Search results for ""Leamington Books""

The sewers of Bucharest, Romania, Christmas 1989. Vlad and other Securitate secret police comrades fan out across a city about to fall to counter-revolution. The show trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are broadcast on television. Vlad, raised as an assassin in a Securitate orphanage in Targoviste, home of Vlad the Impaler, vows to avenge the death of his adoptive ‘parents’ in that very town. Moving from safe-house to safe-house, with help from remnants of the regime, he begins to pick off those involved in the murders. Vlad wanders around the new Romania, observing the turning of coats, the miners’ rampages, meeting other post-communist undead. As European integration and a ‘fully functioning market economy’ beckon, he carves, quite literally, a lucrative and grisly niche. Love and fatherhood remain a possibility. But Vlad, like the stray dogs and street walkers he frequents, knows that life is becoming increasingly dangerous. As one victim exclaims: ‘God does not love the workers!’.

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An Edinburgh advocate undergoes an interior experience of humiliation and terror, totally losing his way in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure. Donald Humbie, leaving behind his career and his wife in Edinburgh, heads north to familiar places for a short break. Unfortunately, the familiar places have become unfamiliar and increasingly hostile. Each setting, each character, each event is an unsettling side-step away from normality in a dark, surreal landscape that has Donald fleeing manically around the country. Fearing that his wife has been abducted, he seeks out MacNucator, a private detective, to find her. Meanwhile the Sinister Cabaret, led by the strange and unfathomable Mr Motion, pursues him relentlessly. John Herdman’s characters inhabit a dark universe illuminated by his profoundly laconic wit. In the Sinister Cabaret he continues the exploration of extreme states of mind and ambiguous interior worlds with the Gothic imagination, which has led critics to compare him with James Hogg and R L Stevenson.

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This book of poetry has been a labour of love. The collection is an expression of love, lust, reality and surrealism, written from the heart. The poems are a direct result of the way Carla Woodburn views life and expresses the situations around her. Inspiration is taken from everyday occurrences and Carla likes to think she's used alchemy to transform these situations into a beautiful collection of poetry hailing from Scotland. An uncomplicated collection of poetry that can be enjoyed by adults and poetry lovers around the globe. This collection is a lifetime's work of Carla's and is lovingly dedicated to Carla's family.

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Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was." Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice - in all senses.

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Eddie Gibbons’ fourth full length collection, WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT YOU, is a poetry book like no other. Playful, thoughtful, inventive, and much larger than your average slim volume What They Say About You was shortlisted in poetry for Scottish Book of the Year. Eddie Gibbons was born in Liverpool, but lives in Scotland. He was a winner at the Inaugural Edwin Morgan poetry prize at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2008. The poetry in What They Say About You covers love, family life, glorious wordplay and celebrations of Eddie's beloved Liverpool Football Club.

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John Herdman's masterpiece of the modern Scottish Gothic appears in print from Leamington Books' imprint Gothic World Literature Editions, with a new introduction from the author. Black humour and even blacker lives collide in a tale of love and murder on an old Borders family estate. In a grotesque story told from two contrasting angles we meet the arrogant genius, Frank, and his hated brother Hubert. Raw and immoral, Imelda is a puzzle, mocking the reader in its quest for answers. Murder and madness this way lie―but who if anyone is to be believed in unpicking the deadly secrets behind the birth of cousin Imelda's child? An assured masterpiece from Scotland's greatest living chronicler of the dark side, Imelda, first published in 1993 became an instant classic of Scottish letters.

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The memories I had built exploded. As the debris landed, my mind grasped at the facts. The Broken Pane is about loss and family, when families are broken. Finding yourself in the pieces of memory. About a young woman and her search for answers. In her early twenties, Tam rushes to her childhood flat only to be confronted by a tragic discovery. Anchored by the weight of family lore, she struggles to come to terms with her loss. As her life spirals, she sets off to find the one person who may hold the answers: her mother. Tam’s travels take her far from a home which was more broken than she had ever realised. Walking the line between reliable memory and unreliable narrator, Charlie Roy’s debut novel invites you to consider whether you are shaped by your past ― or if you shape your past yourself?

