This student cookbook stands out from all the others on the market. It doesn't feature baked beans, & it's packed with truly mouthwatering, easy, nutritious recipes. Betsy Bell wrote this book for her children & their friends when they were heading to university. She realised that they all knew little (or nothing) about culinary survival, but that their sophisticated tastes went beyond the standard macaroni cheese & beans on toast recipes that feature in other student cookbooks. So Hard Up & Hungry

Includes:: recipes that students will want to make; that are tempting enough to keep them away from the nearest pizza outlet or chip shop. It

Includes:: Spaghetti with Fennel & Smoked Bacon, Spinach Frittata, Cod with Olives & Sweet Peppers, Southwestern Burgers, Italian Rice & Beans & sweet treats (including American pancakes & Vodka Jelly). Betsy doesn't forget the basics either: the ultimate Bacon Butty, Boiled Eggs & Baked Potatoes all feature too. The book is also packed with advice on how to store & shop for food inexpensively (including alternatives to supermarkets, & the pros & cons of online shopping). Illustrated throughout with hip black & white photographs & wiro bound, this is the ultimate cookbook for students & anyone who wants to cook fantastic food on a budget.



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Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo & vulnerability of human experience with great clarity & precision, tenderness & care.

These are vivid poems full of light & weather & water
- awash with water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that 'lay like saints/ unharvested, luminous'. There is an arresting imagination at work here, one as relaxed & at home in an alternative world of babies in filing cabinets, light collectors or the visiting dead, as it is in the world we think we know: supermarkets, empty flats, the A580 from Liverpool to Manchester. In the title poem, Sprackland sets out her store: 'I tried the soft stuff on holiday in Wales, a mania of teadrinking & hairwashing, excitable soap which never rinsed away, but I loved coming home to this. Flat. Straight. Like the vowels, Like the straight talk: hey up me duck
- the blunt taste of don't get mardy, of too bloody deep for me, fierce lovely water that marked me for life as belonging, regardless.'

Lucid, sensuous & informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.





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Distringuished as both a great novelist & a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose & then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric & the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance & tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty. ...

Born on a poor dairy farm in Queensl&, Frank Harland's life is centred on his great artistic gift, his passionate love for his father & four brothers & his need to repossess, through a patch of l&, his family's past. The story spans Frank's life; from before the First World War, through years as a swaggie in the Great Depression & Brisbane in the forties, to his retirement to a patch of Australian scrub where he at last takes possession of his dream. Solitude & society, possession & dispossession, the obsessive & often violent claims of family life & love, illuminate the imagination of the artist & the larger world of events. This is an ambitious novel, presented simply & poetically; the narrative is absorbing, full of incident, & peopled with characters of formidable humour & power. ...

The poems in this, Alan Jenkin's third collection, speak of the harm done & suffered
- most frequently in the name of love
-

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Two young girls disappear, but return home unharmed some days later. Around the same time, a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. The residents of an estate in Kingsmarkham are up in arms, & even prepared to take the law into their own hands... Chief Inspector Wexford is not only concerned very personally with the effects of violence & prejudice, but is also involved with a new programme called Hurt-Watch, to help the victims of domestic violence. His daughter, Sylvia, the social worker & never his favourite, has come to work nearby in a refuge for battered women, called The Hide. Her marriage is in difficulties, although her husband has never raised a hand to her. They are merely incompatible. Other women in Kingsmarkham are not so lucky, &, after those early disappearances, two far more serious crimes are committed which will affect the lives & attitudes of police & public alike. ...

Two young girls disappear, but return home unharmed some days later. Around the same time, a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. The residents of an estate in Kingsmarkham are up in arms, & even prepared to take the law into their own hands... Chief Inspector Wexford is not only concerned very personally with the effects of violence & prejudice, but is also involved with a new programme called Hurt-Watch, to help the victims of domestic violence. His daughter, Sylvia, the social worker & never his favourite, has come to work nearby in a refuge for battered women, called The Hide. Her marriage is in difficulties, although her husband has never raised a hand to her. They are merely incompatible. Other women in Kingsmarkham are not so lucky, &, after those early disappearances, two far more serious crimes are committed which will affect the lives & attitudes of police & public alike. ...