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'Beautifully crafted, and so finely balanced that she holds the reader right up against the tender humanity of her characters.' Eimear McBride'A writer of rare elegance and beauty, Caldwell doesn't just get inside her characters' minds. She perches in the precarious chambers of their hearts, telling their stories truthfully and tenderly.' IndependentMultitudes is the beautiful debut story collection from the acclaimed, prize-winning novelist and playwright Lucy CaldwellFrom Belfast to London and back again the ten stories that comprise Caldwell's first collection explore the many facets of growing up - the pain and the heartache, the tenderness and the joy, the fleeting and the formative - or 'the drunkenness of things being various'. Stories of longing and belonging, they culminate with the heart-wrenching and unforgettable title story.
Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, and all Greg Marnier has to show for it is a rambling academic career that has landed him in Aberystwyth. At his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, he runs into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a political player. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can transform himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. The realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent. For every hopeful misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white - until a terrible accident forces him to take sides.
England, 1255: Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a small cell, measuring seven paces by nine, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires and temptations, and to commit herself to a life of prayer and service to God. But as she slowly begins to understand, even the thick, unforgiving walls of her cell cannot keep the outside world away, and it is soon clear that Sarah's body and soul are still in great danger...Robyn Cadwallader's powerful debut novel tells an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch. With a poetic intelligence, Cadwallader explores the relationship between the mind, body and spirit in Medieval England in a story that will hold the reader in a spell until the very last page.
A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams.Ill and bored with having to stay in bed, Marianne picks up a pencil and starts doodling - a house, a garden, a boy at the window. That night she has an extraordinary dream. She is transported into her own picture, and as she explores further she soon realises she is not alone. The boy at the window is called Mark, and his every movement is guarded by the menacing stone watchers that surround the solitary house. Together, in their dreams, Marianne and Mark must save themselves...The perfect gift for girls aged 8+, this well-loved classic will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.
She is the missing girl. But she doesn't know she's lost.Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. As days become weeks with her new family, 8-year-old Carmel realises that this man believes she has a special gift...While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.
John McGahern did not spread himself thinly as a writer. Nearly all of his creative energy went into what was central for him: the great novels and stories that are now part of the canon of Irish and world literature. Yet he spoke out when he felt he had something worth saying and his non-fiction writings are of great interest to anyone who loves his work, and to all those interested in the recent history of Ireland. This book brings together all of McGahern's surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation. His discussions of Irish writers who influenced him are generous and brilliant - among them Michael McLaverty, Ernie O'Malley and Forrest Reid. His interventions on issues he felt strongly about - sectarianism, women's rights, the power of the church in Ireland - are lucid and far-sighted.
The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.
This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text. McGahern has long been recognized as a contemporary master of the short story; The Collected Stories confirms his reputation as Ireland's leading prose writer.
This third edition of Alan Brownjohn's Collected Poems was first published by the Enitharmon Press in 2006. It adds over 140 poems to the second, which appeared in 1988. This volume comprises all of the work that Brownjohn wishes to retain from his twelve individual collections published between 1954 and 2004; it also incorporates a number of newer uncollected poems.Wide-ranging in theme and displaying an impressive mastery of form, this body of writing firmly establishes Alan Brownjohn's achievement as central to the English poetry of the last half-century.'Wonderfully rich and well-produced... Brownjohn is a marvellously skilful comedian... he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny.' Anthony Thwaite, Guardian
Young Chekhov contains a trilogy of plays by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, written as he emerged as the greatest playwright of the late nineteenth century. The three works, Platanov, Ivanov and The Seagull, in contemporary adaptations by David Hare, will be staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2015.
