Search results for ""Story Machine""

Elliott is a boy who likes to find things and, one day, he stumbles across a machine. At first, he can’t work out what the machine is for – it doesn’t beep or buzz like all his other machines and it doesn’t have an ON/OFF button. Then, quite by accident, Elliott makes the machine work. The machine makes letters! Elliott thinks it must be a story machine but, sadly, Elliott isn’t very good at letters and words. How can he make magical stories without them? But, wait, some of the letters look like pictures. Elliott is good at pictures and, as he discovers, pictures make stories. An inspiring, uplifting picture book about the simple joys of a typewriter in a world of hi-tech machines. Perfect for fans of Oliver Jeffers.

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A hurricane is about to hit New York City and Edward Bradington IV has (probably) just been dumped by his boyfriend. He could use a holiday. But with planes grounded and duties to attend to, he decides to drive across the country to his family estate. Accompanied by a photo of his Grams and Gramps and a heart heavy with loss, Edward embarks on a journey into the heart of America. Stopping at roadside bars, diners, and even the grave of the Kentucky Colonel, he will find that - thankfully - journeys home rarely go as planned. Alaric Mark Lewis's debut is an unforgettable epic. Bradington Bay is Homeric in scope, suffused with the adventurous energy of Jack Kerouac, and the heart of James Baldwin.

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‘I do not have a future, and I do not want dreams. My dreams are stories, written by a machine.And I will not think of her.’Luke Kierley has visited the writer and asked it to exorcise from him all memory of her. Now he has no idea who she was and he must try to find a way to live with a bleeding hole in his memory.Told in a unique voice that recalls southern gothic, classic horror, and frontier literature, Writer is like nothing you have read before. JM Burgoyne’s debut brings her virtuosic voice alive in a striking and unforgettable meditation on free-will, love, and the lengths we’ll go to avoid pain.

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‘There have been many amazing projects to help people during the pandemic and Paperchains is one of the very best.’ Queen CamillaAn anthology of 30 stories of lockdown, from people with experience of prison, homelessness, addiction, and families of people in the armed forces.When the history of the Covid-19 lockdowns is written, who will be the storytellers and of whose lives will they tell? Will they tell of the prisoners spending 23+ hours each day locked in a cell, inhaling and exhaling, over and over again, the same recycled air? For months on end. With no visitors? Will they tell of those addicts who were just starting to recover and rebuild, only to find themselves back on the edge? Or the people down your street who had nowhere to live, or those whose house was never really a home? What about the families of service personnel, or young people stuck at home?These are experiences from inside the storm. From people whose stories are rarely heard. This anthology includes works of prose, poetry, drama, and art. Powerful, often irreverent, heartfelt: voices that history cannot forget. A chain of words, poetry and art that binds us all together. A chain that will survive beyond this turbulent time and stand as a testament of who we were during it.

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Sixteen-year-old Pen Flowers is angry. She's furious about climate injustice and social inequality, her parents' separation, and her own lonely single existence. The only thing that makes life worth living is dancing. And with that she plans to change the world. But when romance arrives unexpectedly on the No 11 bus, Pen leaps in. Once her heart's set ablaze, she's gripped by passion. With emotions running high, can she stay true to herself, her art, and all the things that matter most to her? Love Like Your Heart's On Fire is the stunning sequel to Live Like Your Head's On Fire. It is a celebration of the power of dance to drive change, and a page-turning story of teenage dreams and devastation. Sally-Anne Lomas's On Fire Trilogy is destined to become a must-read for everyone who wants to live life with passion and make the world a better place.

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Kate and her teenage daughter return to Ireland to sort through what is left of the family farm. Source is a book about beginnings and homeland and the words that accompany us on our journey.

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Change is Coming. Four generations of a Lowestoft fishing family, rise and fall, with the fortunes of their town.

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Can some truths ever be captured, either in images or words?

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1960. The height of the Cold War. Maths prodigy Ginny Matlock is appointed to be the first woman computer at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the East Anglian coast. She quickly finds, in this landscape of endless skies and shifting shorelines, that nothing is what it seems. What is the terrible secret of Briar Cottage? What dark tale haunts the local pub? And who is the mysterious Artist with whom Ginny's fate becomes entangled? As the Berlin Wall rises and nuclear Armageddon threatens in Cuba, can Ginny build a life for herself among so many mysteries or will the terrors of the age suck her under? Sarah Bower's brilliant novella blows the spy thriller genre to pieces and creates a feminist masterpiece from what is left of the rubble. A swirling mystery in which mathematical proof is always just out of reach. Lines and Shadows is the strange lovechild between Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent and John Le Carre.

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Life isn't easy for Pen Flowers. Her mum's agoraphobia is so bad that she can barely leave the house, while her father is spending more and more time working away, and her best friend is hanging out with the class bully. It’s all getting too much. But when she ‘goes mad’ in dance class, she finds a language to express the pent-up emotions seething inside her. She takes to climbing out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night to dance in the empty streets and sets off a chain of events that will change everything. Sally-Anne Lomas's debut - the first in her acclaimed On Fire trilogy - is a word-of-mouth triumph. In Pen Flowers she has created an archetypal character for our age - determined, passionate, ambitious, loyal, vulnerable, resilient. Strap yourself in for a page-turning epic you’ll fall in love with.

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The debut collection by Cat Woodward is a love letter to Norwich, haunted by the spectral hellhound Black Shuck

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In 1958, geophysicist A. G. Lewis travelled to the Antarctic to investigate the landscapes and skies of that vast and icy continent.Now Elizabeth Lewis Williams traces her father’s journeys, from the Peninsula to Mt Erebus. They are real, imagined, and artistic journeys, exploring communication across time and space, and experiments in scientific and poetic measure.Erebus transports us to an Antarctic of paradox. A land where perpetual daylight balances months of austral darkness. A land of encounters with the unknown, and with mortality – but where camaraderie and faith are the only defence against catastrophe.At its heart, Erebus is a visit to the frozen underworld, and an exploration of how we find a place for ourselves in this vast and often unforgiving world we call home.

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Welcome to Deception Island, a tiny Volcanic caldera in the Antarctic Ocean. Here the rusting remains of industrial whaling and a seabed littered with whalebones testify to mankind’s greed and brutality. But the island is also an outpost of scientific exploration, witness to human attentiveness and fortitude.As the ship carrying the author’s father edges through the basalt cliffs into the calmer waters of Deception Island, the island’s many voices, human and non-human, begin to speak.

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Born in New York City on the night of John Lennon’s assassination Ros is now a celebrated photographer who claims to have killed reclusive writer J. D. Salinger with the help of her alter ego Marta. In the psychiatric hospital where she resides Ros talks with her therapist about art and pop culture and the psychological and moral motives behind her actions. But rebellious and outspoken Marta has other ideas: she mistrusts the therapist and is determined to escape from the hospital during the building refurbishment.Flowing as a torrent of stream-of-consciousness prose The Day I Killed J. D. Salinger explores the vital function of art and the responsibility that ensues when art is not simply what we do but who we are.

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The debut novella by Stella Bech.Madeleine is everything Angela is not: charismatic, lovable, certain. A story of two people who find and lose each other, and the ways love, loss and memory shape a life.

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In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution.Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin’s husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi’s secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin’s crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death. Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin’s children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.

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