Bücher veröffentlicht von Linen Press

Set in the 70's in a small village in India, Letters in the Sand is an engaging story of one girl's quiet rebellion against her strict, dysfunctional family and their non-negotiable plans to marry her at fifteen to any suitable boy. At birth, her future is sealed as a submissive daughter and wife and her father refuses to educate her. "e;I was no better than a cow, brushed and groomed, neck and ankles festooned with bells, flowers around its horns to be put on display for someone to choose."e;In this layered narrative, the political and the personal are interwoven when Kiri's beloved brother, Rajiv, runs away from home to join the extremists fighting for fair pay and justice for agricultural workers and is caught up in the escalating violence.We follow Kiri as she persuades her strict father to let her attend school, starting years older than her class mates, and as she forms an enduring bond with her teacher. Arush is the man who educates her well beyond classroom texts, stands beside her, supports her and finally asks for her hand in marriage.Kiri yearns to escape a life of subjugation but can she find the courage to follow a lonely, challenging path to freedom?

The Fine Art of Grieving Jane Edberg 'Grief is a courtship with death best done with a vivid imagination.' - Jane Edberg Jane Edberg's creative muse vanished when a switch flipped from child alive to child dead. How was she supposed to process her loss? This lyrical, original, beautifully written story is about how, after the tragic death of her adored nineteen-year-old son, she rediscovers the power of art to create an unconventional pathway through grief. This is not your typical grief memoir. It is an introspective and thought-provoking story which explores the profound power of creativity to transform trauma and anguish into resilience and healing. Her journey is illuminated with breathtaking, fine art photographs of reimagined loss.

When you are alone, adrift and displaced, how do you find yourself?Set on a small Scottish island, The Water All Around Us is a poignant novel about loneliness, roots and belonging. Recently arrived, crofters' child, Fenn, is troubled by being different and not fitting in. Incomer and marathon swimmer, Jess, is running away from personal tragedy. A young whale, separated from his pod, swims in the wrong direction and embarks on an arduous, heart-breaking journey. All three are at home in the water, but when their lives connect in the sea that fringes the white-sand beaches, their paths converge and collide with disastrous consequences.Under the surface of this thought-provoking novel are messages, carried quietly and bravely by the whale, about the damage we are doing to our oceans.

In 1875, Simone Gastrell is conveniently committed to Long Meadows Asylum by her adulterous husband. Distraught but not defeated, she meets the silent women whose lives within the institution are ordered and defined by men. Alice Semple, a herbalist and wise-woman, does not speak, but gives testimony in her notebook. Phoebe Baines, a fragile, damaged young woman, lives within the soundless universe of her interior monologue. In a powerless world, relieved only by precious hours spent in the Airing Courts and gardens, the three women come together in unvoiced friendship. When life behind the asylum walls grows even more dangerous and brutal, they find their voices and use them to fight for survival.In their story, readers will hear the echoes of today, of the women locked away in our institutions, often brutalised, still silenced and living invisible lives.

In 1937 Larry Lambert has a vision of a magnificent pub built on frozen fields 'like a grassy sea'. It is an echo of a single, failed, gay encounter in a fishing boat, and in its construction he invests his energy and his thwarted dreams. He calls it The Dolphin.And so unfolds a moving exploration of the constraining expectations of society on three generations of one family. For Larry, there is the cruel impossibility of being gay in 1930s Britain and his ensuing loveless marriage with the embittered Rosemary. For his daughter, Joanie, there is the crushing weight of duty and respectability during the post-war years. Only granddaughter Lottie pulls free and finds the freedom her grandfather and mother were denied. Larry's decision to build The Dolphin sparks events that play out over decades, tearing one generation apart while bringing another back together.

My Blue Peninsula is a confession that fills seven notebooks, with a final notebook left mostly empty. In them, Dora Giraud tries to explain to her adult daughters why she remains in Istanbul after escaping death at the hands of extremists, and why she risks her life to campaign for the truth about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides, ferociously denied for a century by the Turkish state. Dora's desperate need to understand her family history is the thread that binds this story's conflicting fragments. As the direct descendant of the genocides' victims and perpetrators, she carries a tangled legacy of loss and betrayal, lies and ill-gotten gains. With this confession, she hopes to set her daughters free. But can she?My Blue Peninsula is Maureen Freely's fourth novel set in Istanbul, the city of her childhood. In each, a character from the sidelines of the preceding novel takes centre stage to probe a mystery left pending. We first met Dora Giraud in Sailing Through Byzantium as the observant daughter of a famously bohemian household who could not, then, speak the truth.

Jess Richards's beloved father died suddenly at the age of sixty-seven in Scotland. Three months later, she travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand, to a new relationship. This is the story of her grief and her love, of a place lost and a place found, of a memory-packed past and a poised present. Birds and Ghosts was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when international travel was impossible. In this achingly empty space, away from her family and her father's grave, Jess reconstructs her early life and ponders the self who is lonely, different, and invisible. A late diagnosis of Autism adds a conventional label to a uniquely personal portrait. This intimate story edges the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, confident in its experimental style. It is memoir in a pure, unconstrained form, brave and beautiful, moving and utterly compelling. From the author of Snake Ropes, Cooking

This new collection of stories from Avril Joy bring together her finest published and unpublished work. From the Costa winning Millie and Bird to the recent A Morning Tide, listed for the Fish Short Memoir Prize, she weaves narratives of hope in the face of loss, transformation and redemption, and the enduring power of love. Combining a poet's gift for language with a keen naturalist's eye, she journeys across landscapes from Venice to the East Anglian Fens, from Cape Cod to the shore temples of Mahabalipuram. The novella, this One Wild Place, set on a northern hill farm during the pandemic, echoes the mood of the other stories. Moving and poignant it is told with an unerring compassion. Avril Joy explores first love, families, marriage, childhood, mothering, social class, escape, gardens, birds, seas, tides and stray dogs. These stories are about the wild places we call home.