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Edition #2 of NOVELLA EXPRESS with: The Hardest Winter by Carole Hamilton Heaven Burns by Jen McGregor Just Like Him to Die by Douglas Bruton

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Edition #1 of NOVELLA EXPRESS with: Little Apples by Ricky Monahan Brown Black Cat and the Japanese Umbrella by Lowri Larsen Albertine by Laurence Klavan

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Novella Express is a book series celebrating the full diversity and energy of literature's most precious form ― the novella. Edition #3 of Novella Express with: Bluebird by Sonia Hadj Said; Dear FIN by Andrea Layne Black; Between the Virgin and the Sea by Cath Barton. Bluebird starts on a morning that the protagonist believes to be the end of her life. An immigrant from Eastern Europe, the narrator has spent the last ten years thriving to be a writer or a journalist in London and failing on every front. In a bid to try and save herself, she takes a month off from her catering job and takes us down memory lane of experiences of being a young immigrant woman as well as a struggling artist. Minimum-wage jobs, unpaid internships, school certificates, rented rooms in dangerous-feeling areas, nightlife, rejections, family expectations: these are all entwined in her inner monologue as she fights for her own life before time runs out. Andrea Layne Black's LGBQT novella Dear FIN tells the story of Jack Wilson, a young man mourning his beloved dog, on the eve of his 17th birthday and the six-year anniversary of the tragic death of his parents, as he struggles with friends, family, sexuality, and his troubled feelings in the small coastal community of River City. Cath Barton's melancholic novella Between the Virgin and the Sea is set in an unnamed city which has fallen off the map of the world, accessible now only by sea. Violence has broken out in the city and the people, fearing that the established church is involved, pray instead at roadside shrines. The story tells the events of a day at the end of which the white statue of the Virgin which stands on a hill overlooking the city may - or may not - come to life to restore peace to its people. Central to the story is a boy called Tag, the things of which he dreams and the maps he draws.

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What happens when a woman is pushed too far? Is she able to express her thoughts and feelings, or is she forced towards the expectation of behaving 'normally' again soon? A woman travels with her husband to an old colonial mansion after a nervous breakdown triggered by the birth of their child. Confined to the nursery and allowed only to breathe fresh air, eat well and rest in line with a regimented ‘cure’, she slowly begins to unravel at the seams. Her only distraction is writing in secret – that, and the woman she begins to see trapped inside the yellow wallpaper of the room itself. Isolated and breaking apart, she sets herself a task: to free the woman, and to become one with her temporary confinement. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' presents a harrowing, disturbing account of mental stress, confinement and female turmoil - within which the only available solace can be found inside four peeling, sickly yellow walls...

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A beautiful woman is being held captive in an unknown location. She is manacled to a chair in a darkened, sinister dining room. Her captor is polite but menacing. Her female companions, silent spectators. A serial killer’s dark obsession with the preservation of beauty sees him return to stalk the streets of Penzance in the summer of 2019. It’s 23 years since his first victims went missing, setting DI Brandon Hammett on the hunt for the Sleeping Beauty Killer. When a glass box is found in Prussia Cove, containing a conch and the ear of a missing beauty, a murder investigation is launched. Is the Sleeping Beauty Killer back? Or is this a copycat killing? An evasive, clever killer is at large, presenting DI Brandon Hammett with a disturbingly formidable chase to the edge…

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Blockchain and Bitcoin have become household names. BLOCKCHAIN, BITCOIN AND YOU explains the technical concepts that make up the blockchain and what they mean for the future of personal finance, as well as their role in business-relevant applications. Scotcoin’s CEO Temple Melville lifts the complex key principles of blockchain technology out of the preserve of academia and tech and delivers it to a new audience ― the people. Find out what the blockchain is; why it is needed and the problems it solves; why there is so much excitement about the blockchain and its potential; major components and their purpose; major application scenarios ― and what it means for you. “This book is a treasure trove of information for anyone with a curiosity about this new technology and what it means for them in their day to day lives, it helpfully explains the intricacies of blockchain technology in a refreshingly user-friendly and entertaining way.” Stephen Ingledew, Chief Executive of Fintech Scotland

