Stories are living things. They are viral. They enter us through our eyes and our ears and they take up residence inside us.Unriddling the World is a collection of fifty traditional narratives – stories from the winding track that leads from nursery rhyme to the great tales of creation and redemption, by way of ballads, riddles, folk tales, legends, epics and myths. They’ve been shaped by countless voices and they’ve stood the test of time. They are concentrations of human experience and they speak in the enigmatic picture-language of dreams.These Fifty Wonder Tales form the heart of Hugh Lupton's repertoire: from ‘The Stone Monkey’ to the ‘Oil of Mercy’, from ‘The Pottle of Brains’ to the ‘Pool of Dharma’, they are a gift from the past to the future, shaped for retelling by a master storyteller. They’re alive . . . and they’re waiting to be told again.
A memoir in essays by a psychosexual therapist about her experiences undergoing fertility treatment, and finding solace in writing, art, and the world around her.In this poignant collection, psychologist and therapist Sue Hann exposes the heartbreak of infertility through a series of reflective essays. Despite her background, she finds little solace in clinical literature, so she turns instead to writing, art, and nature to make sense of her experience.Finding strength and meaning everywhere from Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings to Sri Lanka's rainforests, in Palingenesis, Sue Hann navigates the struggles and heartache of unsuccessful fertility treatment through the transformative power of art and nature.
In this contemporary coming-of-age YA novel, a teenage girl navigates a romance with an older boy when they're cast as the leading roles in their drama group's production of Romeo and Juliet.When Brooke and Matt are cast as romantic leads in their drama group's theatre performance of Romeo and Juliet, they don't mean to actually fall in love. Secrets and lies seem a small price for Brooke to pay for her first real boyfriend, until they take their relationship to the next level one night in an empty auditorium. After she learns of the illegality of Matt's actions, Brooke's anxiety reaches breaking point and she makes a decision that changes her life for ever. Years later, Matt is reunited with Brooke, desperately seeking redemption. But what sense can they make now of a love that never did run smoothly?Exploring mental health, co-dependency, and the blurred lines of sexual consent, this captivating debut recounts a young woman's journey to independence as she strays beyond all she has ever known to confront her traumatic past.
In this poignant tale of loss, love, and the supernatural, a grieving widower contemplates life beyond the grave after he receives emails from his wife months after her death.Former actor-turned-financial adviser Anthony Bothwell is shaken to his core when his flamboyant wife, Maggie, starts emailing him - from beyond the grave.The vortex of nightmarish events that suck Anthony in make him re-evaluate his scepticism, turning upside down everything he thought he knew about life, death and himself.Being able to communicate again allows the couple to say things they never said while Maggie was alive, but slowly old clashes and buried secrets emerge. The couple's exchanges shift between delight, anger, dark humour and healing. But are the emails real or a product of his desperate grief?When Maggie gives Anthony permission to find a new love, he faces a new dilemma. Can he set himself free from her for a fresh start or is it too late?Bittersweet and unconventional, this is a literary page-turner that will make readers laugh, cry and ask questions.
‘Wild, anarchic, and wonderfully head-spinning’ Neil Jordan, award-winning film directorA dark theatrical comedy about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, from twice Booker-shortlisted author Patrick McCabe.It’s the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel room on the South Coast of England, Chenevix Meredith finds his old comrade Henry Plumm murdered in the bathtub. Piecing together their shared history, Meredith looks back at the years they spent in Dublin half a century ago, running a theatrical agency and rubbing shoulders with actors and assassins alike in the swirling smoke of public houses. What their clients didn’t know, is that the flamboyant pair were undercover agents of the British state, posted to identify terrorist networks.Goldengrove is a deeply immersive, satirical novel in which nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say there are. Steeped in film noir, classic crime and popular culture, McCabe blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s staged in this absurd game of cat and mouse.'Yet again Patrick McCabe summons the ghost of Flann O'Brien in this wild rollick of a novel . . . Wonderful, shape-shifting stuff' Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon'Thunderously compelling and downright ecstatic . . . This is nothing less than the work of a genuine master, a must-read’ Billy O’Callaghan, author of Life Sentences'One hears Joyce and Beckett and Paul Muldoon in the background. Not because there is any borrowing, but because all alike draw from that same dazzling tradition of oral storytelling' Mark Bowles, author of All My Precious Madness
Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before, and perfect for fans of What We Do in the Shadows and Our Flag Means Death.
Words from the Hedge is a passionate evocation of the history, beauty and importance of our hedgerows by a craftsman who has been laying hedges for almost three decades and has the scars to prove it.Hedges are as old as civilisation and as emblematic of the British countryside as chalk streams, hay meadows and oak trees. But unlike woodland and rivers, farmland hedges remain on the periphery of the public consciousness, often going unnoticed and almost always underappreciated. Wielding his pen as deftly he does a billhook, professional hedgelayer Richard Negus takes us on a journey that reveals these ribbons of thorn and barb are so much more than mere decoration or boundary markers. They are essential for much-needed wildlife recovery. If we don’t get our hedges right, there is little hope for species like the almost-extinct turtledove.And yet, no hedge is truly 'wild'; each one is a testament to generations of human skill and labour, requiring ongoing maintenance to survive and thrive. But there is a problem: we need more hedgelayers, and this is something Negus is trying to solve.Introducing a lively band of fellow countrymen and countrywomen along the way, Negus explores everything from the practical complexities of modern farming and land ownership to the challenges faced by conservationists. Written with vigour and humour, as well as rare insight and honesty, Words from the Hedge is a timely exploration of how we can use hedges to make the British countryside a place where nature has a home.