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorWith No Crying (1980), Celia Fremlin's eleventh novel, tells of Miranda, a daydreaming fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who has encouraged a boy to seduce her and is glad to find herself pregnant, but then bitterly resentful when her parents talk her into an abortion. She pads up her stomach, runs away from home, and finds refuge in a squat where her new housemates await the newborn keenly. How, though, can Miranda save face? 'An acute piece of social observation, psychological insight, and intuitive sympathy that makes for a very satisfying read... Quite brilliant, nicely understated, and tantalisingly real.' Hampstead & Highgate Express
The Trouble-Makers (1963) was Celia Fremlin's fourth novel and - as Chris Simmons contends in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition - has a case to be considered among her very best.Katharine is a suburban housewife, desultorily unemployed, unhappily married, struggling to keep up appearances but consoled to some degree by the even more aggravated woes of her next-door neighbour Mary - until, that is, Katharine is brought to the disturbing realisation that Mary's predicament is in fact substantially worse. 'A cleverly devised story. A chorus of nicely-characterised suburban wives speculate on Mary's troubles. Fremlin builds up the whole thing into a crescendo of horror.' Sunday Times'One again Fremlin shows how incomparably more chilling is her quiet, semifactual style than some of the hysterical sentimentalities from Over the Water.' Guardian
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorThe Spider-Orchid (1977), Celia Fremlin's tenth novel, is among her most unnerving. Peggy has divorced Adrian but she accepts his deep attachment to their fourteen-year-old daughter, Amelia, and hers to him. Rita is Adrian's mistress, and he believes he is in love with her - until her husband Derek agrees to a divorce. Then Adrian is appalled when Rita moves in, destroying his privacy and endangering his relationship with Amelia.'Vintage Fremlin, this is one of the best crime novels of the year... With consummate, subtle skill, the author builds up suspense.' Financial Times'To the very last paragraph we are kept tenterhooked.' Times
Seven Lean Years (1961) was Celia Fremlin's third novel of suspense. Its protagonist is Ellen Fortescue, engaged to be married, but oddly uneasy about her approaching wedding. Her fiance Leonard is a man of varying moods, most combustibly where the subject of his stepmother Laura is concerned. Ellen is inclined to a kinder view; but then the woman Ellen calls 'Cousin Laura' does have a complicated history with the Fortescue family...'Fremlin wraps up her little mystery cunningly in this accomplished thriller-chiller of a book.' Sunday Times'Fremlin has a quite extraordinary ability for imbuing the normal with intimations of doom-to-come. And when she begins to develop her elegantly horrible climax, the shivers chase each other down one's spine.'Birmingham Post'Celia Fremlin is about our best hope to compete with the American intelligent superior suspense school.'Observer
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorPossession was Celia Fremlin's seventh novel, first published in 1969. Middle-class mother Clare Erskine initially thinks it a great stroke of luck when her 19 year-old daughter Sarah becomes engaged to a young man with a steady job. However Clare's betrothed, Mervyn Redmayne, has a notable black mark against him: a widowed mother with a petulant, inescapable grip on her son.Brilliant... yet another of Miss Fremlin's triumphs.' Times'Fremlin, masterly delineator of suburban sin and distiller of eerie tensions from commonplace events, achieves a formidable triumph in this new thriller... a must for addicts of the genre.' Scotsman
Celia Fremlin's sixth novel Prisoner's Base (1967) served further proof of her mastery at uncovering anxieties and even terrors in the domestic sphere. It tells of grandmother Margaret, her daughter Claudia, and Claudia's daughter Helen, who share a home from which Claudia's husband is frequently absent. Claudia has a penchant for taking strangers under her wing and into the house, the danger being that they never leave. But a different danger is proposed by Maurice, a self-styled poet who boasts that he has served seven years in prison for manslaughter.'Haunting...Fremlin continues to prove that the modern horror story makes the traditional Gothic one no more than a child's make-believe.' Los Angeles Times'Gripping... a tense thriller that keeps one in suspense until the very last line.' Manchester Evening News
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorCelia Fremlin's third collection of stories, first published in 1984, is a baker's dozen of gripping tales by the mistress of suspense. Within these covers are stories of family frustrations and fury - a young wife who wants rid of her husband, an elderly daughter who cannot endure her mother. Fremlin deals in the uncanny, too, constantly confounding our expectations, and those of her characters.'Wonderfully written, subtle and disturbing.' Times'Written with such perception and elegance that they repay many readings.' Glasgow Herald'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
'A truly funny, sharp comedy that is packaged inside a psychological thriller.' Spectator'A delightful and masterly achievement.' Financial TimesCelia Fremlin's twelfth novel, originally published in 1982, tells the tale of Martin Lockwood, a man stuck between a wife and a mistress and frustrated by his faltering doctoral thesis on depression. Then he encounters Ruth Ledbetter, a smart, unbalanced, potentially dangerous young woman who soon insinuates herself into Martin's life, his home - and his PhD.'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew Taylor'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorThe Long Shadow (1975), Celia Fremlin's ninth novel, tells a Christmas story with a difference. Imogen Barnicott's husband - a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor of Classics - has recently died in a car accident. Now, to the pain of widowhood is added the attentions of an anonymous phone-caller who accuses Imogen of murder and alleges that he can prove it. But can Imogen be certain her husband is truly dead and gone?'Genuine chiller... Splendid suspense in a brilliantly captured domestic setting.' Sunday Telegraph'The story unfolds with brilliant ingenuity, always on the verge of explanation, ever plausibly plunging deeper.' Times
