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These vital vignettes of a post-War Bedfordshire childhood are delivered to us through rich recurrences and strange isolations of character. - Mario Petrucci

Blending Victorian romance and drama with a compelling supernatural story, The Sound of Gematria is an engaging debut novel not to be missed.

Vibrant and exciting retelling of the ancient myth of Culhwch and Olwen from a renowned oral storyteller.

A daughter uncovers the truth behind her mother's life in a kibbutz on the bank of the River Jordan in the 1970s.

Extraordinary coming of selfhood novel that finds strength in the stories we hold close and the people we holder closer.

Galvanised by a health scare, Felix Walton overturns his life to remake himself after a forty-two-year marriage.

In eleven beautifully observed stories, told with intelligent and textured prose, we travel far and wide to disparate places and distinctive cultures.Whether the protagonists are dealing with migration or climate change, acts of terrorism or the intricacies of family relationships, each story turns on a moment that touches the human condition, connecting us to a single encounter.With a finger on the political and cultural pulse, Ultramarine is a generous, finely-tuned collection for the times we live in.

Memory, time, love and loss weave through all of G W Colkitto's poems with a resonance that moves us fluidly from yearning to insight. The master of seeing connections, Shake the Kaleidoscope finds Colkitto taking a view across the whole of life: non-linear, sometimes fragmentary, imbued with whimsy and humour, but above all permeable to the scars and triumphs of loss and love. As the poems range back and forth across the years, one memory provoking another, it is not only the whole of the poet's life laid out in the pieces of glass to be endlessly rearranged, but the whole of the human condition. Whether examining interior moments or negotiations with the world of work; whether writing astute commentary on political and social inequalities, or simply savouring those small moments of deep joy provoked by the simplest of things, Colkitto holds up a mirror to life-his own, and ours.Shake the Kaleidoscope is a major work from an accomplished poet: lucid, accessible, profound.GW Colkitto is a widely published poet, short story writer and novelist from Paisley. He won the Scottish Writers Short Story Competition, in 2011, and the Poetry Competition in 2012. His poetry collection, The Year of the Loch, was published by Diehard Press, in 2017; a second collection, Waitin tae Meet wi the Deil was published by Diehard 2018; and he published the pamphlet, Clyde: my river, with Cinnamon Press in 2022. He is also the creator of Sebastian Symes, Victorian Detective.

Linguistically dexterous, scintillating with intelligence and wit, and balancing incisive observation with deep compassion, the short fictions in Y Knots draw us into the lives of characters we feel completely involved with. Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul for images that reflect the story. But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is an engaging array of unique perspectives on all our souls.If, as Sabbagh writes, writing is always a performance and projection of a self, then Y Knots is the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap off the page so compellingly shows a master at work.- Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida¿¿¿Y Knots hold the Hanging Gardens of Babylon teleported into the tired aridity of a postmodern mind. The lushness of Sabbagh's characters and settings is nurtured with such loving drip-irrigation precision that you'll find yourself enamored with both his beauties and his beasts. - Svetlana Lavochkina, novelist, poet, translatorIntelligent and passionate, these stories are singularities that make all the difference. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, 'an inexorably-thinking man', but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization.- Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers¿