In this Edwardian England cosy historical mystery, a string of abductions and rising tensions thrusts a young Prime Minister into a world of murky politics and dark secrets--written by award-winning BAFTA scriptwriter and film director, Mario Theodorou.London, 1904: the economy is faltering, and one of the youngest Prime Ministers in history is thrust into office on the crest of a populist wave. Battling self-doubt and fierce opposition within the Commons, charismatic Felix Grey is plunged into a tangled web of sinister plots and deception when a lord is kidnapped from a gentlemen's club.As tensions rise between the government and trade unions amidst a series of fatal factory disasters, Felix must quickly connect the dots between the missing politicians and the growing chaos in the country, which is threatening to tear apart Parliament and Nation...Can Felix crack the case and protect his country, or will he bear witness to a grim repetition of history?
'I love this book' Fern Britton'Laugh out loud funny' Kate BottleyAn explosive satire of gender stereotypes that flips patriarchy on its head to highlight sexist double standards.Exploring subjects like work and comedy, history and sport, the beauty industry and domesticity, anonymous author Man Who Has It All imagines a world in which men are bombarded with the same stereotypical bullshit as women. What if men's T-shirts were emblazoned with slogans encouraging them to be smiley, positive and kind? What if we laughed at jokes about fathers-in-law, male drivers and middle-class men of a certain age? What if men's history was a niche topic? Behind the jokes about crazy cat gentlemen, testerical men and the twenty-four-hour moustache, lies a deeper, darker message about language, power and control.Smart and provocative, Man Who Has It All shines a powerful light on the prejudice ingrained in our society. Told through fictionalised scenarios and wider cultural analysis, this is a feminist handbook that will arm you against the patriarchy.'Funny and insightful, but also fiercely radical' Victoria Smith'Takes on patriarchy with wit, verve and a mighty dose of good old British sarcasm' Viv Groskop, author of How to Own the Room'We need to hide copies in every locker room, Wetherspoons and B&Q' Eleanor Morton, comedian and actor'Man Who Has It All does a remarkable job of channelling anger into humour . . . a galvanising read' Rachel Hewitt, author of In Her Nature
An intimate and compelling memoir of how a traumatic journey into motherhood led one woman to revisit the myriad mental-health assessments she had received growing up, until she discovered that she’d been autistic all along.Laura Richmond had no idea that childbirth could result in post-traumatic stress until she experienced it for herself. After a harrowing labour, she was admitted to a psychiatric mother and baby unit together with her six-week-old son. Having been funnelled into mental health services almost twenty years earlier, Laura had tried every medication going and everyone had different views on what her problem was. She’d found that sometimes no one – however qualified they are or however deeply they care – really knows what to say or how to help. She was increasingly desperate, until the birth of her son sparked a sequence of events that would change everything.Laura retraces her steps through all of this. In doing so, she reflects on the tensions and absurdities within modern mental health care, the ways in which trauma shapes us and directs us, and how we can learn to trust ourselves as parents and as people.All My Worldly Joy is a story of self-discovery and profound love. It is a story of how one woman's life has been transformed, and of the thousand tiny joys her son brings every day.
The Paradox Paradox is a dark sci-fi comedy set hundreds of years in the future. It's also set a fair few years in the past.Osheen Shupple has been working his entire life to resolve the paradox of a desperate audio message from years ago, one which holds a horrifying secret that will change the course of history. His plan: build a time machine and return to the source of the message. But he can’t do it alone. Fortunately, the universe has supplied a perfect team: an archaeologist serving twenty-eight life sentences, a veterinarian with an identity crisis and no original body parts, a cheating university student, and a famous but very, very dead starship captain.Together, they will be propelled across the past, and to worlds beyond their timelines, on a temporal treasure-hunt to trace the tragic truth behind whoever Austin Lang turns out to be. But time is not to be trifled with, and every misstep unmasks another layer of chronological chaos. The past can’t be changed – but will there be a future worth saving...?The Paradox Paradox is a darkly hilarious and compelling ride into the future, the past and various alternate dimensions that arise when powerful masterminds wrestle to control the universe.
