Search results for ""Canongate Books""

Lexy''s wedding becomes a crime scene when a murderer dares to strike on her big day in this superbly plotted and wickedly funny cozy.Lexy Campbell is getting married! But in the six months of planning it took to arrive at the big day, she has become . . . a challenge. Friendships are strained to breaking point, Lexy''s parents are tiptoeing around her, and even Taylor, her intended, must be having second thoughts. Turns out it''s moot. Before the happy couple can exchange vows, Sister Sunshine, the wedding celebrant, is discovered dead behind the cake, strangled with the fairy lights.Lexy''s dream wedding is now not just a nightmare: it''s a crime scene. She vows not to get drawn into the case, but the rest of the Last Ditch crew are investigating a bizarre series of goings-on in Cuento''s cemetery, and every clue about the graveyard pranks seems to link them back to Lexy''s wedding day. Will the Ditchers solve the case? Will Sister Sunshine''s killer

Read more less

Join Countess turned advice columnist Amelia Amesbury as she tries to juggle a new Season and a new murder in this charmingly deadly historical mystery.A beautiful debutante, a wealthy widow, and a dead would-be baron. What could be more exciting?Countess by day, secret advice columnist by night, Amelia Amesbury has life happily balanced on a quill''s edge . . . until her sister Margaret shows up in London under a blanket of scandal and Amelia is catapulted out of mourning and into the ton''s unforgiving Season.However Madge''s Season debut is marred by a rather inconvenient death at the dining table as the infamous Mr Radcliffe takes ill and is later confirmed dead by poisoning. With Madge being the last person to have cross words with the soon-to-be baron, the ton''s gossip mill - and the police - are looking to pin the murder on her.Adding to the Ton''s troubles is a jewellery thief targeting the most lavish of Society''s houses. Is

Read more less

Pirates in Penzance? Queen Elizabeth''s half-sister and secret agent Ursula Blanchard takes on a dangerous new mission involving mysterious disappearances and murder in Cornwall in this gripping Tudor mystery.1594. Ursula Stannard is attending on her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth, when she receives an urgent summons from Sir Robert Cecil. Cornishman Master Roskilly was fished out of the sea by Sir Francis Godolphin, and has a shocking tale of being snatched by pirates and put on a slave vessel to Constantinople before his audacious escape. And he''s not the only one . . . Folk in Cornwall are mysteriously disappearing. But why are only exceptional or unusual individuals being kidnapped, and could there be a link to two recent murders?With the queen''s annual progress stalled, Ursula agrees to go undercover to unmask those responsible, knowing that Queen Elizabeth would be the most prized captive of all . . .

Read more less

From the award-winning author of the internationally-bestselling Brigid Quinn thrillers, which have been translated into 20 languages, comes this gripping series spin-off: an upmarket novel of domestic suspense about a pair of sisters nicknamed Malice and Lethal, and a husband who vanishes into thin air, only to reappear and throw a bomb into both their livesAlice Einstein - known as Malice to her former schoolfriends - likes to tell herself stories. There''s a good one she''s workshopping about how, despite once being a critically acclaimed literary novelist, she''s ended up blocked and uninspired, living in her timid, conflict-averse sister Liesel''s spare room.But then Liesel sends her an SOS worthy of a thriller novel. The horror! The horror! Sam is back.Sam, Liesel''s wealthy ex-husband, vanished ten years ago, leaving her a chunk of money but no explanation. Sam is handsome, charming, manipulative . . . and now he claims he''s sick.

