Search results for ""Muswell Press""

Morning rush hour on the London tube. Laurie Bateman witnesses a terrible accident. Life had been looking up - she's dating a new man and finally getting praise at work. But after the accident everything seems to plummet downhill. In the space of a few days her flat is burgled and her flatmate assaulted - she loses her phone and then her job. Are these events linked? Perhaps what she had seen was something more sinister?Compelled to investigate, Laurie finds herself in serious danger and is soon fleeing for her life through tube tunnels in the dead of night - the hunter has become the hunted.

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Burt, the hound of Beelzebub, has risen from the dead, Gadget the miniature horse has moved into the kitchen and Tommy has decided to expand his beer business, and on the advice of his wife Rose, is thinking about distilling gin, what can possibly go wrong? With Brexit looming, a second baby on the way, and sales of IPA beer plummeting, trouble is brewing in the Loire. Shortlisted for the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2019, Tommy Barnes' first book, A Beer in the Loire, told the tale of a year lurching from disaster to disaster as attempted to escape the rat race by starting a brewery in one of the finest wine-producing regions on the planet.

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Guilty. One word on a beggar's cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry Copenhagen street, the second homeless victim in as many weeks. Dagbladet reporter Jensen, stumbling across the body on her way to work, calls her ex lover DI Henrik Jungersen. As, inevitably, old passions are rekindled, so are old regrets, and that is just the start of Jensen's troubles. The front page is an open goal, but nothing feels right..... When a third body turns up, it seems certain that a serial killer is on the loose. But why pick on the homeless? And is the link to an old murder case just a coincidence? With her teenage apprentice Gustav, Jensen soon finds herself putting everything on the line to discover exactly who is guilty ...

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The anthology comprises 42 stories, non-fiction pieces, flash fiction and poetry, the winning entries from an international competition to capture the best of Queer writing today. This is writing that explores characters, stories and experiences beyond the mainstream. Celebrating the fascinating, the forbidden, the subversive, and even the mundane, but in essence, the view from outside.

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1944, Italy RAF nurse Maggie Jones and Captain Jim Howard meet and marry in wartime Rome. A blissful whirlwind romance settles into a workaday life back in post-war England. 1980, London Maggie and Jim’s newly graduated daughter Vivien struggles in a dingy flat with her unplanned baby and distant difficult partner, wondering where her life is going. 2010 Surrey Granddaughter Sarah arrives in the Surrey countryside, planning an idyllic upbringing for her boys. Instead she finds herself deeply and illicitly attracted to Finn, a troubled local teenager. And then there is Flavia the Italian girl, who connects them all. Three generations united by family yet torn by a secret held tight for generations.

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Classic Espionage reissued for the first time in 30 years. Phyllis Bottome taught Ian Fleming to write. Seven years after publication Fleming's Casino Royale was published with striking similarities

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Set in a close-knit Pennsylvania suburb in the grip of winter, A Quiet Life follows three people grappling with loss and finding a tender wisdom in their grief. Ethan's debut novel A Little Hope received widespread UK coverage and will be published in paperback to coincide with A Quiet Life. Scribner will publish A Quiet Life in November'22.

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A double life with a single purpose getting away with murder.

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When the body of Alex Ballantyne is found in Barnes Pond the police are baffled. Who could want to kill the newly retired teacher? Investigations bring them to St Jude s, the prestigious private school where Ballantyne taught, and to the discovery that Ballantyne had been blackmailing several of his colleagues. Sex. Money. Drugs. It seems that Ballantyne knew all about his victims secrets, and they were prepared to pay to buy his silence. Is one of the St Jude s staff the killer? And, if so, which one? DI Moriarty s on the case and he s soon discovering that nothing is quite as it seems. So runs the blurb of Schooled in Murder , a crime novel written by Ben Joseph, who is found dead in Barnes Pond the morning after giving a talk as part of the Barnes Book Festival. DI Garibaldi and his team are shocked to discover that the writer has been killed in exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as the victim in Schooled in Murder . When they look at the novel they see more connections with real life. Ben Joseph is the pseudonym of Liam Allerton who , like the victim in his novel, is a retired teacher. And he taught at St Mark s, a school very similar to St Jude s, the school in his novel. But is that where the similarities end? How much of Allerton s own life, and the lives of those he knew, had he put into his novel? And could the clue to the killer s identity lie in its pages?