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O tempora! O City of failed writers and successful folksingers - Great Whore of Babble-on, if only Mad John Knox could see you now! Wild, experimental and nihilistic, The Sinner was published just months after the death of its author, Stuart MacGregor who was killed in a motor accident in Jamaica in 1973. Denis Sellars, the self-serving narrator is a restless, suicidal folksinger and would-be novelist. The City of Edinburgh is his love ― his enemies are the forces of progress which seek to make commercial the art and music of Scotland. Rob Sellars, his twin, is a successful folk artiste and has succeeded where Denis has failed; but with the might of right on his side, Denis decides between favour ― wider success as an artist ― and the raging dark side of himself. Strikingly personal and unflinching in its portrayal of a man dealing head on with the brutal impulses of the id, The Sinner is the story of a man dedicated to defending grassroots music and literature, even if it comes to violence. Combining amazing moments of passion with a suicidal and godless fervour The Sinner is a novel of despair, forever coming to terms with itself, and capturing the literary and folk scene of Edinburgh, circa. 1970, like no other work.

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With nascent love abandoned and the recurring presence of the creeping 'wrinkled-nosed' laundry man of a traumatic childhood, the stagnating life of Pagan must be revived by the discovery of a somewhat questionable raison d'etre the assassination of an aristocrat. The spleenful nature of Herdman's titular protagonist and a selection of odd experiences perfectly sets up a strife deep within himself: can and how can Pagan commit to his partially bookfound life-calling, tangled into his pilgrimage? In these partnered publications, Pagan's Pilgrimage and A Truth Lover, John Herdman expertly demonstrates his capacity to evoke complicatedly moralising characters with haunting effect. In both works, the protagonists toil and struggle with the brutal world that birthed them, leading to quivering encounters - equal parts absurd and ephemeral.

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In October 2007, writers Mike Small and Kevin Williamson launched Bella Caledonia at the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh. Since then, Bella has consistently explored ideas of self-determination and offered Scotland's most robust political commentary. In the run up to Scottish independence referendum, international interest grew and Bella Caledonia had more than 500,000 unique users a month, with a peak of one million in August - in 2015, the site was named as one of the top 10 political blogs in the UK by Cision. This anthology, curated by Mike Small, is a flavour of Bella's output over these 14 years the editor's pick. Bella is aligned to no political party and sees herself as the bastard child of parent publications too good for this world; from Calgacus to Red Herring, from Harpies & Quines to the Black Dwarf. Under Mike's editorship, Bella has developed a 'Fifth Estate' as a way of disrupting the passive relationship of old media, creating something more active and appropriate for the 21st century - it's about concentration of ownership, and bringing together radical coverage with cultural analysis. Hence the plethora of wide-ranging voices in this anthology, each representing outlier viewpoints in contemporary society - novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media. "Bella Caledonia has been a flagship for progressive thought in Scotland, providing a platform for informed and creative writing, advocating a progressive and independent nation fit for the future." Stuart Cosgrove "Bella has been to be a constant thorn in the side of the powerful voices who would prefer that conventional wisdom went unchallenged, that awkward questions went unasked, and bold solutions went unheard." Peter Geoehgan

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Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. 'Just as I am!' Remember that. We are a great mixture." A young man, tired of life and love, indifferent to the people and world around him, takes up a room in a Parisienne boarding house. Noises from the adjoining room draw his attention to a hole in the wall, and he observes its occupants through it. He becomes obsessed with the individual episodes of human life that play out before his eyes; love, adultery, incest, childbirth, death, thievery and betrayal. Through his voyeurism, the unnamed narrator becomes an omniscient godlike character, observing the room’s inhabitants in their most private and naked moments. The hole becomes a window to the very soul of humanity and the human condition. But as with Prometheus, his godlike powers come at a cost. * * Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935) was a French novelist, and political activist. He was editor of “Clarté”, the periodicals “Monde” (1928–1935) and “Progrès Civique”, which published some of George Orwell's first writings. He was also literary editor for the daily newspaper “l'Humanité” from 1926 to 1929. Barbusse was the author of a 1936 biography of Joseph Stalin, titled “Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme” (Stalin. A New World Seen Through the Man). Barbusse was an Esperantist, and was honorary president of the first congress of the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda. While writing a second biography of Stalin in Moscow, Barbusse fell ill with pneumonia and died on 30 August 1935.