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorListening in the Dusk (1990), Celia Fremlin's thirteenth novel, concerns Alice Saunders, a woman striking out on her own following a traumatic marital breakup. But when she rents a drafty attic room in a ramshackle London boarding house she meets the mysterious Mary - a young woman clearly terrified of something, or someone.'Tart and chilling piece of superior Fremlin Gothic, with some wonderful characterization and great comic passages.' Sunday Times'Suspense and mystery at its elegant best.' Birmingham Post'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorKing of the World (1994), Celia Fremlin's sixteenth and final novel, is the story of flat-mates Bridget and Diane. Despite ten years in age between them they get on well - aside from the constant presence of Alistair, Diane's self-impressed boyfriend, in the flat. The women decide to look for a third tenant, and find Norah, who claims to be a battered wife seeking refuge. But Norah is telling lies that will put all of them in mortal danger.'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorThe Echoing Stones (1993) was Celia Fremlin's fifteenth novel. Arnold Walker's decision to take early retirement and become caretaker and tourist guide at a Tudor mansion changes his life dramatically. His wife Mildred leaves him, and his wayward daughter Flora arrives unexpectedly and agrees to help out. Together, they must reckon with Emmerton Hall's former curator, Sir Humphrey Penrose, a sufferer from senile dementia given to spontaneous acting out of bizarre historical events, whose antics will lead to sheer bloody murder. 'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
The Hours Before Dawn (1958) was Celia Fremlin's debut fiction, and won the Edgar Award for novel of the year from the Mystery Writers of America. Over time Fremlin would earn the soubriquet of 'the mistress of psychological suspense.'Louise Henderson is a young housewife and mother, trying her best to tend to a husband, two small daughters and a constantly crying baby. Her fatigue is such that she fears she is nearing psychosis; and she can't help but feel that a new lodger in the house, a seemingly respectable schoolmistress, poses a threat to her and her family.'Tightly plotted and admirably concise... Fremlin expertly ratchets up the tension, notch by notch.' Laura Wilson'Highly intelligent entertainment, beautifully written with wit and humour.' Frances Fyfield'It grips like grim death.' Spectator
Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark (1972) was the first gathering of Celia Fremlin's short fiction, a form in which she had published prolifically - for the likes of She, Playmen, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine - while building her reputation as a novelist of psychological suspense.Female characters predominate in these tales, as does the doom-filled atmosphere that was Fremlin's metier. She explores her familiar theme of strained mother-child relations, but she also delves into the supernatural realm as well as the psychological. As ever, her capacities for making the everyday unnerving and keeping the reader guessing are richly in evidence.'Here are thirteen harrowing tales by the indisputable mistress of horror.' Chattanooga Times'An outstanding collection...all are well-written and all are possible and none should be read when alone in a dark house.' Savannah Morning News
'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorClare Wakefield - protagonist of Celia Fremlin's 1991 novel, her fourteenth - is more dismayed than elated when she learns of her journalist husband's escape from Middle Eastern kidnappers. Edwin is a difficult man, and home life had been so much more relaxed without him. But dismay turns to fear once Clare begins to suspect that Edwin has practiced an extraordinary deception - and for the purpose of murder. 'A thoughtful, entertaining thriller.' Booklist'I cannot recommend [it] too highly.' Time Out'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper
We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic wars - but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank or a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers - how did the war touch their lives? Every part of Britain felt the long twenty years of war against the French: one in five families had people in the services and over 300,000 men died. As the years passed, so the bullish, flamboyant figure of Napoleon - Boney, the bogeyman - came to dominate so much that the whole long conflict was given his name. Jenny Uglow, the prize-winning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver, follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war, but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray, Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Scott and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century ahead.
Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year'Magisterial, warm, and engaging . . . A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity . . . Jan Swafford is to be saluted.' IndependentJan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.
Popular uprisings in Poland and Hungary shake Moscow's hold on its eastern European empire. Across the American South, and in the Union of South Africa, black people risk their livelihoods, and their lives, in the struggle to dismantle institutionalised white supremacy and secure first-class citizenship. France and Britain, already battling anti-colonial insurgencies in Algeria and Cyprus, now face the humiliation of Suez. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro and his band of rebels take to the Sierra Maestra to plot the overthrow of a dictator... 1956 was one of the most remarkable years of the twentieth century. All across the globe, ordinary people spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, and took up arms in an attempt to win their freedom. In response to these unprecedented challenges to their authority, those in power fought back, in a desperate bid to shore up their position. It was an epic contest, and one which made 1956 - like 1789 and 1848 - a year that changed our world.
In the midst of the fighting, two Russian soldiers seek refuge in the crypt of a German church. There, clutched in the hands of a skeleton priest, they find The Shepherd; a priceless icon thought to have been destroyed long ago. When news of its discovery reaches Moscow, Stalin calls upon his most trusted investigator, Inspector Pekkala, once a favorite of Tsar and known to all of Russia as The Emerald Eye. To unravel the secret of the icon's past, Pekkala traces its last known whereabouts to a band of self-mutilating radicals known as The Skoptsy, who were hunted to extinction years by the Bolshevik Secret Police. Or so it was believed. As Pekkala soon learns, the last survivors of this brutal sect have clung to life in the shadowy forests of Siberia. With the reappearance of the icon, they have returned to claim the treasure they say belongs to them alone, bringing with them a new and terrible weapon to unleash upon the Russian people. Unless the Emerald Eye can stop them.
,amon de Valera is the most remarkable man in the history of modern Ireland. Much as Churchill personified British resistance to Hitler and de Gaulle personified the freedom of France, de Valera personified Irish independence. From his emergence in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion as the republican leader, he bestrode Irish politics like a colossus for over fifty years. On the eve of the centenary of the Irish revolution, one of Ireland's most eminent historians explains why Eamon de Valera was such a divisive figure that he has never until now received the recognition he deserves. This biography reconciles an acknowledgement of de Valera's catastrophic failure in 1921-22, when his petulant rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty shaped the dimensions of a bloody civil war, with an appreciation of his subsequent greatness as the statesman who single-handedly severed the ties with Britain and defined nationalist Ireland's sense of itself.
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