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Having thwarted murderous poachers in The Rhino Conspiracy, the Veteran, Thandi and Mkhize are back in a new fight battling to save elephant herds from being callously killed for their ivory, whilst trying to block wholesale political corruption and money laundering in contemporary South Africa. Will diminishing elephant numbers be reversed? Will the forces of good triumph over the vicious looters? Can the annual trillion-dollar money laundering trade by brought to heel by a brave whistle blower? Peter Hain s gripping second thriller builds to a dramatic climax, the action switching from wildlife to politics, from bushveld to city, from high finance to poaching. A vivid and gripping journey into the competing worlds of activism and corruption.

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The anthology will be published in May 2023, just ahead of Pride. Containing 30 stories, non-fiction pieces, flash fiction and poetry, the winning entries from an international competition to capture the best of Queer writing today. Entry is open to anyone, without restriction. Submissions will open on 15th August and close on 1st October 2022. Winning authors will be notified in November 2022.

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The full story of the IRA bombing campaign of 1974 the biggest miscarriage of justice in British History. This is the book that campaigned for the Guildford Four's innocence revised and updated with new evidence 50 years on

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A series of murders targets the nation's best known poets. Remarkably, they are being murdered in a way that reflects the style of their poems. Victor Priest is given the task of finding the murderer but when a car bomb is discovered in his car, by the eccentric and hilarious young couple turned detectives, a desperate confrontation takes place

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In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing, away from the noise of the big city. The result is two of Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, the memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Mermaid Singing relays the culture shock and the sheer delight of their first year on the tiny sponge-fishing island of Kalymnos. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended. On Hydra, featured in the companion volume, Peel Me a Lotus, Clift and Johnston became the centre of an informal community of artists and writers including the then unknown Leonard Cohen who lodged with them, and his future girlfriend Marianne Ihlen.

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He arrives in the shape of Detective Inspector Stanley Low. Brilliant and bipolar. He hates everyone almost as much as he hates himself. Singapore doesn't want him, and he doesn't want to be in London. There are too many bad memories. Low is plunged into a polarised city, where xenophobia and intolerance feed screaming echo chambers. His desperate race to find a far-right serial killer will lead him to charismatic Neo-Nazi leaders, incendiary radio hosts and Met Police officers who don't appreciate the foreigner's interference. As Low confronts the darkest corners of a racist soul, the Chinese detective is the wrong face in the wrong place. But he's the right copper for the job. London is about to meet the bloody foreigner who won't walk away.

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London,1999. Michael Keats is mourning the death of his wife, killed in a hit and run accident in Northern Italy. His discovery that she had been having an affair devastates him and he sets out to find the identity of her lover. That journey leads him to the villages of the Valtellina, where he becomes embroiled in a crime of treachery and revenge. The brutal repercussions of the war are still reverberating, and as Michael uncovers the truth of his wife's affair, he reveals five decades of duplicity and deception.

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Two members of a Gentleman's Club begin a conversation over a copy of the Sanitary World and Drainage Observer. The discussion turns to where `relief' may be obtained after drinking quantities of tea or lager when walking through the streets of London. We are told that the `places that have no attendants afford excellent rendezvous to people who wish to meet out of doors and yet escape the eye of the Busy.' (police). The book could be read at as an entertaining, straight forward guide to London's public conveniences but yet to our more sceptical eye it is patently a guide to where men could meet like-minded men in an era when homosexuality was illegal. It remains a classic whether taken at face value or not. This title is one of the first on the Muswell Press LGBT+ list launching in Autumn 2019

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Originally published in Europe in the 1950s to avoid prosecution for obscenity, The Gaudy Image is one of the most important "lost" gay novels. Set in New Orleans and featuring a colorful cast of louche but lovable characters, the story follows Titania aka Thomas Schwartz through the backstreets, bars and club of the French Quarter in search of the perfect lover--the Gaudy Image. This beautifully written story is both elegant and caustically humorous, erotic and sympathetic.