In all of Robin Thomas's work there is a subtlety and wit so contained that it invites re-reading. It takes full immersion to savour the linguistic dexterity and intelligence at work, to appreciate that humour often belies the absolute seriousness of life. In reminded of something, this balance is particularly delicate and the poignancy superbly controlled and utterly affecting. With a yearning that can only come of love and loss, the poems use the simplest of metaphors in the most lucid language to convey memories and emotions so complex and heart-breaking that they are almost beyond the scope of words-a collection that is profoundly moving and exquisitely realised.Praise for Robin Thomas's previous workPoems are like rooms. One might feel safe in such a room and, at first sight, the poems of Robin Thomas employ an architecture which is reassuring. [...] Yet walls shake and windows crack and the 'homely' formal qualities of these well-made poems belie a mystery, a strangeness, a reckoning.- Julian StannardRobin Thomas's is a fragile world, whose unexpected strengths derive from his elastic, unsentimental grasp of reality. It's not surprising that I find myself smiling with recognition as I read Robin Thomas's view of the universe ... after all, ambiguity and contradiction are embedded in comedy of the most serious kind.- Janice DempseyOccasionally I seize upon a single poem sent to me, or discovered by accident, and rejoice in its particular oddness or specialness or combination of the two. Robin Thomas's poetry evokes this response with its extraordinary quirkiness, combination of wild and everyday wisdom, the way the clues are always in the margins, chuckling as they wait to be found or found out. Thomas is the master of irony and juxtaposition, never obvious, always surprising.- Wendy KleinRobin Thomas completed the MA in Writing Poetry at Kingston University in 2012. He has had poems published in a number of journals including Acuman, Agenda, Envoi, Orbis, Brittle Star, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Scotland, Pennine Platform, The High Window, South, Stand, Rialto and The Interpreter's House. He has been shortlisted for the Buzzwords, Bridport and Bath Poetry Café prizes and is represented in several anthologies. His pamphlet, A Fury of Yellow, was published by Eyewear in 2016. His debut collection, Momentary Turmoil, was published in 2018, followed by A Distant Hum in 2021, both by Cinnamon. Dempsey and Windle published his Cafferty pamphlet in 2021 and his collection Weather on the Moon was published by Two Rivers Press in 2022. Robin also had a Flash Fiction Novella-Margot and the Strange Objects-published by Adhoc Publishing in 2022.

Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol sees John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.

A poetry collection exploring spirituality in the contemporary world.

Charting a life spent lost in numbers, is My Life in Receipts a memoir? Too fictionalised. A novella? Too close to the truth. All too recognisable? YES!From chanting times-tables and unlearning old money to discovering the sinking schoolroom 'Maths Feeling' that ends a child's ambitions to be a 'scientist'. From the promissory note of student days to the hard times of the dole giro. From the exuberance of the first wage packet to the pleasures and limits of being able to pay your way... My Life in Receipts plunges you into the world of bags full of threatening letters, intimidating bailiffs, bankruptcy, eviction-even imprisonment.Revealing the lives of people in a perpetual cost of living crisis, and the work of those who help them fight to reclaim their lives, this is a dark, original and tragi-comic exploration of the past, the future, money, debt: whether to flee, whether to fight. There are some victories, some routs-and, along the way, thoughts on electronic train tickets too.Andrew Dutton will make you laugh out loud, scream with righteous anger and, most of all, make you think.Andrew Dutton has been writing since the early 2000s and has previously self-published an e-book of short stories, A Mirror.His work frequently explores life at 'the bottom of the pile', reflecting a long career helping people in financial hardship and debt.Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, he now lives in Derbyshire and draws inspiration and comfort from books, music, cats, and long country walks with his partner and their beloved Labrador.Andrew's debut novel, Nocturne: Wayman's Sky, and two other novels, The Crossword Solver, and The Beauty of Chell Street are also published by Cinnamon Press.

"We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long," writes John Barnie in one of his 'observations' ('Art in the Flatlands'). And bite he delivers.Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more... Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality.Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we "...live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void." ('Varieties of Meaning')Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. John was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. His collections of essays, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. His most recent collections are A Report to Alpha Centauri (Cinnamon Press), Afterlives (Leaf by Leaf) and the forthcoming Dunes of Cwm Rheidol (Cinnamon Press)..

A fictional pot-pourri in prose and poetry, Say I am Merry explores love and loss and the way the stories of one generation are handed to the next. A poignant, ambitious and compelling debut.

