Life Death and Vanilla Slices by Jenny Eclair
Poor Jean Collins.
She stepped out into the road without looking and now lies broken in hospital. But what distracted her? And why was she carrying a box of vanilla slices, the cream cakes she only ever bought for special occasions? Jean’s daughter Anne travels back up north to find out. But her mind is on her teenage sons in London – boys on the brink of becoming not very nice men. What damage could they do in just a few days? (Quite a lot, probably.)
Meanwhile there are secrets waiting for Anne and Jean, back at the old family home. Secrets that were buried a long time ago . . .
Jenny Eclair is celebrated for her unflinching black humour and brilliantly sharp observations. In her extraordinary new novel, she has also created a compelling and heart-breaking family drama that feels as rich and honest as real life.
Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Policy by Catherine Morris
Now available in paperback, this book is the first study to explore the life and work of Alice Milligan (1866-1953). A prolific writer for over six decades, Milligan published her work in a range of genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, travelogues, biography, plays, journalism, letters, and memoirs. From 1891 to the 1940s, she founded a series of cultural, feminist, commemorative, and political organizations that put the north on the map of the Irish Cultural Revival and provided a new resonance to Irish visual culture. The book not only reclaims an unjustly forgotten Irish cultural and political activist during this foundational era in modern Ireland, but also provides new ways of interpreting the Irish Cultural Revival itself.
A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Asubel
Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—an enthralling new collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition.
Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form.A Guide toBeing Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way …
The Spy Who Loved Me by Clare Mulley
In June 1952, a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in the South Kensington district of London. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising; that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable.
The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Granville would become one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated special agents. Having fled to Britain on the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the intelligence services and took on mission after mission. She skied over the hazardous High Tatras into occupied Poland, served in Egypt and North Africa, and was later parachuted behind enemy lines into France, where an agent’s life expectancy was only six weeks. Her courage, quick wit, and determination won her release from arrest more than once, and saved the lives of several fellow officers—including one of her many lovers—just hours before their execution by the Gestapo. More importantly, the intelligence she gathered in her espionage was a significant contribution to the Allied war effort, and she was awarded the George Medal, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre.
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?
Before I Die by Jenny Downham
Tessa has just months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, and drugs with excruciating side effects, Tessa compiles a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is Sex. Released from the constraints
of “normal” life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up.
Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark
At 16, Mary Wollstonecraft shocked England when she ran away with her married lover, the tempestuous, brilliant poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. then, at 20, she secured her place in history by writing “Frankenstein”, now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics of all time. This biography recounts the life and loves of this legendary woman, from her youth as the daughter of a philosopher and a pioneering feminist, through her passionate, turbulent marriage, and her career as a writer and editor.
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy and Terry Teachout
The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.
“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx
Pink Sari Revolution by Amana Fontanella
A triumphant portrait of a fiery sisterhood changing the lives of India’s women.
In Uttar Pradesh—known as the “badlands” of India—a woman’s life is not entirely her own. This is one explanation for how Sheelu, a seventeen-year-old girl, ended up in jail after fleeing her service in the home of a powerful local legislator. In a region plagued by corruption, an incident like this might have gone unnoticed—except that it captured the attention of Sampat Pal, leader of India’s infamous Gulabi (Pink) Gang.Poor and illiterate, married off around the age of twelve, pregnant with her first child at fifteen, and prohibited from attending school, Sampat Pal has risen to become the courageous commander and chief of a women’s brigade numbering in the tens of thousands. Uniformed in pink saris and carrying pink batons, they aim to intervene wherever other women are victims of abuse or injustice. Joined in her struggle by Babuji, a sensitive man whose intellectualism complements her innate sense of justice, and by a host of passionate field commanders, Sampat Pal has confronted policemen and gangsters, officiated love marriages, and empowered women to become financially independent.
In a country where women’s rights struggle to keep up with rapid modernization, the story of Sampat Pal and her Pink Gang illuminates the thrilling possibilities of female grassroots activism.
The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
The German book that has shaped an entire generation. A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues that are tearing this family apart.
Finding Takri by Palo Stickland
My Grandmother Takri was the only person who remembered the date I was born. ‘She said it was the fifteenth of the Punjabi month of Chet,’ my mother told me. ‘It was your father who was wrong.’
Twelve year old Takri is quickly married to Basant, leaving her heart in the village of her birth …
… Finding Takri tells the story of three generations of a Punjabi family, as they move across India, witnessing Gandhi’s Salt March, the horror of Jallianwala Bhag and the partition of India, before moving to Glasgow, Scotland.
Depression : A Public Feeling by Joy Howard
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n Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.
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