Read more less

A quiet town. A horrible incident. Things that don''t add up. - The highly-anticipated latest instalment of the DS McAvoy series from the Sunday Times best-selling, Kindle chart-topping author. McAvoy is a true original Mick HerronAn unexpected invite to his estranged mother''s surprise birthday party at a fancy Durham hotel gives DI Aector McAvoy and his wife Roisin a chance for a well-deserved holiday. Off-duty, and still recovering from his previous injuries, McAvoy is determined to take advantage of the all-expenses-paid break, despite the old grudges and thick tension between himself and his step-family.However, what should have been a relaxing, if awkward, getaway weekend turns out to be a full-on nightmare, when McAvoy finds himself in the middle of a town drama that involves the tragic demise of Ishmael Piper, a rock star''s millionaire son . . . and best friend of McAvoy''s charming, bullying step-brother.With dark

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BERNARD SHAW PRIZEA woman's life, erupting with brilliance and promise, is fissured by betrayal and the pressures of duty. What had once seemed a pastoral family idyll has become a trap, and she struggles between being the wife and mother she is bound to be and wanting to do and be so much more. The woman in question is Sylvia Plath in the final year of her life. As Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes unravels through the heady days of their first summer in Devon together, Sylvia turns increasingly to writing to express her pain and loss, yet also her resilience and power. She has decided to die, but the art she creates in her final weeks will set her name, and the world, ablaze.

Read more less

Herman had often walked these streets, eyeing the forest of tall ships, their blackened strakes handsomely curved, masts like crosses, empty of sails . . .1841. A young Herman Melville is yet to write Moby Dick. He sets out on a voyage aboard a whaling ship. What happens on that trip will give him enough material for a lifetime of writing. But what of the dark things Melville encounters on his journey, and the illicit relationships he embarks upon that are to torment him once he returns home to his wife Lizzie? All is revealed as Jay Parini lifts the lid on one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century . . .

Read more less

Siân, troubled by dark dreams and seeking distraction, joins an archaeological dig at Whitby. The abbey's one hundred and ninety-nine steps link the twenty-first century with the ruins of the past and Siân is swept into a mystery involving a long-hidden murder, a fragile manuscript in a bottle and a cast of most peculiar characters. Equal parts historical thriller, romance and ghost story, this is an ingenious literary page-turner and is completely unforgettable.THIS EDITION ALSO FEATURES MICHEL FABER'S NOVELLA THE COURAGE CONSORT

Read more less

Since 1888, Rangers and Celtic football clubs have been locked into an intense and frequently explosive rivalry: Rangers the product of West Scotland's Protestant establishment, Celtic the team founded to raise money for the Catholic underclass of Glasgow.On 2 January 2010 the two teams met in the Old Firm's New Year Derby, a fixture that had been banned for ten years because of the trouble it brought with it. Richard Wilson puts that game at the centre of a book which delves into the history and widens out to the cultural resonance of the fixture within Scotland. It is a potent mix of close-up observation and big-picture thinking, with insight, understanding and depth.

Read more less

This is the story of a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil.It is also the story of an extraordinary journey undertaken by a man named Henry. It begins with a mysterious parcel, and it ends in a place that will make you think again about one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. Once you have finished reading it, it is impossible to forget.

Read more less

Arranged as a diary around a calendar year, Those Who Marched Away tells many individual stories from many wars down the ages, with several compelling entries for each day of the year. The diarists come from every walk of life; from faceless foot solidiers to those charged with orchestrating battle, from the Home Front to the Holocaust, from famous writers, political leaders and fighting men and women to ordinary working people enveloped by events over which they have no influence. Together, they contribute an intimate insight into what has been described both as 'the most exciting and dramatic thing in life' and the 'universal perversion'.

Read more less

Squabbling siblings, misfit school-friends and life on the estates of West Dublin are trouble enough. But then a ghost starts haunting the family home and Denny's life starts getting properly complicated.Hilarious, warm and tragic by turns, Ghosts and Lightning is a refreshing tale of one young man doing the right thing when surrounded by all the wrong choices and finding love in the most unlikely places.

Read more less

'Eunoia', which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, Eunoia is as playful as it is awe-inspiring.

Read more less

Bloodshot Monochrome is a glorious poetic take on all things black, white and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead in 'Problem Pages', playing out noir dramas in 'Vicious Circle', or capturing moments of her own life in perfect snapshot, Agbabi's verse is sublimely lyrical and spiked with gleeful humour.

