Introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.'A creepily prescient tale ... Insidiously horrifying!' Margaret AtwoodDeft, dread filled, hypnotic and hopeful. Completely got under my skin.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave'A masterpiece of creeping dread.' Emily St. John Mandel'Crystalline ... The signature of an enchantress.' Edna O'Brien'Lush, hypnotic, compulsive ... A reminder of where groupthink leads.' Eimear McBride'A masterwork of English pastoral horror: eerie and bewitching.' Claire-Louise Bennett'I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.' Lauren GroffThis is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY are coming closer . . .THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist.THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity.Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ...Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION'In Auguries of a Minor God, her outstandingdebut collection, Eipe sings of joys and wounds felt deeply under the skin' David Wheatley, GuardianNidhi Zak/Aria Eipe's spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. From 'stunning' and 'paralysing' to 'killing' and 'destroying', each arrow has its own effect on some body - a very real, contemporary body - and its particular journey of love. The second is a long narrative poem, 'A is for [Arabs]', which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. With an extraordinary structure, yoking abecedarian and Fibonacci sequences, it is a skilful and intimate account of migration and exile, of home and belonging.
An antiseptic little man, a cartographer by profession, a horticulturist by avocation, he spends a first night in an abandoned, mucky greenhouse and is very happy to be permitted to stay on there, tending his 283 plants...
Balfour's political career spanned the years from 1874 to 1929, during which time he saw Britain's acquisition of a new colonial empire, the disastrous Boer War, the beginning of India's progress towards independence, and the emergence of the Dominions as equal partners in the British Commonwealth.
Rosie Raccoon was up to no goodout and about in a grand neighbourhood. It seems Rosie is up to no good as she breaks into the houses of Bear, Flamingo and Snake, but when Officer Skunk catches her in the act all she has taken is junk!
But whether it's daytrips to the beach or drawing secret sketches, Joe works hard to show Finn life beyond the battered concrete yard below their flat. Joe is determined not to become like his Da.
Hedgehog and Tortoise were the best of friends. So the two friends wave to each other, blow kisses, sing songs, dance around and write letters. And even though they can't hug and they can't touch, they both know that they are loved. A gorgeous, uplifting, inspiring picture book that makes social distancing fun!
What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad's pleadings that he's stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad's every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered.
'The body is in the library,' Colonel Osborne said. 'Come this way.'Following the discovery of the corpse of a highly respected parish priest at Ballyglass House - the Co. Wexford family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family - Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called in from Dublin to investigate.
The night Dad had a few cheeky ones after work, forgot the milk and tripped over the rubbish, Mum called him A Wild Thing and said "Don't mind me!"
A brand-new series about a panda who's fed up of being labelled as cute, from the duo that brought you Dave Pigeon. A guaranteed laugh on every page!
Sweet Dreams charts the rise of the New Romantics, a scene that grew out of the remnants of the post-punk period and developed alongside club culture, ska, electronica, and goth.
A day with Lowly Worm could never be dull!Certainly, the day Lowly shares with his best friend Huckle in this story is filled with surprising ups and downs. With everything from bike crashes to a big birthday surprise, these stories show exactly why Lowly is one special worm!Come join in the fun !
Flossie, Big Hilda, Mother Cat, Squeaky Mouse and a cast of Scarry's most popular characters are off to pick spring flowers, watch fireworks at the Pig family picnic, help the postman deliver letters, and celebrate holidays, family and friends.
This viking duo will give Horrid Henry a run for his money!What if your parents WANTED you to behave badly?Set in the snowy fjords of a Viking kingdom, the terrible twins, Hack and Whack, are proud to be the best worst vikings.
Everyone's favourite (socially distanced) characters return to help us through this challenging period. Hedgehog is waiting for his friend Tortoise to wake up. Tortoise begins to stir - the one boulder that Hedgehog didn't think he could lift to turn .
