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It’s a very personal collection inspired by Hirshhorn’s move back to the USA after having divided his time between London and Beirut for quite a few years. Moving to a new place puts things into a new perspective and makes one aware of passing time and can lead to a form of alienation. Themes like these play a role in the first set of poems. In 1944, the Hirschhorn family emigrated from England to the USA, to an apartment in New York. The very personal poems in the 853 Riverside Drive section reflect on this event from the father’s, mother’s and son’s point of view with a lament about the sister who never made it to New York. Aspects of being in exile are being explored in the third section drawing on Hirschhorn’s roots in the Middle East and Finland. This section also features a few poems by his friend Fouad M Fouad, an exile from Aleppo, co-translated from the Arabic. The last section puts everything in a wider perspective based on what’s gone before, different spiritual experiences and memory.

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The poems in The Past Is a Dangerous Driver is inspired by Neal Mason's fascination with the past, not only in the way it exists as general history but also as it is formed by one's own personal recollection. Through his poems, Neil links the past to the present, in a way that puts events in a new light and exposes discovery of hidden complexities. History is no longer seen as being made up of facts and artefacts but instead it is presented as the manifestation of the human spirit. The poems also conjure up an eclectic view of Britain, its values, history and even future. The title of collection is a hint that the past does affect the present, not always for the best, but its influence needs to be acknowledged.

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These engaging poems were written over a period of time and as part of different projects, yet they all touch on aspects of faith. Karen Hayes was inspired by iconic churches, atmospheric locations, local legends, paintings, religious artifacts and more. She often takes a mundane situation and lifts it into something more spiritual. A visit to a museum is compared to a modern-day pilgrimage, she reflects how we struggle with our doubts, fears, superstition, disease, dead and loss. Yet far from being gloomy, there is always hope and her poems give you a warm feeling about life. The poems, therefore, not only reflect on the religious aspects of faith but also deal with faith, or lack thereof, in ourselves and our surroundings.

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Transeuropa is a series of wickedly funny poems by bestselling Dutch performance poet Jules Deelder about foibles, trouble and strife in Europe throughout the ages. Where else will you find poems about Goering's soft spot for rings in odd places, `The Ring der Tinglelungen', or mocking the practice of feeding Christians to tigers and lions in the Roman Empire, `Roman Humour', and a brutal poem full of black humour about neighbours killing each other, `In the Balkans'. Although Deelder occasionally uses rhyme, the most striking aspects of these poems are the superb use of rhythm and the poet's view of the world. Bold, often outspoken and full of feeling. An excellent choice for those who like to start reading poetry as well as seasoned poetry lovers.

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In this very personal collection of poems Norbert Hirschhorn takes stock of his life and gives voice to his quest to pass on the experiences of the generations before him. Or in the author's own words: `Over the past decades I have lived and worked in the Middle East, coming to a greater understanding not only of Judaism, but also the other Abrahamic religions. As I approach my ninth decade of life I am aware of the need to share with my descendants the wisdom, texts and lessons handed down by our ancestors of all religions. The poems in this collection reflect this aim and necessity.' As the title suggest Stone. Bread. Salt. combines seriousness with playfulness. In the opening poem, Three Score and Ten, the author takes a serious look at his life whereas in Life-Course Department Store he measures out a life in department store goods. Norbert Hirschhorn experiments with rhyme and metre, free verse and prose poems, yet they all are in his inimitable voice, and together they tell a story. In some lines the echoes from the past are eerily relevant for present-day life: Don't ask your friends what their leanings are: stir up trouble, you'll be blamed. You cannot, must not, push your friends too far, or they'll make you wear the yellow star. What makes this collection extra special is Norbert Hirschhorn's work on translating some Fouad M Fouad's poems from the Arabic. Working closely with the author, a medical professor, poet and Syrian refugee this resulted in three remarkable poems: Killers Live Long, After the Barrel Bomb and Canon Lens 18-300. This collection sweeps you along from London to New York and the Middle East and back again. At some points Hirschhorn almost literally stops readers in their tracks by using the + sign. On BBC website black cloud icons every day for the next five + counting In Hawaii sunny 68 DegreesF + the surf is up Midnight here a dirty mist descending 1 DegreesC even birds are coughing My winter bronchitis has returned + I was escorted from a British Library reading room when people complained Each poem can be savoured on its own but together they paint a picture of a thoughtful poet and American Health Hero (to quote Bill Clinton) trying to catch the essence of life to hand it down to the next generations.

