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THIS IS IT—WHERE QUARRY'S STORY ALL BEGAN. AND ANOTHER LIFE ENDED. The assignment was simple: stake out the man's home and kill him. Easy work for a professional like Quarry. But when things go horribly wrong, Quarry finds himself with a new mission: learn who hired him, and make the bastard pay.
'A quietly incendiary piece of writing, at times heartbreaking, at other times really wonderfully funny... a profoundly humane, funny and smart novel' Independent A dying man and his only son. Six old friends. A missing videotape. And a reunion in a crumbling house on the edge of The Quarry. Praise for Iain Banks: 'The most imaginative novelist of his generation' The Times 'His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers' Ken MacLeod, Guardian 'His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent' Neil Gaiman 'An exceptional wordsmith' Scotsman
'Halls' stories show that even in zero-hour, austerity-battered Britain, the tenderness and warmth of human connection exists. The Quarry is, in the end, a testament to this messy truth - how love, hate, hope and fear have always lived on the same street' GLEN BROWN, author of Ironopolis You can see it in them; all that anger inside, it's toxic. Throw some drink into it and everything bubbles over. People say that they never see it coming, the swing of the fist that kicks it all off, but I can tell. In these interconnected short stories, we meet the men living on the Quarry Lane estate in west London. These are men at work, at the pub, at home, with their families, lovers and friends. Men grappling with addiction, sexuality and the corrosive effects of toxic masculinity. From a bouncer at the local nightclub, to a postman returning to the streets of his youth, and a young man thinking of all the things he'd say and do to the father who left him behind, this startling debut reveals the complex inner lives of individuals whose voices are too often non-existent in fiction. Powerful and impressive, The Quarry marks the arrival of a bold new voice.
“The most frightening novel of the year.” – The Scotsman Todd, Randy, and Carter come across a boy while roaming the countryside near their town. They take him hostage in a cave in an abandoned quarry and consider what to do next. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding needed a plane crash and a desert island to bring out the capacity for violence and evil in his English schoolboys. Jane White, a mother and housewife living in Godalming when she wrote Quarry, needed only a chance encounter in fields not unlike those around her own development. Quarry is deeply unsettling. White’s teenaged kidnappers ride bikes, worry about exams, have to be home in time for supper. Yet they also imprison and torture another boy with the cold calculating objectivity that Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Written in cool, realistic prose, Quarry pulls the reader into a vortex of violence and inhumanity. It’s a gripping and believable account of a crime and a parable filled with complex symbolism. “Nothing since A High Wind in Jamaica probes the depths of innocence with such terror and finesse as Jane White’s novel,” declared Newsday.
A HIT. AND A MISS. Quarry doesn't kill just anybody these days. He restricts himself to targeting other hitmen, availing his marked-for-death clients of two services: eliminating the killers sent after them, and finding out who hired them...and then removing that problem as well. So far he's rid of the world of nobody who would be missed. But this time he finds himself zeroing in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Does the hitman's hitman have the wrong quarry in his sights? The Critics Love QUARRY "Violent and volatile and packed with sexuality...classic pulp fiction." -- USA Today "Collins' witty, hard-boiled prose would make Raymond Chandler proud." -- Entertainment Weekly
When Martha gains a place at the university, her achievement is met with a mixture of hostility and pride by her uncomprehending family. It is there that she meets Luke (married to her friend Dussie) who is to haunt the years that lie ahead as she struggles to cope with the intellectual and emotional challenges that surround her at work and at home. This is essentially the story of a young woman's journey to maturity and independence, her high ideals, and a slowly-growing awareness of her passionate nature. Nan Shepherd's subtle prose and her understanding of the hidden currents which move people are matched by her intense and memorable descriptions of the natural world, and a dry sense of humour. The book has lost none of its freshness and originality since it met with high praise on publication over seventy years ago - four years before Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song.
In the early 19th century, when it was the policy of many of the poorhouses and workhouses to deter paupers from applying by making the conditions inside harsh and unpleasant, two boys set out on a journey to Hackney Workhouse in London. Their starting point was in the pleasant Cheshire countryside, where they were apprenticed to the cotton mill built by Samuel Greg in 1784. Children as young as nine would be employed there as scavengers, piecers, mule doffers or can tenters. These jobs could be just as unpleasant and difficult for a poor child as those we may have heard of, such as chimney sweeps and match girls. Quarry Bank Mill was some 200 miles north of London and the boys had to sneak ...
A well-to-do, upper-class young woman, intelligent, fashionable, educated, strikingly beautiful, exploitative, selfish, and haughty, a despiser of men as she knows them, taking them all as manipulable weaklings, meets a mysterious, unsettlingly attractive male at a cocktail party, one who is not only distant and seemingly immune to her brandished charms, but who seems to hold her, to her disgruntlement and indignation, in a subtle contempt. Later her life undergoes an unexpected, dramatic, and radical change. Seized and shipped with others as cargo, as human cattle, to the beautiful, green, fresh, perilous world of Gor, she finds she is now only an object and beast, a slave. She is collared ...
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SHORTLISTED FOR CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2022 'Thank you for being the baddest in the literary game, knowing and loving us Black girls' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author of Queenie 'Such a loving and warm guide and ode to black girls, I am so happy the younger generation have this in their lives' BOLU BABALOLA, author of Love in Colour Your big sis in book form, Grown is the ultimate fully illustrated guide to navigating life as a Black teenage girl. With a foreword from the inimitable Spice Girl Melanie Brown and contributions from inspirational Black women such as Diane Abbott MP, Dorothy Koomson and Candice Carty-Williams and illustrations from Dorca...