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A finespun tale of doubles and confused identities. Ghost-writer Leonard Balmain finds himself drawn into an unwanted complicity with the dark revelations unfolding within that of his subject ― the mysterious Torquil Tod. When Tod's tale turns into murder and sexual betrayal, Leonard realises he knows too much and is in danger of ending up on the very pages of Tod's turbulent history. Black magic, sacrificial murder and cannibalism collide in an uneasy voyage towards, and from beyond, the grave.

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Poems and lyrics from free-flowing Glasgow writer Jim Ferguson ― poet, novelist, dissenter, teacher and performer. Jim's loose, kinetic and improvisational rhythms are drawn from Scots speech and the ebb and flow of consciousness itself. With a sometimes gentle, sometimes psychotic candour, and a weird pleasure all of its own, Jim's voice shares politics, dreams and the surreal effects of globalism on the individual. "If it wasn't so Kafkaesque, it would be Orwellian." Jim Ferguson is a poet, pamphleteer and novelist based in Glasgow. Born in 1961, Jim has been writing and publishing since 1986 and is a Creative Writing Tutor at Glasgow Kelvin College.

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Every poet has a drawerful of rejection letters. The poems in Roughly Speaking by Eddie Gibbons have for many years - some since as long ago as 1969 - lived in the shadows of their siblings who went on to have wildly exciting lives in Eddie's published poetry collections. Roughly Speaking is Eddie Gibbons' fifth volume of poetry and contains both new and rejected poems. Though some of the works included in Roughly Speaking have had brief moments of infamy in poetry magazines the majority have never seen the bright light of public acceptance, their prime achievement to date being the collection of rejection slips. To keep these overlooked orphans company there is a small band of band new poems although the readers will have to make up their minds which is which.

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Living as if an outsider, but functionally ingratiate to normal social circles, Duncan has his morality rocked by bearing witness to a violent act. Where can one land on judgement of abject behaviour when inflicted upon a person, perhaps more abject than the act itself? Pressure to testify pushes Duncan into various forms of escapism and a consequential number of captivating encounters, all whilst trapped in a brooding vacuum of self-reflection. Herdman's writerly magic is an underappreciated facet of Scotland's continually great literary output.

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“In place of happy love, lonely pain. In place of motherhood, disease. Misery and shame, child. Medicine and surgery, and never any possibility of any child for me." First published in her magazine The Forerunner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Crux is an emotive tale on the nuances of female independence, social expectation and love in early 20th century America. Following an all-female group who move west to open a boarding house for men, The Crux focuses on the experience of Vivian ― and her desire for the undesirable. Deeply in love with Morton, a charismatic young man infected with both syphilis and gonorrhea, Vivian’s expected journey through her ‘marriage’ years is abruptly turned upside down. Torn by her personal intuition, the advice provided by her female companions and the knowledge that Morton will never give her healthy children, Vivian is faced with a permanent choice ― to forfeit love for the benefit of future generations. Balancing female and male perspectives on illness, personal preservation and nationalism, The Crux tracks Vivian’s path through heart break, emotional development and female camaraderie. As an allegory for Gilman’s own branch of utopian feminism, The Crux is a story of sacrifice and partnership deliberation within the framework of 20th century disease hysteria, eugenic ideology and developing modernism. Often omitted from her writing canon, The Crux is an integral aspect to understanding not only Gilman’s own writing ― but the history of feminism as a whole.

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A new approach to hypnotherapy along with several detailed, working examples, appropriate for anyone familiar with a smart-phone or tablet. This method comprises a sequence of visualisations the model for which most people are already intimately familiar. It's something that we intuitively understand and with which we feel completely comfortable and at home – our own mobile phone. The approach presented in this hypnotherapy toolkit was born from a need to create a metaphorical framework which younger clients in particular, whatever the depth of their knowledge of literature, traditional fairy tales or myth, would find easy to visualise, understand and accept. Seven full scripts are presented within this volume each dealing with a specific problem or ailment. The scripts are infinitely adaptable. The general idea of 'updating one's internal apps' should work with almost any problem and there is sufficient material within this volume for anyone to create their own personalised 'Updating Apps' scripts simply by editing the material they find here to suit their clients’ problems. The ‘Updating Apps Modules’ chapter breaks the scripts down into their constituent parts providing a step-by-step methodology for this purpose. Advice and instructions on how to read or deliver these scripts are also provided along with links to online recordings of examples of speaking to both the conscious and unconscious minds simultaneously - delivering an overt message to the conscious mind along with the more important but covert subtext for the unconscious mind to follow, digest and implement. Inductions and deepeners are included and each of the full scripts is provided with two exductions, "Wake up!" and "Go to sleep..." The "Go to sleep..." exductions are provided should you wish to record the scripts either for yourself or your client to listen to before sleeping.

