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It’s 1920s England, and the coastal town of Gravely is finally enjoying a fragile peace after the Great War. Jon Lowell, a naturalist who writes articles on the flora and fauna of the shoreline, and his wife Harriet lead a simple life, basking in their love for each other and enjoying the company of Jon’s visiting old school friend David. But when an American whaler arrives in town with his beautiful red-haired daughters, boasting of his plans to build a pier and pleasure grounds a half-mile out to sea, unexpected tensions and temptations arise. As secrets multiply, Harriet, Jon and David must each ask themselves, what price is to be paid for pleasure?
This is the hidden history of an invention that we use every day but seldom dare to speak of. In medieval China it was cutting-edge technology. For 19th-century Americans it was a newfangled alternative to dried corncobs and the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. Wits in Georgian London preferred pages of bad poetry. The sages of ancient Athens were content to wield the xylospongion instead. It's the tale of toilet paper; the biography of bumfodder. From its origins at the Imperial court of Emperor Hongwu to its reinvention as a quack remedy for haemorrhoids in 1870s New York city; from the Dutch and their mussel-shells to Henry VIII and his Groom of the Stool; from Madame de Prie's pioneering bidet...
In the Tudor struggle for Reformation and Catholic Reformation, for power and for souls, Richard Smyth, theologian and educator, refined the art of polemicism to fight against the advance of heresy at home and abroad, both in the lingua franca of academic circles and the language of his own people. A much neglected voice today, Smyth spoke passionately and influentially on justification, monastic vows, and the Eucharist. He clashed with leading reformers such as Bucer, Cranmer, Jewel and Vermigli in verbal debates and in print. New evidence from Douai shows how he trained and equipped a younger generation to continue the fight. A fascinating and enlightening work for the interested layperson and the expert alike, Dr. Loewe’s scholarly and readable study dissects catholic reactions to the religious upheaval in England during the reigns of three successive Tudor monarchs.
When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust? The Stone Tide is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.