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The narrator looks back on the muddle of his life as a literary translator. He dreams of finding literary fame while toiling away at his translation of an important but dauntingly bleak Peruvian novel. At one point he earns a living by working for a large multinational company whose hidebound hierarchy infuriates him. With his professional ambitions frustrated, his dead-end jobs take him London and Lima, Paris and Madrid, Leiden and back to London. His edgy relationships with friends, family, colleagues and lovers seem to go nowhere. The story is told through a mosaic of interlinked episodes that together create a picture of the narrator's bumpy road to maturity. Finally, he realises, painfully, that he, a translator, is prone to `misreadings': of his own strengths and weaknesses, of the women in his life, of the viability of his translation career, of the options open to him. Can a chance meeting in a Dutch town with a key figure from his past bring some much-desired clarity?

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The focal point of the novel is the small town of Soutbek. Its troubles, hardships and corruption, but also its kindness, strong community and friendships, are introduced to us in a series of stories about intriguingly interlinked relationships. Contemporary Soutbek is still a divided town - the upper town destitute, and the lower town rich, largely ignorant - and through a series of vivid scenes, the troubled relationship between Pieter Fortuin, the town's first coloured mayor, and his wife Anna is revealed. In so many ways the past casts a long shadow over the present, not in the least through the unreliable diaries of Pieter Meerman promoted by Pieter Fortuin and Professor Pearson, a retired white historian. They give us a unique insight into the lives of the seventeenth-century Dutch explorers, and hint at a utopian society, suggesting that Soutbek is the birthplace of assimilation and integration. The blossoming friendship between Anna, Sara, a foundling, and Willem, Pieter Fortuin's nephew, is unsettled by David, Anna's and Pieter's son. His father has bought David a bright future, but when he comes back from boarding school David appears alienated from his father and from his old friend, the former gardener Charles Geduld, just as Anna starts to accept him as her son. Is there hope, or are we left with Willem's conclusion that 'he would spend the rest of his life working off the debt of his family's poverty'? A moving story that paints a thought-provoking picture of life in contemporary South Africa.

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Travels with My Father is a beautifully written autobiographical novel. Written from the point of view of a young woman, daughter and writer, it is a frank, yet delicate and moving, account of her relationship with her father and his influence on her own life.In the footsteps of her father, the author travels the world. Yet, key scenes are set in Plumstead, a suburb of Cape Town, where her father lived most of his life.The relationships and divisions between members of a family that does not wear its heart on its sleeve, and some of whom are real eccentrics, are sensitively recorded. It all adds to an intricate picture of a changing South African society.

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Karen Hayes created this cycle of poems as a fictional social landscape inspired by a row of houses along the coastal wall at the Parrog, near the small town of Newport in Pembrokeshire. Each house appears in the poem with its actual name, whether in Welsh or English, but its history and inhabitants have been fictionalised and the details in the poems, although sometimes corresponding to a particular photograph or phrase, are entirely imaginary. The poems also serve to preserve the original houses along the wall in our memory as the author realised that increasingly tourism saved the area from falling into complete disrepair but also drove away the local population. The poems chart the simultaneous decay and preservation of a way of life through a mixture of snippets of conversation overheard in shops, fragments of local myths and legends which occur in photos and journals in the houses, conversations in local pubs about incomers and economic exiles, the poignant story of the disappearance and presumed murder of Suzy Lamplugh and, above all the way that her own children all grew up together across almost twenty summers.

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Isn't everyone the 'refrain of other people's lives'? This collection has to do with the feeling that your own life is determined by other people.Arnold Jansen op de Haar (1962) moved from Arnhem to London in 2014. His emigration brought everything into focus. The poems of this collection combine to form a story. What makes somebody the person he is?What do you do when everyone has disappeared and you are the last one?Arnold Jansen op de Haar, shuttling between two countries, sets out in search of his history.at my birthmy own father called meson and heir for laterbut later is lastI am the refrain ofother people's livesI repeat a self-evident truth

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A Diamond in the Dust is a fictionalised account of the life of Charles I from his birth to the age of twenty-eight. It shows England's most maligned monarch, Charles I, as he really was. Dominated by his debauched father, James I, he grew up a diffident, stuttering, dreamy figure, wracked by a crippling disease - rickets. But he was lifted and defined by his passion for all the arts, especially theatre and painting. Brutal real-life caught up with him, however, spinning him at the centre of a whirlwind of love, art, war and even murder, as he struggled unsuccessfully to keep control of his life and his kingdom. This first novel in the trilogy The Stuarts: Love, Art, War, shows Charles I growing up and finding love. It puts the vilified king in a different light. Under the wing of his precocious sister Elizabeth he blossoms and his interest in culture and the arts grows into a passion or some would say an obsession.