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The memories I had built exploded. As the debris landed, my mind grasped at the facts. The Broken Pane is about loss and family, when families are broken. Finding yourself in the pieces of memory. About a young woman and her search for answers. In her early twenties, Tam rushes to her childhood flat only to be confronted by a tragic discovery. Anchored by the weight of family lore, she struggles to come to terms with her loss. As her life spirals, she sets off to find the one person who may hold the answers: her mother. Tam’s travels take her far from a home which was more broken than she had ever realised. Walking the line between reliable memory and unreliable narrator, Charlie Roy’s debut novel invites you to consider whether you are shaped by your past ― or if you shape your past yourself?

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"I’m a woman. I support them. I’m bisexual. I support them. I’m a feminist. I support them. I endure regular abuse for being trans. I support them. I am called a “poof” by the unenlightened. I support them. My name is Lesley, and I'm a woman ― that is to say that I am human, just like you, and you like me." A meditation on the passing of time, a declaration that life, love and poetry are defined by time, are all about time and timing. Here are love poems, life poems, elegies, aubades, odes, existential solitude poems, prose poems, joyous poems of fleeting human pleasures, poems compassionate, sanguine and witty, poems delicate with vulnerability, urgent poems on survival over time. * These are powerful, moving and accomplished poems that speak to all humanity, written by a certain woman documenting her uncertain becomings over time. Whatever the certainties of those enforcing it or of those of us willingly or unwillingly defined by it, the category ‘woman’ has always been uncertain. ’One is not born a woman’, Simone de Beauvoir observes, ‘one becomes one’. But what is it to be deeply certain of an urgent calling to womanhood all of one’s life yet violently excluded from such a becoming? What is it to win through?

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What are the Runes, and are they actually good for magic? Combining a lifetime of learning and experiences with the Runes with a unique, quirky set of illustrations, James Flowerdew brings you this beginner’s guide. Full of direct references to genuine ancient texts - as well as ripping yarns, poignant anecdotes and a good dose of humour - this book attempts to demonstrate not just the surface of Rune magic, but the underlying principles and culture that inform them alongside some general magical practice. The Runes are much more than a historical alphabet. They are a key to the wisdom of the ancient peoples who used them in language, life and magic, with these surviving writings not only clarifying these uses, but providing at least the bones of what you need to use them yourself today. A mixture of elegant and coarse, gentle and gritty, sombre and witty, the Runes are not to everyone’s taste - but they echo a very real and relatable cosmology. A world view that doesn’t hide the warts, but that finds plenty worth loving at the same time. Step into the world of the Runes on steady feet, and start a spiritual journey from which you may never wish to turn back.

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WARNING! Contains moderate bloody violence against slavers and plantation owners! This pioneer vampire tale from 1819 spills revenge-cold blood as its narrator leads us through high gothic terror to radical outrage on the subject of slavery, reaching a blood-soaked conclusion dripping with 'biting' polemic vilifying the bankers who caused the economic recession of that same year. An anti-capitalist horror fable from 200 years ago, The Black Vampyre vilified the worst financial predation the capitalist world would ever see ― the enslavement of Africans in the New World. One dead man said no! And this is his story. The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo tells the affrighting tale of a slave who is resurrected as a vampire after being killed by his owner; the slave seeks revenge by stealing the owner's son and marrying the owner's wife. The anonymous writer D'Arcy sets the story against the conditions that led to the Haitian Revolution. First published in chapbook form in New York in 1819, this emancipatory tale from literary New York in the 1810s arguably dates the birth of horror as know it! This edition features a new introduction as well as extensive notes and a guide to literary allusions.

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