Read more less

Underground, in the tunnels beneath New York, a young man is missing.Above ground, Ali Lateef of the NYPD is assigned the case. The boy's mother is reluctant to help and Emily, his girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Can Lateef find Lowboy before it's too late?An extraordinary chronicle of a desperate young man and the race to find him, Lowboy is a modern masterpiece.

Read more less

Collapsing stock markets, melting ice caps, floods, tornadoes, terrorism . . . When it comes to bad news, we've never had it so good. Perhaps it is time to be a little more optimistic? That's what Laurence Shorter decided. And that's why he set himself the challenge of meeting the world's most cheerful people. Surely with the help of Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson and Bill Clinton, Laurence can find the secret to inner happiness. But first things first - how on Earth is he going to get to meet them?

Read more less

At the dawn of the twenty-first century Adam Kellas finds himself hurled on a journey between continents and cultures. In his quest from the war-torn mountains of Afghanistan to the elegant dinner tables of north London and then the marshlands of the American South, only the memory of the beautiful, elusive Astrid offers the possibility of hope.With all the explosive drama of The People's Act of Love, this is a spellbinding tale of folly and the pursuit of love from one of today's most talented and visionary writers.

Read more less

May, 1831, and on a tiny island off the Isle of Man a lighthouse provides a harsh living for an unusual family. Lucy and Diya, husbandless and with three children between them, watch over the ancient light on Ellan Bride. Meanwhile the Scottish engineer, Robert Stevenson, is modernising the nation's lighthouses, and Ellan Bride and the future of the family, are under threat. When two surveyors arrive to assess the light, tension escalates to danger point.

Read more less

In this fascinating follow-up to the highly successful Dear Francesca, Mary Contini writes to her other daughter, Olivia, to tell the story of her great-grandparents, the humble Italian shepherds who emigrated to Edinburgh and then helped to transform Britain's food culture. Sharing some of the recipes that they brought over, the tomatoes, the garlic, the sausage, the wine, this is a mouthwatering memoir of family and food. It is also a brilliant evocation of life between the wars, a triumphant story of survival against all the odds, that captures the sights and smells of Italian life and culture, at home and abroad.

Read more less

By 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the world's most famous author, had become an almost religious figure, surrounded on his lavish estate by family and followers alike. Set in the tumultuous last year of the count's life, The Last Station centres on the battle for his soul waged by his wife and his leading disciple.Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity on the one hand and the reality of his enormous wealth, his thirteen children, and a life of hedonism on the other, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes he is dying alone, while outside over one hundred newspapermen are awaiting hourly reports on his condition.Narrated in six different voices, including Tolstoy's own from his diaries and literary works, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances bewitchingly between fact and fiction.

Read more less

The name John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Born in Dunbar in 1838, Muir is famed as a pioneer of conservation, and his passion, discipline and vision are still inspirational today.Combining acute observation with a sense of inner discovery, Muir's description of the summer he spent in what would become Yosemite National Park in California's Sierra Nevada mountains raises an awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension. His journal provides a unique weaving of natural history, lyrical prose and amusing anecdote, retaining a freshness, intensity and honesty which will amaze the modern reader.

Read more less

Sweeping in scope, both historically and geographically, Vassanji weaves a rich tapestry of vivid characters (real and imagined) in a Kenya poised between colonialism and independence.Vikram Lall, like his adopted country, inhabits an 'in-between world': between the pull of his ancestral home in India and the Kenya he loves passionately; between his tragic past in Africa and an unclear future in Canada; between escape from political terror and a seemingly inevitable return home . . . a return that may cost him dearly.A master storyteller, Vassanji intertwines the political and the personal - the rise of the Mau Mau in the last days of colonialism looms large over a plot centring on two love stories and a deep friendship. The result is a sumptuous novel that brilliantly explores the tyranny of history and memory, and questions the individual's role and responsibility in lawless times.

