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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A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey & Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls & voracious librarians, John Coltrane & Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story & post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland & the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East & West, tragedy & farce, compassion & detachment, slang & philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy & a meditation on the many uses of the mind. ...

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. ...

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police & her family & neighbours had already begun to search for her body. She had been missing for three days. A short while later, another young woman disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. The residents of the Muriel Campden Estate are up in arms, & even prepared to take the law into their own hands.... . ...

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police & her family & neighbours had already begun to search for her body. She had been missing for three days. A short while later, another young woman disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. The residents of the Muriel Campden Estate are up in arms, & even prepared to take the law into their own hands... ...

Hebe listens in the darkness of the hall to a family conference. The stern hypocrisy of her grandfather is winning the day. He has summoned her three horsey sisters' successful husbands & they are discussing Hebe's unexpected pregnancy. The decision, unanimous, is that it be terminated. Hebe, dissenting, flees into the night.

Twelve summers later she is living happily alone with her son in a seaside town in Cornwall. He is receiving an expensive education. Hebe has organised her life oddly but well. She has two chief talents in life
- cooking & making love
- & these she has exercised with dignity, in privacy & for profit.

It is when separate strands of the web of Hebe's life become entangled that the even tenor of her days is threatened, & her life is changed.





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Harold Nicolson, born in the late Victorian age, scion of a privileged family, was a man of extraordinary talents. As a diplomat a glittering career beckoned
- an Embassy certainly, perhaps even head of the Foreign Office. But his talents extended well beyond the conference chamber, for he was also a renowned politician, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist, journalist, broadcaster, & gardener. His position in society & politics, his flair for recording the events that he witnessed, gave him insight into the most dramatic events of British, indeed world, history, from the peace settlements of 1919 to the Abdication Crisis; to the events leading to the Second World War to Suez. Nicolson's personal life was no less dramatic. Married to Vita Sackville-West, one of the most famous writers of her day, their marriage survived, even prospered, despite their sexual orientations, for both were practising homosexuals. Unashamedly elitist, bound together by their literary, social, & intellectual pursuits, moving in the refined circles of the Bloomsbury group & other literary & social coteries, they viewed life from the rarified peaks of aristocratic haughtiness. At Sissinghurst Castle, their home for more than thirty years, their shared passion for gardening led to the creation of one of the most magnificent gardens of Engl&. Few men could boast such gifts as Nicolson possessed. Yet he ended his life plagued by self-doubt, despondent at not having realized his full potential. 'I am attempting nothing; therefore I cannot fail, ' he once acknowledged. What went wrong? It was a question that haunted Nicolson throughout his adult life. Norman Rose sensitively unravels this intriguing history. Relying on a wealth of archival material, he brilliantly disentangles fact from fiction, setting Nicolson's story of perceived failure against the wider perspective of his times.
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