From bestselling author and winner of the Blue Peter Best Story Book Award, Uki and the Swamp Spirit is the fifth title set in the world of Podkin One-Ear.Uki had the sensation of a sickly green light, spreading out through the networks of water. Of tendrils connecting all the creatures of the marsh in a web . . . Linking itself so it could poison it all and destroy it.Uki and his friends have two more spirits to find and capture. After defeating Valkus, they make for Clarice, who is spreading disease through the swamps. Can Uki and his friends outwit him - all whilst they themselves are being chased by the Endwatch and Jori's clan of assassins?'Storytelling perfection.' Sophie Anderson'One of my sons very favourite authors.' Romesh Ranganathan'Superb.' Max Porter'It's jolly good fun ... expect sequels to breed like... well, rabbits.' SFX on The Legend of Podkin One-Ear
The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth...Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.
In this fourth explorers adventure we meet Ursula, a part mermaid girl who is determined to follow in Stella's footsteps and help her to defeat the Collector!Ursula knew the submarine wasn't designed to go this deep, but what choice did they have? No one wanted to get swallowed up by a colossal sneezing jellyfish!In a distant watery corner of the Explorers Kingdom, a submarine engineer, Ursula, is determined to become an explorer. Unfortunately, she hides an extraordinary secret, which makes her the sworn enemy of the Ocean Squid Explorers' Club were they ever to find out . . . But when The Collector threatens the Club, Ursula throws caution to the wind and leads an expedition through treacherous waters, filled with gremlins, aboard the Blowfish submarine - and joined by her friends Max, Genie and Jai - and even her idol Stella!Thrilling, heart-pounding adventure with exquisite detail throughout. Alex Bell's world-building is second to none. Praise for the series:'A magical adventure of friendship, bravery and derring-do in a richly imagined world.' The Bookseller'A fantastic frosty adventure.' Sunday Express'Wintry, atmospheric, highly imaginative fantasy.' Metro'The most huggable book of the year . . . An (iced) gem.' SFX
Just when Bluebell thought her crazy family were behaving normally, her parents make an announcement that could turn everything upside down.If only Zoran, their au pair, would come back to live with them. Unfortunately he's too busy teaching guitar to his new protege, Zachary Smith. Blue is jealous at first, until Zach starts helping her little sister with a secret project and becomes a regular visitor at the Gadsby house.Then Zach goes missing. Blue needs her family to pull together if they're going to find him...
So topsy-turvy had attitudes become in certain circles that the accusation of being 'unquestionably the biggest war-monger in the world today' was levelled at Churchill not Hitler! This book intends to study the various forms of motivation which led to this phenomenon (pro-Nazi sympathies in Britain).
Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake), Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema's pre-eminent figures.
Patriotism Perverted is an exploration of British anti-Semitism in the last six months of peace and the first year of the Second World War. It shows how, against the backdrop of an endemic British 'social anti-Semitism', a virulent form of this tendency was able to emerge in the late Thirties in a variety of extremist movements. These movements gained their strength from the popular obsessions, in 1939, with Jewish responsibility for the approaching war (seen as 'The War of the Jews' Revenge'), and with the myth of the Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot. In many cases, these views were closely related with pro-Nazism and were often held by the most patriotic of people. For most, the outbreak of war was a signal to perform their patriotic duty. But there were others who found themselves in a considerable dilemma, torn between patriotism and their desire to subvert a war they believed Britain to have been tricked into undertaking. Researching many prominent figures of the day, including Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley, Patriotism Perverted offers a fascinating insight into the views and activities of those in the various anti-Semitic and/or pro-Nazi circles in 1939.
A Messiah of the Last Days (1974) was C. J. Driver's fourth novel. A profound meditation on politics and a complex portrait of English society, it is also fast-paced and suspenseful. Its narrator is Tom Grace, a pragmatic, efficient London barrister with a comfortable life. But his ordered world is unsettled by his involvement with a young man he defends in court - John Buckleson, the charismatic leader of an anarchic movement calling themselves The Free People. Though deeply divided in many ways, the two men are drawn to each other by a common dream of creating a new social and moral order. Buckleson, though, is a figure of interest to more people than those who subscribe to his vision.'C. J. Driver's exceptional alertness to our times is matched by the power and zest of his evocative writing, lit up by wry wit.' Nadine Gordimer.
Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Jerusalem, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, King of Transylvania, King of Croatia and Slovenia, King of Galicia and Illyria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Salzburg, Duke of Bukovina, Duke of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza and so on, another thirty or so titles could be added. Was ever a monarch so festooned as Emperor Francis Joseph? He ruled from the Year of the Revolutions, 1848 until his death in 1916. His empire was the most multi-national state ever. An ethnic map of 1910 shows there to be Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenes, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Italians, Jews, Muslims, Ladins (in the Tyrol) and Roumanians. What is more, even together the Germans and the Magyars constituted a minority. And yet, as Alan Palmer observes no other European monarch 'exercised full sovereignty for so long.' Unlike Queen Victoria he ruled rather than merely reigned. That alone suggests he was something more than the humourless bureaucrat he is commonly thought to have been, and Alan Palmer is successful in providing a more rounded and sympathetic portrait of him both as head of an empire and head of a family.His personal life was punctuated with tragedy: his brother, Maximilian was executed y Mexican republicans; his only son, Rudolf shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling; his wife, Empress Elizabeth, was stabbed to death in Geneva, and his nephew and heir, Francis-Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. This was the first biography of Francis Joseph by an English writer and was acclaimed when originally published in 1994.'With great skill Mr Palmer blends in the Emperor's private life with the story of the Empire. . . This is an important book; also an entrancing one.' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph'A compelling read' Lawrence James, Evening Standard
A glib assessment of Metternich might not be a favourable one, he was not without his ridiculous qualities, and yet he survived, more than survived, in fact, with the 'Age of Metternich' lasting for more than a generation, and giving Europe a measure of peace, albeit repressive, that was much needed after the Napoleonic convulsions.Alan Palmer describes well Metternich's extraordinary longevity. 'Clement von Metternich held continuous office at the head of Europe's affairs for a longer period of time than any other statesman in modern history: he became foreign minister of the Austrian Empire in the autumn of 1809 and he did not resign until the spring of 1848. For thirty-three of these thirty-nine years his statecraft and philosophy of government determined the political pattern of the continent. The 'Age of Metternich' , though often impatiently dismissed by historians as a mere interlude, lasted for twice as long as the 'Age of Napoleon' which preceded it and for half as long again as the 'Age of Bismarck' which followed in the closing decades of the century.'Metternich was a statesman to his fingertips, practising 'the skills of diplomacy with greater fluency than any contemporary Talleyrand, from whom he had learnt many of the refinement of the game.'How would he fare today? Probably quite well as he was, again in Alan Palmer's words, 'an early champion of federalism and a good European ...''As a work of history (it) cannot be faulted.' A. J. P. Taylor, Observer'Well-written, well-researched, lucid and witty.' Philip Ziegler, The Times
'Even the lives of scoundrels play some part in portraying an age...'Our interest in all things Victorian - in the seamy side of the era especially - is ageless and undimmed. Giles St. Aubyn's Infamous Victorians, first published in 1971, stands as a brilliant illumination of two dark stories of the time, replete with sinister elements of iniquity and hypocrisy.In the first fifty years of Victoria's reign two doctors were hanged after being found guilty of murder at the Central Criminal Court. Both men were 32 years old, both poisoners, both murdered for money. Dr William Palmer was a notorious figure, tried for a single murder though he almost certainly killed others. Dr George Lamson was a morphia addict convicted of killing his crippled young brother-in-law at Blenheim House school. Giles St. Aubyn restores them to life on the page, examines their careers and assesses their guilt.
'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?... It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell...'In Companions of the Day and Night (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier Black Marsden - chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's fiction.
Dennis Brain is recognized as perhaps the greatest horn player the world has known. He helped rescue the horn from the obscurity in which it had languished for over a century, and revived the public's faith in it as a major solo instrument. Brain restored to the concert platform concertos by Mozart and Haydn, and inspired contemporary composers to write for the horn, most notably the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings by Benjamin Britten, composed during World War II, a piece which is now central to the repertoire of tenors and horn players. Brain died at the tragically young age of thirty-six in a car crash. The beauty of his playing and his untimely death captured the public imagination like no horn player before or since. This biography was reissued thirty years after his death, and includes a discography. The book also contains an appreciation by Benjamin Britten.'A clear account of Dennis Brain's brilliant career ...' Times Literary Supplement'...an absorbing and extremely well-written account of the orchestral scene in England.'
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