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'Clever, warm and funny' - ADAM KAY 'Beautifully rendered, thoughtful and original' - Pandora Sykes 'A marvellous read' - Ruth Hogan Ada is a widowed writer, navigating loneliness in Oxford after the death of her husband. She has no children. No grandchildren. She fears she is becoming peripheral, another invisible woman.Eliza is a student at the university. She finds it difficult to form meaningful relationships after the estrangement of her mother and breakup with her girlfriend.After meeting through Ada's new venture, 'Rent-a-Gran', and bonding over Lapsang Souchong tea and Primo Levi, they begin to find what they're looking for in each other. But can they cast off their isolation for good?An exquisite story of connection and loss, and how a person can change another person's life. Full of heartache yet joyful and life-affirming, this is for fans of Normal People, Expectation and Sarah Winman's Tin Man.'Leaf's writing is warm and lyrically funny - she has an eye for details both sublime and ridiculous.Looking for Eliza is an intelligent and big-hearted read with the human condition at its core.' - Harriet Walker, The Times
'I Never Said I Love You is one of the most electric, enchanting, engrossing and energising memoirs of self-harm, self-loathing, grief, eating disorders, suicide - and sex - that you will read.' The Sunday Times 'Indecently entertaining... one of the most uplifting and eccentric memoirs I have ever read.' Observer 'Brutally honest and relentlessly funny.' Adam Kay, author of 'This is Going to Hurt' 'A brilliant memoir full of gasp-inducing honesty about depression and family and taking control of your own pain. Funny, sad, hopeful, I Never Said I Loved You is an irresistible, strangely empowering read.' Matt Haig 'This mind-blowingly wonderful memoir had me convulsing with laughter even whil...
CLOSE YOUR EYES I invite you to imagine a plan for a new and better society where everything is very coherent and makes a lot of sense and nothing is confusing or awful OPEN YOUR EYES No need to imagine. Here is the plan. The plan is illustrated. The plan is quite complicated. But not too complicated. I think you will be thrilled by it. I am certain you will be thrilled by it. No need to read massive volumes or use the internet JUST READ THIS ONLY THIS
Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021 Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019 A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies - loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction - that make up a life. The habit of f...
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year Alice Oswald's poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability - a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality - is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life's losing struggle with the gravity of nature. Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sound...
There's a bar at the crossroads on the way out of town. Or the way in, depending on whether you're coming or going. Marcie and her husband have run it for years. They had children once, but not any more. After thirty years of marriage, there aren't many secrets left. Couples often tell themselves that, although it's not always true. Arlene appeared in the bar one day not long before Franky Albertino came back, thinking she'd find someone she'd once known, looking for a man named Jack. Franky was hoping that people might have forgotten the mess he left the first time around. Both of them were wrong. Women were always Franky's problem. Women and money. What Arlene's problem is isn't clear. It's obvious she has a history, but then which of us doesn't? As Arlene gets closer to finding Jack - her father? Her lover? - the bar becomes a scene of a great unravelling; secrets buried a lifetime ago are dragged into the light. In Things We Nearly Knew, Jim Powell invites us to consider how much we know about the ones we love and finally asks: would you want to know the truth?
Susie Boyt's sixth novel is the story of the first year of a marriage. Eve a nervous young actress from a powerful theatrical dynasty has found herself married to an international expert on anxiety called Jim. Could it work? Should it work? Must the show always go on? This is a highly-strung comedy about love, fame, grief, showbusiness and the depths of the gutter press. Its witty and sincere tone - familiar to fans of Susie's newspaper column - will delight and unnerve in equal measure.
A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem - part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining - the poems are united by a desire to pay absolute attention to both the material and inner world. The worlds within this collection appear to be teeming with life - crabs push through sand, wasps swarm on meat; and forms change - bones are repl...
**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 'A modern masterpiece' Guardian Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize *A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020*
An uncanny, startlingly beautiful story collection steeped in the Cornish landscape, from the award-winning author of Diving Belles and Other Stories and Weathering.