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The Yellow House paints a fictional picture of Vincent van Gogh's life between August 1888 and December 1889 when he lived in Arles in Southern France and where he created many of his masterpieces. Jeroen Blokhuis tells the story from van Gogh's point of view, from inside his mind, providing a fresh and revealing look at how this intriguing painter worked.The Vincent in this novel very much tries to fit in, but is often baffled by how people react. It is almost as if he can only express himself through his paintings, which in turn flummox the public.At this point, Van Gogh has fled from the dark sombre Netherlands of his youth, from Paris, and even from his best friend and beloved brother Theo, in search of the light, the sun of the South. The yellow house in Place Lamartine becomes his refuge but what about his hope of setting up an atelier with other painters, of making friends, and having a sense of belonging?

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Set in Boston and London over sixteen years, True Freedom is a panoramic account of how America came to fight Britain for its freedom in the eighteenth century. The Boston scene is set though vignettes about the people who shaped its history. Thomas Hutchinson, sixth generation of Boston aristocracy, whose wealth is seeming unassailable. Self-taught medical doctor Thomas Young an idealist meeting his hero Samuel Adams, who is determined to have his revolution. Their Sons of Liberty and Mohucks play a key role, all the time supported from London by the radical politician John Wilkes. True Freedom is full of vivid period details, you can almost smell parliament in London or hear the clerks scribbling away in the American Department. So too, in Boston, you can picture Faneuil Hall, experience the might of the British navy in the harbour, and feel the grit and determination of the Boston people to defy parliament in London. Together they form facets of the main character: the Boston uprising. The facts are all there but by focussing on personal relationships especially the one between the brothers Pownall, Michael Dean takes us right to the heart of identity and sovereignty.

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Each of the 14 stories feels like a short novel. Vicky Grut has taken inspiration from a range of often ordinary situations and shows how easily things can unravel. They veer from the realistic to the surreal, nothing is quite what it seems, and Vicky's original way of observation is a revelation. These collected stories make you ponder about who is in control of one's destiny. The stories form a series of metaphors covering different aspects of life, and the closing story about the ultimate end is very moving. To give you a flavour of what they are like here are a few snippets: In Rich, two young people travelling towards Florence just after the Bologna bombing of 1980, decide to cadge a meal and a bed for the night from a girl they barely know. In the early hours of the morning, the atmosphere suddenly changes. They are in over their heads. In Mistaken, an academic is mistaken for a shop assistant in a big London department store. When she reacts impulsively she finds herself in trouble. Help comes from an unlikely quarter - and for all the wrong reasons. In Downsizing, Julianne and Tom are all that remain of their company's department of Policy and Evaluation. Julianne reads management theory and they exchange faintly erotic phone calls while they work on their organisational review, until Julianne has a visionary idea. In Live Show, Drink Included, two young people on a day-trip to London decide to see a Soho sex-show, obsessed with getting a free drink, they are in for a surprise. In Into the Valley, a woman tries to comfort her suffering mother-in-law on ward 19 in a small hospital in Wales. Underneath the ward sign it says, in English and in Welsh, `Bereavement Office / Swyddfa Profedigaeth.' There probably isn't a ward 20.

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The White Crucifixion starts with Chagall's difficult birth in Vitebsk 1887, in the present-day Belarus, and tells the unlikely story of how the eldest son of a herring schlepper became enrolled in art school where he quickly gained a reputation as `Moyshe, the painting wonder'. The novel paints an authentic picture of a Russian town divided by belief and wealth, rumours of pogroms never far away, yet bustling with talented young artists. In 1913 Chagall relished the opportunity to move to Paris to take up residence in the artist colony The Hive (La Ruche). The Yiddish-speaking artists (Ecole Juive) living there were all poor. The Hive had no electric light, or running water and yet many of its artists were to become famous, among them Amedeo Modigliani and Osip Zadkine. The novel vividly portrays the dynamics of an artist colony, its pettiness, friendships and the constant battle to find the peace and quiet to work. In 1914 Chagall and Bella make what's supposed to be a fleeting visit to his beloved Vitebsk, only to get trapped there by the outbreak of the first world war, the subsequent Russian revolution, and the establishment of the communist regime which is increasingly hostile towards artists like Chagall. Yet, Chagall keeps on painting, and the novel provides a fascinating account of what inspired some of his greatest painting. He manages to return to France and is reunited with his paintings only to be thwarted by yet another world war which proves disastrous for the people he knew in Vitebsk which include his uncle Neuch, the original `fiddler on the roof'. The White Crucifixion is a fictionalised account of the rollercoaster life of one of the most enigmatic artists of the twentieth century.