Out in the Field immerses us deeply in a compulsion to be outside-here we draw inspiration from landscape, birds, weather; here we step outside ourselves, and allow our perspective to shift...Drawn into the fields through Patricia Helen Wooldridge's meticulous observation, our minds breathe alongside the poet's. Within the spell of these pages we find ourselves in a world with a different notion of time and change. We find ourselves in the moment.A maven of attention, Wooldridge's acute reflections make each seasonal shift fresh, each creature and plant precious and beautiful, each encounter with the natural environment unexpected. And, as we open ourselves to this world through these poems, our humanity and passion for this ailing and extraordinary planet can only be enlarged, compelling the reader in turn out into the field.Patricia Helen Wooldridge lives in Hampshire and is inspired by walking, bird watching and working on her allotment. She studied English Literature at London University and has a doctorate in creative writing. In the past she has taught English in schools and more recently creative writing to undergraduate students. Her work has been placed in a variety of poetry competitions and has appeared in poetry journals and competition anthologies. Her collection, Sea Poetics, won the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Prize in 2017, and her pamphlet, Being, was published in 2021. Her poem, 'I Stop Wearing the Mini-skirt, 1972' was commended in the 2013 National Poetry prize and used to develop a workshop guide by poet, Jane Yeh, for the The Poetry Society.

Saoirse grows up hearing the extraordinary stories of family members who died before her birth or in early childhood. Her aunt Miriam, who believed she had lived across a thousand years to be with her lover in each generation, the Moorish Princess Casilda. Her grandmother, Daireann. more than a healer and wise woman, and her father, Oisin, an alchemist and magician. But who is Saoirse? I was Casilda's mother more than a thousand years ago, she tells her mother, Sarah.Tucked away under a mountain in Roscommon in Oisin's family home, Saoirse meets Faolan, a local boy lost in their garden maze. As they play out stories from myth, Faolan's loyalty and love grows, but Saoirse craves adventure and is not easily won. As their paths diverge, one momentous event threatens everything, leading Saoirse into a maze from which she might never emerge and taking Faolan on a quest on which their lives depend.Spanning back into the mists of pre-history; travelling from Roscommon to Paris, Prague to Brittany, Budapest to Nice, Zaragoza to Tromso, and bringing together Celtic mythology from Ireland and Brittany, Saoirse's Crossing asks questions of identity as contemporary as they are ancient, exploring the lengths we will go to for love.

1900s London. For Patrick Bowley, fresh from rural Galway, a place of mind-expanding encounters with mystics, suffragettes, theosophists and free-thinkers. Drawn into the world of such luminaries as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant and W B Yeats, it seems that Patrick is on a quest for meaning that will bear fruit. But a bruising failure in romance leaves him disillusioned with London and its class divisions and, in spiritual crisis, he flees to the familiarity of rural Ireland. But Patrick finds no peace and as Europe slides towards war and Ireland towards rebellion, his longing to shut out the world is challenged by a vocation to preach peace in Ireland that will not be quieted. And so he begins an epic pilgrimage to Dublin, arriving days before the 1916 Easter Rising. It is here that Patrick's journey reaches a gripping climax - one that finally reveals the true nature of the 'pathless country'. Winner of the J G Farrell Award and an Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Award, James Harpur's debut novel deftly weaves a story of spiritual awakening with fin de siecle alternative thought, love and political history, exploring how conscience and spiritual quest survive in an atmosphere of war, sectarianism and class hierarchy.

Justin, a popular Leeds professor, seeks redemption in the ashes of youthful idealism. Holding together his family is already a struggle as his son, Sanjay, is drawn into radical politics by his lover Farida, who joins a Kurdish Women's militia to fight ISIS. With nerves already frayed, Justin's wife, Harpreet, is devastated when revelations of his past as an urban bomber come to light, turning his life upside down. Can love and loyalty prevent this family from imploding? Jane Austin's second novel, Renegade is a compelling story of 70s rebellion, revolution in Rojava and a family in a tailspin; a tale that touches the beating heart of our times.

Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself.When life unravels for Beth after the break up of a long marriage, she finds herself reaching back for answers. Into her past as a troubled, pregnant teenager in a home rapidly falling apart. Into the life of her great-grandmother, using her skills as a researcher and psychoanalyst to find the truth behind family secrets.Moving between past and present, through parallel stories of family disintegration and lives knocked off course, and exploring how secrets resonate with shame down through the generations, Britannia Street is a story of how a woman carries trauma to her family and the world. A story with which so many will empathise.Will Beth be able to discover the lost parts of herself buried beneath the roles of daughter, wife, mother, nurse? Can she learn to understand and forgive herself? Will she emerge to find love again, and with who?Sometimes we have no idea why we make the choices we do, but for Beth, there is the chance to make the right choice.Family secrets and resilience weave together in this compelling story of how we deal with loss of so many kinds, even the loss of self. From historical fiction author, Beth Cox, Britannia Street is a vivid, compassionate fictionalised biography that will grip you from beginning to end.

From a mother meeting her son's murderer, to a wife's despair and desire for revenge when her beloved cat dies, this is a collection of stories about troubled lives. The protagonists struggle to cope in adversity, some finding themselves capable of unexpected courage and resilience, but for others adapting to their difficult circumstances appears impossible. In the title story, a newly retired husband becomes obsessed with environmental issues, bringing his marriage to crisis point. 'Son' explores the dilemma of discovering a family crime, whether to expose it, or assist concealing the evidence. In 'Just for a While' a foster child knows the understanding and stability she finds with her new carer will be short-lived. A middle-aged man falls in love for the first time in 'Catalina', but at what cost?A study of human nature, in which grief, abuse, and disability are explored. Step into the microcosm of another person's experience, understand their dilemma, ask: how would you cope?

When artist, Eve, leaves London to live alone where no one knows her in small-town Shipden on the north Norfolk coast, little does she suspect that the next eighteen months will change everything. As she writes to and receives emails from her travelling daughter, Jez, Eve's story unfolds, filtered through her particular perspective, while around her, in the old house converted to flats, strange characters inhabit her new life. People like Hester, the eccentric widow of a once well-known journalist and Amos, a troubled man searching for a wife. But the quiet life is not what it seems. Eve's relationship with a local poet, Choker is disturbed when Leo, an actor from her past, finds her. When ex-military-man, Knox, moves in to the house as others leave, her new sense of home is under question. And even in this secluded place, there are those who know more about Eve than she knows herself, like the two old Russian sculptors who can tell her about her unknown father. Inhabiting this fragile borderline, will Eve be able to make a new life fostering unwanted and troubled children? Will hope win the day in this story of secrets, death, grief, and the bonds that tie mother and daughter? A compelling debut novel from poet and artist, Jenny Morris.

After a decade trying to accept that London is home, a devastating bereavement pushes 29 year old May to return to the rural Vermont town she fled so long ago. Ignoring her sister's strong misgivings, she immerses herself in creating a healing garden, bringing people together with the food she loves to cook, and renovating a dilapidated farmhouse until she starts to find a sense of peace and purpose. But as spring turns to sultry summer and she is thrown increasingly together with Harley, the man she loved and left ten years before, May is torn. Will she take a risk and follow her heart, or go back to London where her ever loyal sister is longing for her return? Mish Cromer's latest novel of love and friendship and the healing power of the natural environment explores the impact of family, trauma and loss, and the powerful need we all have to find the place where we belong. Praise for Mish Cromer's debut novel: Alabama Chrome You'll come for the wonderful characters - gruff Cassidy with a dark past, wise Lark, Belle and her beauty parlour, Evangeline the mechanic, Brooke Adler the hard-nosed reality TV presenter... then you'll be swept away by the fantastic sense of place. Set in small-town Kentucky and focusing on the bar which acts as the town's front porch where stories are told and secrets are ultimately revealed, Alabama Chrome is a beautifully written page-turner, told in a voice that will stay with you - along with the book's big heart. - Alison Chandler You begin to understand, reading this story, how important it is to allow yourself to be understood, - Joanne Merrison A compassionate and skilful tale of a soulful young man's struggle, vividly intertwined with the characters of a remote US town who welcomed him, and their reaction to the arrival of a controversial reality TV presenter. A gripping read. - Isabella

