REVISED & UPDATED WITH NEW MATERIAL ON AFTER DARK AND MURAKAMI'S FORTHCOMING WORKS

As a young man, Haruki Murakami

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Between 1929 & 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR: dekulakisation, the dispossession & deportation of millions of peasant families; & collectivisation, the effective abolition of private property in land & the concentration of the remaining peasantry in 'collective' farms under Party control. There followed a 'terror-famine', inflicted on the collectivised peasants of the Ukraine & certain other regions by the state, which set impossibly high"as, removed every other source of food, & prevented outside help
- even from other areas of the USSR
- from reaching the starving millions. Epic in scope & rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow tells the moving story of a disaster that was, in human terms, one of the worst in living memory.

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When Harvey Angell zaps into Ballantyre Road he brightens up Henry's life like a super-charged thunderbolt. With Harvey around, the atmosphere's electric! But despite the Connecting Kit & ' Energy Field' jargon, Henry is sure Harvey's no ordinary sparky. Musician, magician or electrician? Henry's determined to find out exactly who Harvey Angell really is & watt he actually does... ...

Orphan Henry's dream to see the ocean finally comes true when his Aunt Agatha plans a seaside vacation. But Henry's got more important things to do than sit on the beach & eat ice cream. He has a mystery to solve!

Henry can't sleep a wink his first night at Sibbald House because he hears moaning & groaning coming from somewhere inside the house. & when Henry discovers a hidden bedroom that makes the skin on the back of his neck prickle, he knows just who to call for help: Harvey Angell, the man with a five-hundred-kilowatt smile & Connecting Kit bulging full of curious gadgets.

The townspeople refuse to shed light on the mystery, but none of the lodgers are going to get any sleep until Henry & Harvey uncover the shocking secrets of Sibbald House.



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When Henry comes home from school & finds a strange baby hidden among Aunt Agatha`s hollyhocks, it looks as if another adventure is in store. But to find out where she comes from & who the dark women are who start to haunt 131 Ballantyre Road, Henry has to summon Harvey Angell. Harvey Angell proves that he can journey into the future as well as he has journeyed into the past, although his mission is breathtakingly hazardous- ...

Only a month after his arrest for planting bombs which killed three & mutilated scores in London in 1999, Nazi nailbomber David Copeland began a passionate correspondence with a delightful young English rose called Patsy. As he awaited trial, Copeland bombarded Patsy with letters detailing his disturbed background, crackpot beliefs & most intimate feelings. Through letters alone, he fell madly in love with his tender-hearted penfriend. But Copeland wasn't writing to the petite 20-year-old blonde of his imagination. His 'sweetheart' was in fact a burly 40-year-old nightclub bouncer called Bernard O' Mahoney, who in the past had used the same means to coax confessions from two child-killers. O' Mahoney's earlier hoaxes helped secure life sentences for these murderers & so too did his correspondence with Copeland when the letters surfaced at the nailbomber's Old Bailey trial. But the extraordinary tale of how O' Mahoney snared Copeland is only a small part of Hateland's larger, more remarkable story. For the book is primarily the narrative of O' Mahoney's own gradual transition from Nazi thug to Nazi opponent. It marks his public renunciation of the hate-filled world he left behind & of the racist misfit he once was. In Hatel&, O' Mahoney writes with unblinking honesty about the violence he inflicted upon others, & that which he was subjected to, during his time as a foot soldier of fascism. His frank analysis of his background, motivation & actions produces a disturbing self-portrait that offers a chilling but often darkly comic insight into many of the strange individuals who constitute Britain's fascist movement. Gradually disillusioned & ashamed
- partly as a result of his unexpected friendships with blacks & Asians
- O' Mahoney's decisive break with his Nazi past comes when he infiltrates.........

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In these stories whose lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as her characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind & boxed away, it's as if they have never been
- until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were na-ve & trusting, at husbands & their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second changes
- her are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on & can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

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