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Otto Iking is an outsider, at home as well as at the boarding school for the blind. But he is also an observer. Otto looks at the world around him with an unpitying sense of humour. He observes the other pupils he, too, watches the carers and teachers, who aim to prepare pupils for the real world which 'can be very cruel'.He discovers his feelings for Sonia, a fellow pupil, and he makes plans for a rescue mission to liberate hostages in the notorious Moluccan hijacking case in Bovensmilde.But most of all, he wants to escape from the institution for the blind to a school for sighted children. Otto is not to be pitied. He can picture a future working for the radio.The novel paints a frank picture of the 1970s, when 'everything had to be tried'. The Institute is a beautifully written boarding school novel, which is both hilarious and moving, about a boy who is searching for his identity and a sense of security.In short, it's about a boy with remarkable powers of observation.

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He Runs the Moon is a collection of wonderfully atmospheric stories of life in the rundown Capitol Hill area of Denver in the early 1970s, in the Bronx, New York during the 1950s & 60s and in the Boston and Cambridge area in the 1970s.Brandmark, a great story teller in the American tradition, draws you in. Take the Denver stories which form a narrative of a Gothic city populated by people who feel they don't quite belong. In one story female creative writing students are all secretly in love with their professor but does he really register them at all? Can a girl become emotional attached to a temperamental red Mustang? You bet, especially after her boyfriend leaves for Los Angeles.Figures from the 'old world' haunt the children and adults in the Jewish community of New York City. A troubled granny with a head that is bothering her, and the 'witch' in the basement flat, who comes to the rescue when a child is lost and has dark marks, like figures from a book, on her lower arm.In the Boston tales characters piece together dreams from the fragments of their lives.Be transported, for example, to the world of an obsessive dental hygienist, and the occupational hazards of sharing a dull green clapboard house in rooms which seemed to pitch and heave.

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In the title story Away From the Dead we meet Isaac Witbooi, a farm worker, who has to come to grips with losing everything including the graves of his entire deceased family. In After Spring a couple takes a holiday but we're drawn into the issue of identity: Even if they hadn't heard us speaking English earlier, they would have known our foreignness simply by sight. It is visible to them in our facial features, the way we wear our clothes, our hair. The fact that we are third and fifth generation South Africans respectively matters little to them. Making Challah is a touching picture of an ageing woman, and it uses the baking of challah as a wonderful metaphor of passing time. Ridwaan and Chadley are On the Train, a seemingly routine journey but somehow a dog has been acquired and it's been Chadley's first time to kill. Find out how it felt to be Andries Tatane who, on 13 April 2012, died during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg, South Africa. In the Narrative of Emily Louw, a true story, a young woman regrets not having given something to old Emily after listening to her sad story: At the second, a policeman had looked at the blanketed child, her worn face and bleeding feet and he had smirked, as though to indicate that her husband had left by choice and couldn't be blamed for his departure. Next is a thoughtful reflection on being called Muzungu when a white South African woman visits Uganda. From Dark is a rallying call to remember that illegal mining causes the deaths of hundreds every year. Zama-zamas (Zulu for 'chancers') live underground for months at a time, dying in police raids, fires, cave-ins and poor conditions. A young couple's outing goes horribly wrong in At the Seaside. Grandmother's great big wicker picnic basket, which was supposed to be a treat, takes the blame. An 'informal settlement' of zinc shacks on the flatlands sets the scene in Allotment. Warda Meintjes and her husband struggle to survive. A great stadium for the World Cup is being built but Warda's unborn child stops moving. The homeless were being rounded up by police, placed in trucks, driven out into the countryside and dumped. 'Thank God we're spared that,' one woman said. 'Don't fool yourself,' another replied. 'That is us. It has already happened to us.' In The Shark Mia's very sense of being gets overtaken by events. A dark story leading on to Development, darker still, but thought-provoking, and about what it is to be human. The Wall is almost surreal and deals with growing old on the street. Alletjie lives with her husband Jan Bakker and Solly, her disabled brother, next to an old mine built by Cornish miners in the 1880s. Their circumstances are a cut above those of Warda and her husband, yet, 'living on the old goats and chickens and a disability grant was never enough', and Alletjie who 'does everything' thinks it isn't fair, 'the mine owned her this future for herself'. Resurrecting again exerts a certain surreal appeal. A father takes to his bed because of a crushed pigeon or is it a metaphor for a crushed soul in the office? His son is told to pray but is there going to be a resurrection?

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