Read more less

This superb collection, hailed for its power, compassion and elegance, takes in the wide sweep of human experience. From the last hours of a condemned man, to the imaginary life of an AIDS patient, to the first performance of a bizarre new symphony, Yann Martel's stories are moving, thought-provoking and as inventive in form as they are timeless in content. They display the startling mix of dazzle and depth that has made him an international phenomenon.

Read more less

A powerful debut from an Australian novelist that features one of the most likeable but contrary figures you are likely to meet in contemporary fiction.Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house in Illinois and couldn't be more welcoming . . . until she starts to be distubed by the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things begin to go terribly wrong.How the Light Gets In is an acutely observed story of adolescence, reminiscent of American Beauty in its dissection of engrained prejudices and middle-class hypocrisy. In Lou Connor, Hyland has created a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.

Read more less

London, 1593. A city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, strangers are unwelcome, suspicion is wholesale, severed heads grin from the spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe walks the city's mean streets with just three days to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer escaped from the pages of his most violent play.Tamburlaine Must Die is the searing adventure of a man who dares to defy both God and the state and whose murder remains a taunting mystery to the present day.

Read more less

In the lush, uninhibited atmosphere of Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson is languishing with the disease that will soon kill him; when a chance encounter with the mysterious Scottish missionary, Mr Baker, turns his thoughts back to his conservative, post-Reformation Edinburgh home.As Stevenson's meetings with the tantalizingly nebulous missionary become increasingly strange, a series of crimes against the native population sours the atmosphere. With its playful nod to Stevenson's life and work Manguel has woven an intoxicating tale in which fantasy infiltrates reality.

Read more less

A classic detective story that explores the last years of Hemingway's life, evoking both Cuba and this giant of American letters with enormous skill and wit. When the bones of a man murdered forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer and ex-cop Mario Conde is called in to investigate. As he unearths the truth of the night of 3 October 1958, he is forced to come to terms with a very different side to his former literary hero.Padura Fuentes switches between Conde's world and that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier; in the heat and rum haze, the two seem slowly to merge. In an extraordinary journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century´s most enigmatic and powerful writers, a masterful and totally convincing portrait emerges, as well as a riveting mystery that will keep you in suspense until the very final pages.

Read more less

It is 1978. Corrado Dusa is head of Italy's Christian Democrat Party and the country's Senior Minister. He is also considered to be the key figure in resolving the crisis of dissent and violence that permeates political life. But Dusa has been kidnapped and now his son, Bernardo, a member of a militant extremist group, has disappeared. The press is aghast while the family sense disaster. Can Dusa's release be negotiated? Under what conditions? And - most importantly - with what results? First published in 1981 (The Bodley Head Press) Massie's stylish and enthralling thriller won a Scottish Arts Council Award: exploring America's influence on Europe and the causes of terrorism, The Death of Men is sure to have an arresting affect on readers today.

Read more less

This trenchant and illuminating book by one of Africa's most influential and celebrated writers is a major statement on the importance and dangers of stories, one in which Achebe makes telling use of his personal experiences to examine the political nature of culture and specifically literature.It is the weaving of the personal into the bigger picture that makes Home and Exile so remarkable and affecting. It's the closest we are likely to get by way of Achebe's autobiography but it is also a brilliantly argued critique of imperialism. Achebe challenges the way the West has appropriated Africa with a particular emphasis on how 'imperialist' literature has been used to justify its dispossession and degradation.Above all this is a book that articulates persuasively why literature matters. Stories are a real source of power in the world, Achebe concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away.

Read more less

This superb anthology offers a lively and indispensable collection of poems and songs from the eighteenth century. Here are the poets who created the literary tradition of vernacular directness which Burns drew upon and shared.Before Burns includes a substantial selection from the work of Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson (Burns's 'elder brother in the muse'), as well as a wider selection from the men and women writers whose good-humoured accessibility so characterised the poetry of their time.MacLachlan's excellent introduction also puts these works in perspective and makes a case for a linguistic confidence, rather than insecurity, in their vigorous use of English and Scots.

Read more less

Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland's finest and most underrated short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the strangeness of the daily human condition.This wide-ranging collection of the very best of Elspeth Davie's short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.