THE PUB IS THE HUB - And the hub of this pub is Pilot Ken, the affable crossword solver of the Bat and Ball, first to arrive and last to leave every drinking day. So the stories of Ken and his companions unwind with pub-talk and laughter, some genuine, some hollow; peppered with Ken's eccentric theories: Does space actually curve towards pubs? Abounding in arguments over politics and trivia, rich in personal tales and tragedies, large and small.As the town slips further into terminal decline, Ken's story weaves with the characters he drinks with. Meet Jim, the fully-qualified giant; landlady Evil Mand and her running battle with the pubco; Frank Speke, who crusades for his right to say whatever he pleases, no matter how offensive; Emily, the theatre director and Pomo, the Clown, both, trying to fend off the burgeoning cultural desert; Wayne, freed from the ties of convention by his decision to drink himself to death; FMC, the lonely class warrior; and Nev, who wants white people to stop behaving like idiots around him.When Ken's posse is exiled from the Bat and Ball by a hostile temporary landlord who ousts the regulars in an attempt to 'revive' the pub; we travel with them on their fruitless tour in search of a new home and triumphant return, mapping the troubled, dying town where the pub is the last redoubt of decency, friendship and bar-room philosophy. Yet always there hovers the shadow of death-in-a-glass, from which nobody is exempt.Crosswords, love, life, death.Love, life, death, crosswords.Praise for Andrew Dutton's debut novel: Nocturne: Wayman's SkyIntriguing, very original.- The Stoke Sentinel

Alfred Wayman is an enigma: solitary, strange and with no past. All that is known of him is his hatred of falsehood and obsession with the night sky. Friends and enemies speculate on his character and history; some aiming to understand him, others to destroy him. In doing so they reveal their stories and the loves, hates, jealousies and rivalries that make them who they are. Wayman thrives in darkness, but every night must come to an end and the night-creature must face the triumph of the light.

With nothing but a collection of vinyl records without a player, a shoebox of memories, and a lot of secrets, Cassidy is used to being alone. But when his camper-van breaks down in a snowstorm and he is rescued by a kind young woman, Lark, he finds himself working in a small-town bar and becoming part of the community. But with the arrival of an inscrutable new waitress, Reba, Cassidy finds himself unsettled by a sense of recognition. And there are further complications as Brooke Adler, reality TV host and hero of the town's inhabitants, arrives unexpectedly to shoot a new show. Cassidy is drawn into protecting Reba from the ghosts of her past only to discover that his own ghosts are chasing him and that he must find the courage to speak the truth, or risk losing everything, again.A story of family, both given and found, and the long shadow of domestic violence, Alabama Chrome interrogates the masks of the modern world, and what true kindness means.

2121: Wading through a drowned fenland, Jean is searching for a lost village and a hillside church that appears only in dim memories of the world before it was engulfed by rising sea levels, deserts and floods. She is looking for a time capsule buried over 160 years ago, a symbol of hope for a different future.1958: Coming of age in a drab and exhausted post-War London, Ida finds herself questioning the assumptions of her mother and her Uncle Roy. Wanting more from life, she is drawn into circles of political activism, jazz clubs, and life lived on the margins of conformist society - places where there are as many questions as there are possible answers. Separated by decades and a planet turned upside down by climate shifts, the lives of these two women begin to draw together. As Jean closes in on the location of the time capsule and Ida prepares to take part in the first Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear weapons research centre at Aldermaston, their fates dramatically collide.

Paul's mother abandoned him when he was a baby.Evie's mother died in a car accident.All Paul knows is what the private investigator told his father twenty-one years ago. Now Evie is a private investigator. And Paul wants to find out what really happened to his mother. There are secrets never to be told. But secrets rarely stay buried and, when the truth begins to surface, who will want to face it? As the disturbing secrets mount, both families will be changed forever.

From its tentative first word ('perhaps') to the final phrase, realising 'here is no journey / only attending to stones- / like a story told yet again / by an old friend', the reader is immersed in a woodland that is alive with quiet yet profound epiphanies-the way we live and die; the way we might weave narratives that change our stories. In this liminal place, which is both a real woodland and an internal space, we learn that 'What matters is the silence that encircles you...' And we find in that silence a liturgy of the natural world we too often forget we are part of.