems, warrior boasts, praises of women and kings and modern plumbing; through a flowering of literary poets in the twentieth century; right up to thirty of the most exciting contemporary Amharic poets working both inside and outside the country. These poems ask what it means to be Ethiopian today, part of a young fast-growing economy, heirs to the one African state which was never colonised, but beset by deep political, ethnic and moral problems.

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A special limited edition of J. G. Ballard’s cult, post-modern and shocking novel I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. The Collector’s Edition A former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, Robert Vaughan gathers around him a collection of alienated crash victims. Among them is James Ballard, our narrator, who is drawn into a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity. Alongside Ballard’s cult postmodern novel, this special edition, edited by Chris Beckett, includes never-before-seen reproductions of Ballard’s annotated manuscript pages, essays, stories and material that shine a new light on this modern masterpiece.

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An awareness of one’s own ethical assumptions and how these inform everyday practice is crucial for all student social workers. Social workers who genuinely wish to do the right thing by their services users have no alternative but to constantly think and rethink the principles and assumptions that inform their actions, and this book supports them on their journey to do just that. This third edition is set out in two parts: Part I deals with broad ideas about values and ethics in general, looking at philosophy, religion and politics, as well as the duty of realism. Part II takes the discussion further, looking at how these general principles are relevant to everyday practice, with chapters on the use and misuse of power, the idea of self-determination, and the challenges of working with people whose experience and outlook are different to one’s own.

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'In Search of Fat' is a translation of some of Bewketu Seyoums's popular poems from Amharic. The poems in this bilingual edition mark his distinctive humorous but cutting style in predominantly short form. The translations, with input from the author, aim to replicate in English the energy and vitality of his voice. Bewketu Seyoum is a popular young Ethiopian poet and writer from Mankusa in Gojjam, north-west of Addis Ababa. His father is an English teacher and his mother comes from a family of Orthodox priests. He has published three collections of Amharic poetry, two novels and two CD's of humorous stories. His short punchy poems, full of warmth and humour, address all the important issues of modern life, including poverty, freedom, religion and love. In 2008, Bewketu was awarded the prize for Young Writer of the Year by the President of Ethiopia. In June 2012, he will represent Ethiopia at the Poetry Parnassus festival in London.

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