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As he moseys from east to west, driving slowly, stopping frequently he meets Trump's countrymen and women - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, native American; Christian, Muslim, atheist, Mormon, Mennonite; rich, middling, poor. They talk about everything from slavery and Indian reservations to , Butch Cassidy, and Marilyn Monroe. Everyone has something to say about Donald Trump, whether they love him or hate him, and the outcome of the presidential election Reynolds follows the direction of history, the direction taken by explorers and pioneer settlers. As he travels he conjures a vivid picture of the US then and now; its landscape and its people in all their diversity

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On the morning after Boat Race Day, a man's body is found in a nature reserve beside the Thames. He has been viciously stabbed, his tongue cut out, and an Oxford college scarf stuffed in his mouth. The body is identified as that of Nick Bellamy, last seen at the charity quiz organised by his Oxford contemporary, the popular newsreader Melissa Matthews. Enter DI Garibaldi, whose first task is to look into Bellamy's contemporaries from Balfour College. In particular, the surprise 'final round' of questions at this year's charity quiz in which guests were invited to guess whether allegations about Melissa Matthews and her Oxford friends are true. These allegations range from plagiarism and shoplifting to sextortion and murder...

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Low goes undercover returning to a world that the city refuses to acknowledge; a world of gambling addiction, crime syndicates, international money launderers, immoral celebrities and corrupt politicians, all living in Asia's cleanest metropolis. Marina Sins Bay may be the sparkling embodiment of the island's devotion to economic prosperity, yet a corrupt underworld lies within the 'Monaco' of Asia. As Inspector Low gets closer to the unpalatable truth, he will demand answers to questions that society has chosen to ignore for too long. The first in a trilogy of Inspector Low crime thrillers

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In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing, away from the noise of the big city. The result is two of Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, the memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Mermaid Singing relays the culture shock and the sheer delight of their first year on the tiny sponge-fishing island of Kalymnos. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended. On Hydra, featured in the companion volume, Peel Me a Lotus, Clift and Johnston became the centre of an informal community of artists and writers including the then unknown Leonard Cohen who lodged with them, and his future girlfriend Marianne Ihlen.

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Nature or nurture? The impact of traumatic childhood experience reverberates into the grown-up world of Frank, Alice and Henry – children from three families suffering the fall-out from their early life. Frank, a working-class boy abused by his step-father, Alice, physically handicapped and frustrated, Henry, the less clever son of wealthy ambitious parentsFrom a rundown estate in Eastleigh, a small town in Darlington and an affluent Cotswold home, each character grapples with the life fate has handed them. Until by chance they all come together in adulthood, the repercussions are explosive.

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Will dwindling elephant numbers be reversed? Will the forces of good triumph over the vicious looters? Can the annual trillion-dollar money laundering trade by brought to heel by a brave whistle blower? Peter Hain's gripping second thriller builds to a dramatic climax, the action switching from wildlife to politics, from bushveld to city, from high finance to poaching. A vivid and gripping journey into the competing worlds of activism and corruption.

