Bøker utgitt av Leaf by Leaf

Ranging widely in substance and style Solstice moves from lyrical invocations of Nature to reactions to ¿lockdown¿; from a classical sonnet to the free-wheeling title poem. Across this short collection, the musicality of Arthur¿s register is enlivened with wit, including a couple of outrageous puns. Often culminating in wonderful surprises, the poems include a deeply felt meditation on Edward Hopper¿s art, and a powerful prophecy of ecological disaster. This is a collection to savour and revisit.Arthur¿s work is moving and expertly written. His is a distinctive voice.¿ Claire Crowther

Whatever the indifference or brutality of the world, love still thrives. September 1942: Following the collapse of the Allied resistance in Burma, the full might of the Imperial Japanese Airforce has been unleashed on the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, in an attempt to force the Chinese government to sue for peace. The brave actions of a squadron of Chinese pilots in their battered planes offer a glimmer of hope in these darkest of hours. May 2019: 29 year-old Torin Cameron from London meets 26 year-old Lu Chen Xi (Sunny) at a business conference in Chengdu. Reluctant at first, she becomes his guide on a journey of discovery, that takes them deep into the Sichuan countryside and opens Torin¿s eyes to Chinäs heroic role in the second world war¿and a family secret that has remained concealed for seventy-five years. Unravelling the threads between wartime China and Europe and modern-day Chengdu and London, Degrees of Separation explores the yin and yang of tangled human experience, the twists of fate and tendrils of connection that wind through generations and across cultures. An uplifting and inspirational story of love and reconciliation.

Will the past never leave the present in peace? Did you learn family tales at your grandmother¿s knee? Just harmless old stories. But what of the reality behind them? The Beauty of Chell Street is the story of a family dominated by its own poisonous mythology; one which outlives them all. Nora Wilson endlessly recounts the story of her betrayal by her husband, Sam, during her heyday as the incomparable Beauty of Chell Street. Her demands to a lost God for Sam¿s damnation become her only life force. Long after their deaths, when their great-granddaughter, Francine, discovers old pictures of Nora and Sam, their story obsesses her. As she collects the past, Francine is as single-minded as Nora and as ruthless as Sam. Can she even cheat time and death to get to the people who knew Nora and Sam? As betrayal weaves its way through turnabout time periods and Francine assembles her evidence, the story is told again and again into Francine¿s old age while the image of Nora remains frozen, looking out from the photograph that started it all, forever the beauty of Chell Street.

What was it like to live through the Second World War beside the Thames in London? How can the writer celebrate her parents¿ lives and mourn their deaths through her own development as a poet? How can she express love for those she thinks of constantly?For Patricia Helen Wooldridge, inspired by Virginia Woolf¿s A Sketch of the Past, the answers are acts of imagination, merging memoir with poetry. Lyrical, seasonal, walking in landscape, soaring with birds and full of flowers, Daughter paints the world of parents and poet through a collage of memories. Tender, poignant, balancing the enormity of loss with the vastness of love and, crucially, demonstrating the grace of poetry to meld past and present, this is an exquisite and heart-felt collection.