Showing 1–12 of 18 resultsSorted by latest
-
£18.99
Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become. Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.
-
£22.00
What do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land? Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain.
-
£16.99
Mary’s death is bad news – for her daughter Patch, ex-partner Robin, and niece Jude. It will mean a funeral. But Patch can barely keep track of her mother’s journey from the hospital to the mortuary, let alone host a wake in her childhood home. Robin wants to support her, but instead of assuming the role of responsible father, he heads to his former haunt: the lay-by where he used to meet farmers for sex. Jude’s on her way from Naples, worrying less about Patch, her estranged cousin, and more about whether there’s a medicinal bag of cocaine in the boot. She hasn’t told the family she’s en route. This way, any lingering acrimony will be forgotten, and Jude’s past behaviour will be forgiven. Thrown together in Mary’s tiny house, each of them is trying to feel something: to grieve, atone, join in, be better.
-
£18.99
Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. The past is accelerating towards them: the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne’s block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different.
-
£20.00
Through a series of inspiring letters written to his daughters, climate activist and writer Ben Rawlence finds new ways to open conversations and navigate the uncertainty of our changing times together.
-
£25.00
Charlotte and Francesca were best friends at university in the mid-1970s. But tensions coursed beneath their natural affection, deepening when Fran got together with Charlotte’s friend Adrian, and the two women drifted apart. When Fran contacts Charlotte out of the blue with an unusual proposal – an invitation to live with her and Adrian in the rambling house they’ve bought in the countryside – Charlotte impulsively persuades her partner, Bill, to accept this tantalising promise of a new kind of community. At first their new life feels utopian; life and space are shared joyfully. But it doesn’t take long for old tensions to rise to the surface, shattering their illusions and showing each of them in a new light.
-
£16.99
Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a day-care centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path. At the heart of the story is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us.
-
£18.99
Wyeth is a newcomer to New York, a young Black painter who is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. He shares a studio with his friends and earns money working for a gallery and an art restorer but he’s struggling with his portrait painting, unable to truly capture the life of his subjects. Then he meets Keating, a white former priest struggling with his faith. The two men seemingly have nothing in common, and yet Keating shows Wyeth how to see the world anew. The hot summer progresses, filled with art openings, walks around the city, and Wyeth’s search for a long-forgotten Black artist. But as the men grow closer, the differences between them become more stark, until Wyeth and Keating must decide what they are willing to risk – for art and for love.
-
£20.00
In the aftermath of a massacre from which he doubts the world will ever recover, Ferdinand Draxler finds himself at the crossroads of history. Unless it’s just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature. The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who accuses him of genocide, Draxler longs to be a hero for his people or the comic scourge of their enemies, but does he have the mettle to be either? He isn’t even sure he has what it takes to go mad. He wades through protests and searches London for menacing graffiti, whilst dodging the warring staff in the primary school where he is headmaster and the pleas of his non-Jewish wife to seek ‘mental health’ support. But can’t she see that the world is crumbling around them, and he is at the centre?
-
£18.99
A book about many things, including: A man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old; a Jack Russell called Jimmy, famous for his good behaviour; the mischievous nature of memory; the aging body, and how it begins to fail; taking our chances, facing our fate; how we find happiness in this life; how a departure can also be an arrival; and when it is time to say goodbye.
-
£18.99
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of ‘Midnight’s Children’, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can’t rest until he avenges his former tormentor.
-
£22.00
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, ‘Debatable Land’ is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.