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This is the tale of life lived large, a collection of uproarious and often moving stories spanning 60 years, from Geoff's youth as a clothes obsessed Jewish suedehead, hanging out in Tottenham dancehalls, via straight Bowie Boy frequenting London's gay clubs, gender confusion in Manhattan's Studio 54, and on to huge career success as a screenwriter. I have been a fly-pitcher working out of a suitcase, a kitchen porter at Jewish functions, and flogged suits to Nigerians down Brick Lane market. I was the singer in a much-loved culty punk band the Leyton Buzzards, a floppy-haired pop star in Modern Romance, a songwriter, and record producer. I wrote a gay anthem for John Waters drag queen muse Divine, worked as journalist and restaurant critic for style magazines The Face and Arena, before becoming a successful writer and producer of TV comedy. I then wrote a couple of films, one of which, Kinky Boots' became a Tony Award winning Broadway stage show. With a cast ranging from local oddballs to international celebrities, Geoff Deane's unique take on the world is only matched by his extraordinary use of language which combines Cockney rhyming slang with Yiddish and a smattering of Polari

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Beatrice Palmentier is 36, an award-winning director and discontent. She is about to embark on a new documentary featuring reknowned restaurateur Jospeh Troumeg, when the discovery of a skull on the Thames riverbank throws her off course.

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From a chance encounter with a handsome lifeguard on the beach in Cape Cod, attraction blooms for the young Clive Spoke. The US of the late sixties offers freedoms he has not yet tasted in Britain and ex-Marine Dennis Montrose is happy to oblige. Years later, and now a leading theatrical agent, Clive is devastated to learn of the early death of that first love. Rushing to the US to comfort Dennis’ partner he finds there is more to his demise than meets the eye. With his trusty PA Shirley Morris by his side, Clive sets out to investigate and uncovers a devastating and destructive conspiracy aimed at the burgeoning gay community. Could the government really be involved?

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In the last decade over 6,000 rhinos have been killed in South Africa. Relentless poaching for their horns has led to a catastrophic fall in black rhino numbers. Meanwhile a corrupt South African government turns a blind eye to the international trade in rhino horn. This is the background to Peter Hain’s brilliantly pacey and timely thriller. Battling to defend the dwindling rhino population, a veteran freedom fighter is forced to break his lifetime loyalty to the ANC as he confronts corruption at the very highest level. The stakes are high. Can the country’s ancient rhino herd be saved from extinction by state-sponsored poaching? Has Mandela’s ‘rainbow nation’ been irretrievably betrayed by political corruption and cronyism?

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The winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2023. Having stormed out two years ago, it won't be easy, nor will returning to the haunted river beside the house where words ripple beneath the surface washing up all sorts of memories. Joe turns to his sister, Birdee, the only person who has ever listened. But she can't help him. Then there's Tim Fysh, local fisherman and long-time lover. But reviving their bond is bound to be trouble. As the water settles and Joe learns the truth about the river, he finds that we all have the capability to hate, and that we can all make the choice not to. Ransom's fractured, distinctive prose highlights the beauty and brutality of his story, his extraordinarily vivid sense of place saturates the reader with the wet of the river, and the salty tang of the sea.

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Settled in a dilapidated house in the Loire they are plagued by calamities (mainly of Tommy's making), excitable neighbors, a destructive puppy and an unexpected pregnancy. When it looks like the money has run out. Tommy has an epiphany. Beer will save him, of course it will, it always has. After all there is a craft beer revolutions sweeping the world. Sadly it turns out that 20 years of drinking beer doesn't qualify you to brew it. Featuring colorful characters, a stunning location, and an inspiring collection of beer recipes, this is an irresistible feast.

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The most important twelve months of her life lie ahead. Success would mean becoming a fully-fledged priest a year from now, something she feels profoundly called to do. Failure would not only prove her father right, but also delight all the antis who consider woman priests an abomination. Can she convince everyone - herself included - that she's more than a five foot eight redhead with a PhD and a penchant for Max Factor's Mulberry Lipfinity?

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It is the 1970s and Oxford’s male institutions are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female ‘Fellow’. Impulsive love affairs – with people, places and the ideas in her head – beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact. Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date.

