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The deeply moving second novel from the author of the award-winning FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN. 'Courageous...memorable...moving' - Guardian 'One of our most exciting young writers' - The Times 'Life-affirming, beautiful and achingly poignant' - Donal Ryan 'Isn’t the life of any person made up out of the telling of two tales, after all? The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape’s breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.' Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been ...
'There exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.' One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide - a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower - all facing their own personal disasters. As one of those lives hangs in the balance, the stories of all five unwind, drawn together by connection and coincidence into a web of experiences that perfectly represents the joys and tragedies of small town life.
On a farmhouse at the edge of Salisbury Plain, a family is falling apart. Stephen can’t afford to put his mother into care; Arthur can’t afford to stop working and look after his wife. When a young stranger with blue hair moves in to care for Edie as her mind unravels, the family are forced to ask: are we living the way we wanted? Visitors is a haunting, beautiful look at the way our lives slip past us. Critics Circle Award 2014 for Most Promising Playwright. Winner of the Best New Play Award at the Off West End Theatre Awards 2014. Shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright and the Writers Guild of Great Britain 2014 award for Best Play.
The first collection of plays from the multi-award-winning playwright and novelist. Introduction by Alice Hamilton. Visitors: On a farmhouse at the edge of Salisbury Plain, a family is falling apart. Stephen can't afford to put his mother into care; Arthur can't afford to stop working and look after his wife. When a young stranger with blue hair moves in to care for Edie as her mind unravels, the family are forced to ask: are we living the way we wanted? Visitors is a haunting, beautiful look at the way our lives slip past us. Eventide: A love song, an elegy, a celebration: Eventide tells the story of three people whose worlds are disappearing. John is a landlord forced to sell up; Liz is a ...
Ghost Music is the first collection of poems from the multi-award-winning playwright and author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain (Times Bestseller).
'Shot through with compassion . . . this dreamlike, winding tale is a joy.' A. L. KENNEDY 'Moving and unconventionally wise' Guardian This was how I heard the most important story of my life, the thing that decided me, the story that determined who I was in the end. At a hotel bar in a quiet English town, two strangers meet by chance and share their stories. Hers is of an inconspicuous life, shaken by heartbreak and scattered with unfulfilled dreams. His is a dizzying tale of an unending quest for someone he lost in his youth. From the blustery cliffs of Dover to the confines of a dark prison cell; from the courtroom witness box to the West End stage, we join him as he slips through time. Extraordinary though his story is, what she has to reveal is even more surprising, and will take them to a place neither of them – or you – expected. From the bestselling author of FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN comes this captivating novel about love, abandonment, and the power of stories to help us find meaning in a confusing world – a world that can sometimes threaten to overwhelm us, but one that is rich with possibility, and always full of wonder.
On a farm outside Winchester, Ryan struggles to make a living off the land. His sister Lou has returned home after the death of their father to support Jenny, their formidable mother. Now, when Lou's boyfriend Pete reappears, flush with money from his job at an oil refinery, Jenny fights to hold her children to the life she planned for them.
Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again on a park bench in a town full of memories, and find something still burns between them. Critics Circle and Offwestend Award-winning playwright and novelist Barney Norris has been heralded as 'one of our most exciting young writers' (Times), 'a rare and precious talent' (Evening Standard), 'a writer of grace and luminosity' (Stage) who is 'fast turning into the quiet voice of Britain' (British Theatre Guide).
'Lyrical' Daily Mail 'Beautiful' Spectator 'Skilled' Financial Times 'Vulnerable' Guardian 'Deft' Independent 'Profound' Observer 'The beginning of summer. Perhaps it crosses my mind even now while I wait for news of Amy that something is coming towards us. Like sighting the first slow swell of a wave.' Years ago, in an almost accidental moment of heroism, Ed saved Amy from drowning. Now, in his thirties, he finds himself adrift. He's been living in London for years - some of them good - but he's stuck in a relationship he can't move forward, has a job that just pays the bills, and can't shake the sense that life should mean more than this. Perhaps all Ed needs is a moment to pause. To exhale and start anew. And when he meets Amy again by chance, it seems that happiness might not be so far out of reach. But then tragedy overtakes him, and Ed must decide whether to let history and duty define his life, or whether he should push against the tide and write his own story. Filled with hope and characteristic warmth, Undercurrent is a moving and intimate portrait of love, of life and why we choose to share ours with the people we do.
I wish there could be a day where families came together and just said it all to each other. Because then everyone would know it all, and there'd be nothing left to hurt anyone. Sussex. London. Wiltshire. Northamptonshire. Wales. Over three decades, a family spreads across the country, and the chord they made together starts to fray, the distance between them changing the music of their lives. Barney Norris's We Started to Sing is a love song to the people who raised him, and a hymn to the bravery of our brief lives. The play premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2022.