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In 1720s Scotland, a priest and his son get lost in the forest, transporting a witch to the coast to stop her from being killed by the village. In the sad, slow years after the Second World War, Ruth finds herself the replacement wife to a recent widower and stepmother to his two young boys, installed in a huge house by the sea and haunted by those who have come before. Fifty years later, Viv is cataloguing the valuables left in her dead grandmother's seaside home, when she uncovers long-held secrets of the great house. Three women, hundreds of years apart, slip into each other's lives in a novel of darkness, violence and madness.
From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness. Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rain and battering wind. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wants it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sounds a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, and rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other. In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community. Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth’s belongings and discovers her place in the past – and perhaps a way forward. Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and love.
A tale based on the early eighteenth-century scandal that inspired Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" finds a sickly and impoverished Alexander Pope gaining entry into high society and closely following a forbidden affair between the rakish Lord Petre and the coquettish Arabella. A first novel. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.
'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...’ This is the diary of Cassandra Mortmain, which tells of her extraordinary family and their crumbling castle home. Cassandra's father was once a famous writer, but now he mainly reads detective novels while his family slide into genteel poverty. Her sister Rose is bored and beautiful, and desperate to marry riches. Their step-mother Topaz has habit of striding through the countryside wearing only her wellington boots. But all their lives will be soon be transformed by the arrival of new neighbours from America, and Cassandra finds herself falling in love... BACKSTORY: Get to know Dodie Smith, and be inspired to keep your own diary! **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
When iconic musical Dust is revived twenty years after the leading actress was murdered in her dressing room, a series of eerie events haunts the new cast, in a bewitching, beguiling, moving and terrifyingly dark psychological thriller... 'A delicate supernatural thriller of love, loss, murder and the dangers that come with getting what you wish for. Quite lovely in a dark, dark way' Sarah Pinborough 'Dark and haunting ... further cements Louise Beech as one of the most original and exciting authors of the moment' Claire Allan 'Haunting, provocative, and true to Beech's style: packed with pain and heart' Jack Jordan _________________________________ A haunted theatre A murdered actress Three...
A memoir on love, lust and attachment: one woman's remarkable and candid account of transforming a difficult and uncomfortable love triangle into an honest polyamorous relationship. Lucy Fry's story opens with the heady and impassioned affair she embarked on during her wife's pregnancy. It is a relationship that appears to be unstoppable, perhaps even addictive, despite guilt and self questioning. With intense and unflinching honesty, she takes us on a compelling journey from childhood trauma and addiction to sobriety, from infidelity to ethical non-monogamy, and—perhaps most intensely of all—from her fear of parenthood to her exquisite joy at having a son. L and B's love for their new baby, 'The Boy', changes the dynamic once again. They fumble through early parenthood, in a way that many will recognise, while at the same time trying to fathom and fashion a unique journey of their own.
Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1969. On a hot January evening that he will remember for decades, Elias Cole first catches sight of Saffia Kamara, the wife of a charismatic colleague. He is transfixed. Thirty years later, lying in the capital's hospital, he recalls the desire that drove him to acts of betrayal he has tried to justify ever since.Elsewhere in the hospital, Kai, a gifted young surgeon, is desperately trying to forget the pain of a lost love that torments him as much as the mental scars he still bears from the civil war that has left an entire people with terrible secrets to keep. It falls to a British psychologist, Adrian Lockheart, to help the two survivors, but when he too falls in love, past and present collide with devastating consequences. The Memory of Love is a heartbreaking story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
‘Brilliant . . . A deeply unsettling, excellent read’ - Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under 'A potent contemporary fable . . . riveting' - Guardian ‘Genuinely thrilling . . . one long beautiful scream’ - Evie Wyld Lucy lives with her husband Jake and their two boys. Her life is devoted to her children, her days mapped out by their finely tuned routine. Until a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband. He thought she should know. Lucy is distraught. She decides to stay with Jake, if only for the children’s sake, but in order to even the score, they agree that she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, or what form it will take. And so begins a delicate game of crime and punishment, from which there is no return . . . Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy by Megan Hunter is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal. ‘Utterly compelling . . . precise and darkly truthful’ Esther Freud
** Pre-order Shy, the new novel from Max Porter, now **A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYWinner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.'Amazing and unforgettable.' THE TIMES 'Dazzlyingly good.' ROBERT MACFARLANE'Unlike anything I've read before.' GUARDIANIn a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. This extraordinary debut, full of unexpected humour and emotional truth, marks the arrival of a thrilling and significant new talent.