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Rose Gregory has suffered a devastating blow, a double bereavement from which months later she is still reeling. Sanctuary and rest are prescribed by her doctor. But when she arrives at her refuge, a dank and decaying Monastery, she finds it is not the haven promised. Despite the veneer of calm contemplation, the Monastery turns out to be a hotbed of intrigue and disharmony. Rose witnesses bullying and cruelty and ultimately in defence of the vulnerable turns to violence herself. Sylvia Colley’s extraordinary understanding of a woman’s struggle to deal with grief, the denial, the anger, the loneliness, is described without sentimentality. A beautifully written and moving story.

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As a passionate Londoner, Ken Livingstone has seen London change dramatically over the last 60 years. From playing on bomb sites in an era where St Pauls was the tallest building in the city, to 2019 where the gleaming towers of the Shard and Walkie Talkie dominate the skyline, thanks to new building rules introduced by his administration. With a witty and worldly eye he takes a look at his home town; the people, places and the politics that have shaped the landscape. On this personal journey he shares his views on every aspect of the city from his favourite restaurants and most loved buildings to anecdotes on fellow politicians and the triumphs, and disasters, encountered running the largest metropolis in Europe.

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Growing up in a strict religious family in the 1920s young Annie Lang is witness to disturbing events that no one will explain. Only the family dog may know the answers. Six years on, student Annie returns from France to find her world in disarray. Annie and sister Bea turn detective and unearth a disturbing truth.

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London,1999. Michael Keats is mourning the death of his wife, killed in a hit and run accident in Northern Italy. His discovery that she had been having an affair devastates him and he sets out to find the identity of her lover. That journey leads him to the villages of the Valtellina, where he becomes embroiled in a crime of treachery and revenge. The brutal repercussions of the war are still reverberating, and as Michael uncovers the truth of his wife's affair, he reveals five decades of duplicity and deception.

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Sarah has given up her career and moved to the countryside to bring up her two young children, while her husband works long hours in London. Alone, she explores the fields and the woods near her home and discovers a lake, a memorial bench for a boy who drowned in mysterious circumstances, and Finn, a beautiful troubled teenager who plays truant from school. As Sarah pieces the mystery together, an uncomfortable attraction between her and Finn builds. She knows that this blossoming relationship is wrong but the chemistry between them is difficult to resist. Their relationship reaches a climax over one hot summer, threatening to destroy everything that she holds dear. Woven into Sarah's story are the voices of two other women connected to her family - Maggie, the RAF nurse and Flavia, the Italian girl. As their stories unfold, a secret is revealed, binding Sarah and Finn in a way that they would never guess.

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When Clementine and Edouard's last child leaves home, the cracks in their marriage become impossible to ignore. Her work as a perfumer is no longer providing solace and her sense of self is withering. Then, her former lover resurfaces, decades after the end of their bisexual affair, and her world tilts irreversibly. Set in Paris and Provence, this is an intimate portrait of a woman navigating conflicting desires and a troubled past whilst dreaming of a fulfilling future.

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In Search of the Missing Eyelash is a novel about home and love and what can become undone when we try to make it all better. It's also about gender and sex and it flips from heart-breaking to hilarious within the stoke of an eyelash.

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Both a celebration and a lament for Ukraine, a moving personal memoir taking us from Katya's idyllic childhood with her siblings: holidays in Crimea and carefree days working the land at the Dacha; to the sickening impact of Putin's invasion and its effect on Katya, her friends and family - the anxiety, fear and heartache. The desperate attempts to make contact with friends and ensure loved ones are safe. Throughout it all bestrides Babushka, Katya's 'favourite person on earth' still living in the family's apartment block in Kyiv. Babushka learned fortitude at an early age when her own mother was taken by the Germans and she was rescued by a Jewish doctor whose identity was kept secret. When she is not growing vegetables and making vats of borsch, she is reading the sexy bits from novels out loud to her granddaughter. But in this last year she has turned her hand to a recipe of a different type - Molotov cocktails - in preparation for an attack on her apartment block. Combining prose, poetry, collage, maps and illustrations this is a truly immersive memoir - an authentic portrait of the impact of war.