Read more less

At the turn of the 20th century, Glasgow was the centre for an avant-garde movement of art and design innovation in Europe, which we now refer to as The Glasgow Style. While the "Glasgow Boys" group of painters has been widely written about, their female contemporaries have received far less attention. In this work, the editor redresses this imbalance, bringing together research from 18 scholars on the work of an astonishing number of female artists from this period.

Read more less

Poor Angus centres round a struggling painter, Angus McAllister, who has returned to the seemingly idyllic Hebridean island of his birth in the hope that it will inspire him to create his masterpiece. His privacy is invaded by Janet, a visitor with relatives on the island, who has decided that an affair with an artist would be the simplest way to incense and recapture her husband, a golf-fanatic devoid of imagination.So begins an irresistible story, both comic and serious which, with characteristic ironic wit explores the attitudes of men and women to sex and relationships in general, and which focuses on the psychology of the artist and the justification, if any, for art

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BETTY TRASK PRIZEFollowing the death of her best friend, Erin has to get out of London. Returning home to Belfast, an au pair job provides some refuge from her grief and her relentless mother. She spends her spare daytime sitting in quiet churches and her free nights at the bar where her childhood friend Declan works. Erin is grateful for the distraction offered by, first, a good-looking American academic, and then the reappearance in her life of an old flame. They offer delightful diversions. But Erin must eventually confront herself.

Read more less

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARA TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR Nealon returns to his family home in Ireland after a long time away, only to be greeted by a completely empty house. With no sign of his wife or child anywhere, it seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. The one exception is a persistent caller on the telephone, someone who seems to know everything about Nealon''s life, his recent bother with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family. All Nealon needs to do is talk with him. But the more he talks the closer Nealon becomes tangled in the very crimes of which he claims to be innocent.

Read more less

LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE RICHARD JEFFERIES AWARDA WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023Footprints in the Woods is John Lister-Kaye''s charming account of a year spent with otters, badgers, weasels and pine martens. This family - Mustelidae - all live in the wild at Aigas, the conservation and field study centre in the Highlands that he calls home.With fifty years of experience living side-by-side with these creatures and the patience of a true naturalist, John reveals the lives of these elusive animals: sometimes red in tooth and claw, but often playful, familial, curious and surprising.

Read more less

A curious book that will change your relationship with the heard world In Listen, Michel Faber''s lifelong passion for music culminates in an intriguing exploration of two big questions: how we listen to music and why we listen to music. He muses on the notion of ''cool'', delves into the rich lodes of commercial and aesthetic worth and interviews a panoply of people who experience music in different ways, unlocking some surprising answers.

Read more less

In the Black Mountains of Pakistan, the discovery of an unconscious, unknown man is the first snowball in an avalanche of chaos. The head of the village is beset with problems - including the injured stranger - and failing to find his way out. His daughter receives a love letter and incurs her father''s wrath. A lame boy foretells disaster, but nobody is listening. Trapped in terrible danger, a wolf-dog is battling ice and death to save a soldier''s life. Beaten by her addict husband for bearing him only daughters, a woman is pregnant again - but can this child save her?All the while, the spirits of the mountains keep a baleful eye on the doings of the humans. In a land woven with myth, chained with tradition and afflicted by ongoing conflict and the march of progress, can the villagers find a way to co-exist with nature that doesn''t destroy either of them?

Read more less

'Great poems,' David Whyte has said, 'are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.' Essentials is a collection of his own best poems, each in their way about capturing the experience itself, whether that is in the daily shifts, the ever-turning seasons or the bigger cycle of gain and grief that are part of our journey through life. Each poem is accompanied by a short context on where and when it was written. Together they form an elegant testament to David Whyte's most closely-held understanding - that human life cannot be apportioned out as one thing or another; rather, it is best seen as a living conversation, a way between and beyond, made beautiful by darkness as well as light, at its essence both deeply solitary and profoundly communal. This updated edition includes poems from his 2021 collection, Still Possible.

Read more less