In1843, Edinburgh artist, David Octavius Hill, is commissioned to paint the portraits of 400 ministers who have broken away from the Church of Scotland. Only when he meets Robert Adamson, an early master of the new and fickle art of photography, does this daunting task begin to look feasible.Hill is soon bewitched by the art of light and shade. He and Adamson become the darlings of Edinburgh society, immortalising people and places with their subtle and artistic images. In the Blink of an Eye is a re-imagining of Hill's life in the words of those who were beguiled by his artistry and charismatic charm. Tender, tragic and sometimes humorous, these voices come together in a story of art and science, love and loss, friendship and photography.

Alice Green realises that reaching fifty is much the same as being invisible so why not make the most of it? Her head-in-the-sand husband doesn't notice the clothes mountain and the piles of pretty stationery.When two police cars draw up outside her house in leafy Edinburgh, Alice knows the game is up. While dealing with the present, she backtracks through her memories, recasting the events and people who chipped away at her confidence and contentment over the years. Run, Alice, Run is an irreverent coming-of-middle-age novel that looks with irony and black humour at the way society defines and diminishes women of all ages.

The date is 1937. The place Liverpool. Mary escapes a loveless childhood by marrying an infantry soldier who glories in active service.The date is 1952. The place Nairobi. The Mao Mau are rising up to reclaim their land in bloody guerrilla warfare. Mary's adulterous love affair unfolds in the empty rooms and grounds of deserted colonial houses. Trysts go unnoticed until political and personal events move towards their shocking finale. Spanning four decades, this is a novel of both epic proportion and intimate narration. At its heart is the poignant and powerful love affair between Mary, the young wife of an infantry soldier, and an intelligence officer who truly understands Africa and its plight. Their secret meetings are conveniently camouflaged by the hysteria and violence surrounding the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. We watch Mary from her too-young marriage, to her success in the Red Cross during WWII, to the jaded reunion with her husband, to the headlong passion of mature love. The ending is a bombshell.This story, spanning four decades, is told by Mary, her husband, David, and their young children, Eve and Clara, who listen at doors and speak their own fear-fuelled version of the truth.White Lies is about different kinds of war and different kinds of loving. It explores the fragility and partiality of memory and our need to re-write the past so that it does not jar with the stories we tell ourselves and others.

The Deep Sea chippy and the Fantasy Island bar face each other across the neon glow of Junction Street. Beth shovels chips on one side and Amber spins naked around a pole on the other. Their work is mundane and predictable, each night much like any other, until a sudden, dramatic death forces them to choose between relative safety and risk.Into this situation wanders George, lost and broken-hearted and dressed in a monkey costume.Nothing is Heavy follows these three characters over the course of one intense Saturday night. Unaware that their lives are already intimately connected by a previous tragedy, their fates collide again with completely unpredictable results.What ensues is a hilarious, surreal, furiously-paced adventure involving sex, drugs, chips and angels which hovers masterfully between tragedy and farce.The strength of this truly original novel is that beneath the thrill-a-minute, fast-paced action, Vicki Jarrett deals with serious issues as the unforgettable characters' life-crushing backgrounds are slowly revealed and the past catches up with the present.

This is a book of many voyages.There is the meandering trail that leads to the right boat for crossing an ocean. There is the preparation stalled in a sweltering American boatyard while arguments about equipment and finance combine with the narrowing of the hurricane window. There is the crossing itself which starts with the wrong weather, broken boat parts, torn sails, serious leaks and a very seasick crew as Scarlet gets blown off course in unkind seas.Male and female monologues form the internal voyages. The skipper's thoughts range from the challenges of fitting a wind vane to almost losing an arm in a tangled genoa to the navigational system of the Puluwat Islanders. His wife describes diminishing supplies, the damp, bruises, blue eggs, jellyfish and her anxiety about the deteriorating health of her son who, suffering from ME, should not have been persuaded to go with them.External and internal journeys criss-cross as Scarlet sails on across 3000 miles of ocean. She would have told a different story.

This new collection of poetry reflects the lives, hopes and fears of women hidden behind walls and bars, lives which few of us can even imagine. Avril has waited until she is absolutely confident that she can capture the complexity of those voices which she does here with extraordinary authenticity, poignancy, and humour. The style is breathtakingly original.

A faded seaside town in autumn is the backdrop for this elegiac story of a vulnerable boy and the adult who befriends him. Eight year old Neville, who counts stars and steps and grains of sand, is the first to notice that the red beach hut is occupied again. Abbott is on the run after a disturbing cyber attack. Their fleeting friendship, played out on the margins of sea and shore, brings the honesty and compassion both seek. But others watch, judge and misinterpret what they see while Abbot's past runs at their heels. An evocative portrayal of two outsiders who find companionship and solace on a lonely beach. This novel is about the labels we give people who are different and the harm that ensues.