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1953. Eli is nineteen years old and lives alongside a cursed field with his strange aunt Dreama. Six months before, his mother disappeared during the North Sea flood. Unsure of his place in the world and of the man he is becoming, Eli is ready to run. Shane Wright is a man with plenty to hide. Caught in a complicated relationship with Eli, Shane is desperate to maintain the double life that he has created for himself. Then Jimmy Smart appears. Jimmy Smart, the mysterious showman who turns the gallopers at the fair. Under his watchful gaze, Eli discovers a world he knows nothing about with rules he cannot understand. Three men bound together in a blistering story that spans 30 years, from 1953 into the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic, The Gallopers is a visceral and mesmerising novel of deceit, desire and unspeakable loss.

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The most important twelve months of her life lie ahead. Success would mean becoming a fully-fledged priest a year from now, something she feels profoundly called to do. Failure would not only prove her father right, but also delight all the antis who consider woman priests an abomination. Can she convince everyone - herself included - that she's more than a five foot eight redhead with a PhD and a penchant for Max Factor's Mulberry Lipfinity?

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This third collection of poems by Shaun Traynor maintains his high standard of perfection in verse. It is an emotional narrative of love lost, love regained. It is a love story, but there are also poems of truly beautiful pastoral observations. The title poem shows the poet’s ability to be gritty when an urban landscape demands.

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Cleaning Up is a gritty, contemporary, urban drama told through the parallel and intertwined lives of its three main characters; a teenage boy adrift on the city s drug raddled estates; a young ambitious policeman assigned to investigate local organised crime s link to the city s drug trade and a youth worker whose job brings him into constant contact with aspects of both worlds

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A huge figure in the history of British espionage and one of the models for James Bond, Sidney Reilly was born in Russia in 1873. To his employers, the British Secret Service, his background was a mystery yet his immense charisma took him into the epicentre of British establishment. Reilly lived for danger, he spoke seven languages and was rumoured to possess eleven passports and a wife to go with each. Among his exploits in the early twentieth century were the infiltration of the German General Staff in 1917 and the near overthrow of the Bolsheviks in 1918. His reputation with women was a legendary as his genius for espionage. Reilly: Ace of Spies was adapted into a BAFTA-winning television series in 1983, starring Sam Neill as Reilly and Ian Charleson as RH Bruce Lockhart. Originally published in 1967, this edition has a foreword by Dugald Bruce Lockhart, the author’s great-nephew. Dugald is a successful actor and author of The Lizard, published to acclaim in 2020.

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A headless corpse a missing person case closed? June, and as Copenhagen swelters under record temperatures, a headless corpse surfaces in the murky harbour, landing a new case on DI Henrik Jungersen s desk just as his holiday is about to start.

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Copenhagen is a mysterious city where strange and sinister things often happen. Menacing and at times darkly humorous there are echoes of Roald Dahl and Daphne du Maurier in these stories, many of which have been specially commissioned for BBC Radio 4. From the commuter who bitterly regrets falling asleep on a late-night train in Last Train to Helsingør, to the mushroom hunter prepared to kill to guard her secret in The Chanterelles of Østvig. Here, the land of ‘hygge’ becomes one of twilight and shadows, as canny antique dealers and property sharks get their comeuppance at the hands of old ladies in Conning Mrs Vinterberg, and ghosts go off-script in The Wailing Girl. Deliciously dark and chilling, this is Nordic Noir at its finest.

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Spring 1855 and Virginian farmer John Dickinson has a dangerous secret that will lead to a tragic decision. The family's riches have been wasted by his reckless brother who holds all of them hostage and, adding fuel to John's desperation, the enslaved workers have been visited by a Canadian abolitionist who pushes them to escape. One does, and his pursuit of freedom involves a dangerous quest to find his mother and child North of the border. Meanwhile, the Dickinson family become fugitives of another kind, escaping their losses in a wagon en route to a new life in the West. Confronted by hunger, fear and a near fatal river boat accident, each member of the family is tested to their limits.

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