Featuring seventeen essays from people all around the world, Bloody Hell! is a collection of adventures in menopause from across the personal and political spectrum that aims to light a fire of shamelessness and break the boundaries surrounding this ‘taboo’ topic.As a feminist of colour who often resorts to writing what she has long wanted to read, editor Mona Eltahawy has seen first-hand how when a movement takes a brave dive into the deep end of a taboo, representation can be limited. Bloody Hell! is the antidote.This is not a medical textbook, nor is it a guide on how to remedy or fix anything. Rather, it is a collection of menopausal individuals – women, transmasculine and non-binary people – with their own entry point into that transition who can share unique insights and anecdotes about menopause that are deeply intimate, highly informative and hugely relatable.Menopause can be a confusing and anxiety-ridden time spent navigating the unknown. However, it can also be an opportunity for transformation, liberation and self-love. Bloody Hell! is a chance for new beginnings, knowledge and power and these essays encourage us to embrace the messy and beautiful nature of change.
'Tantalising' Leo Vardiashvili, author of Hard by a Great Forest'Profound' Iqbal Hussain, author of Northern BoyTwo strangers meet in Manhattan and spend a perfect night together. In Tokyo, they have seven days to see if that one night might mean something more.Landon’s living alone in Tokyo as a British ‘expat’, Louie’s visiting while he anxiously waits for approval on his US visa. Against the backdrop of a misty Tokyo Spring, their precious time together is spent wandering into side streets and coffee shops, sharing unmade beds and plates of food. But as the days tick by, Louie’s expectations start to overtake reality and he falls too deeply for a life that’s not yet his.Breathtakingly tender, Seven Days in Tokyo is an astonishing debut about the intricacies of desire and a search for belonging. It is a lyrical, immersive portrait of how some things, however beautiful and profound, are destined to be as short-lived as the cherry blossoms.‘A study of misplaced desire and a poetic love letter to the city itself’ Jemma Kennedy, playwright'Alvior's protagonist and love interest are as complexly built as a Sally Rooney couple' Zahra Barri, author of Daughters of the Nile
A Passion for Passion is a love letter to romance fiction, collecting together excerpts, book cover designs and synopses of the most absurdly frivolous and outlandishly whimsical novels.Alice Fraser holds a special place in her heart for the solemn silliness of romance novels. Despite knowing everything is going to be all right in the end, the journey to reach a Happily Ever After can take any number of wildly entertaining and unlikely twists and turns. To celebrate the unparalleled joy this genre can bring to readers and defy its maligned status, Alice has created D'Ancey LaGuarde, the wildly prolific, undisputed master of the art of romance.This book will be a constant source of solace and encouragement for romance fans worldwide, and small enough to slip inside a reticule to smuggle in to your next ball . . .
love lay down beside me and we wept is Helen Murray Taylor’s lyrical memoir of devastating mental illness.Helen Murray Taylor was finding her feet as a young doctor and trying to maintain some semblance of a life in the shadow of a punishing schedule when she witnessed a horrific road traffic accident. The impact of this fatal collision caught Helen off guard and had terrible repercussions. Both her career and her mental health took a battering. After a succession of other distressing events left Helen emotionally shattered and seriously depressed, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. At her lowest, she almost succeeded in taking her own life. love lay down beside me and we wept sprang from these difficult times, from Helen’s months on the ward and the psychological upheaval of being restrained against her will, and from the challenge of being a doctor turned patient, but also from the moments of pure comedy and unexpected comradeship that she encountered there.This is a profoundly moving and masterful account of one woman's physical and psychological breakdown, it's a tribute to the love that supported her through it, and it's an offering to the reader who might find comfort or understanding in this story.
‘Go to Empty Wigs for prose that never ceases to dazzle, for an extended holiday from contemporary pieties and to disgrace yourself with laughter’ Paul Genders, Literary ReviewEmpty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great imaginative writers of our age.It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Welsh Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments, Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject.Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick changing moods, Empty Wigs is a late modern masterpiece and a return to the novel’s origins.'Meades finds the mot juste, the striking reference, to complete every brilliant line. Is it all a bit too much? Reader, it is' Stephen Smith, Observer'A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space' Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph
Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is a sequence of incantations, a series of battles.Each of the three journeys sees Shaw walk alone into a Dartmoor forest and wait. What arrive are stories – fragments of myth that he has carried within him for decades: the deep history of Dartmoor itself; the lives of distant family members; Arthurian legend; and tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia. But these stories and their tellers don’t arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. As with all quests, Shaw is entering a domain of traps and tests.Bardskull can be read as a fable, as memoir, as auto-fiction or as an attempt to undomesticate myth. It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.
Since 2016, podcasting legend Jeff Cannata has delighted The Filmcast listeners with show-stopping movie reviews in poetic form. Now, lovers of the silver screen can enjoy reels of these laugh-out-loud limericks in Best Summed Up: a must-have quiz compendium for cinephiles.From applauding filmmaking mastery in box office sell-outs to damning dismissals of action big hitters that have missed the mark, Cannata critiques every genre of contemporary film and unpicks all must-see releases from 2018 to 2024 with his signature wit and wisdom.The challenge is simple: readers must identify the film described by each verse in five, delightfully moreish levels of brain-teasing poems. So grab some popcorn and see if you can achieve award-winning status of your own by completing the ultimate test for movie buffs.I guess my thoughts on ______ are best summed up in the form of a limerick...
A historical crime fiction novel set in Victorian London's gaslit theatre scene, where ghosts lurk in the shadows and murder takes centre stage.
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