With this assured & powerful first collection, Henry Shukman springs fully-formed into the poetry world, having already won a raft of prizes for individual poems. His sensibility is unique, engaging & immediate; we are drawn into the worlds of these poems by his accurate eye, his sensual line & the warmth of his communion with the scene he describes.

Ranging across the globe, from Mexico to Japan, from the States to Southern Engl&, these poems can be lyrical & deeply affecting, wryly funny or wildly imaginative. From a lonely mother attempting to learn the piano to a ski-jump that never ends, from a redemptive encounter with horses on a cold day to a miraculous bowl of chicken soup, these poems display a vibrancy & variety rarely seen in contemporary poetry. But Shukman's great strength is in the domestic: the complexities of love, & the rites of passage of childhood & parenthood, are re-entered with candour, grace & originality.

In Doctor No's Garden is an affectionate, refreshing debut, striking in its imagery & insight, remarkable for its lightness of touch & emotional weight.



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Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence & witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium.

The result is mesmerising: Mak

...

Vinci's second book is a set of prize winning short stories which show her growing maturity as a writer. Moving away from disturbing explorations of child sexuality but still preoccupied by physical extremism, she takes as her theme the definition of love in the twenty-first century. In an age when the individual is becoming increasingly absorbed by the corporate, are our own bodies the only things over which we have power? & are our physical urges the only way that we can begin to define what love is? In the artfully detached, enigmatic voice that Vinci is becoming known for, she tells us thirteen dark, strange tales of obsession. A brother & sister invite a stranger to join their incestuous relationship: a woman sews up her vagina to purify herself of men. Vinci never judges
- she lets us watch & underst&. As in A Game We Play, her sensitive portrayal of behaviour often dismissed as deviant makes her a constantly interesting, challenging & original writer.
...

Penny Birch is back, as naughty as ever. In for a Penny continues the story of her outrageous sex life & also the equally ...

The tenth Richard Bolitho novel in Alexander Kent's spectacularly successful series deals with Bolitho's life as a young lieutenant aboard the Trojan, an eighty-gun ship of the line.
The year is 1777 when the revolution in America has erupted into a full-scale war. The navy's main task is to prevent military supplies from reaching Washington's armies & to destroy the fast-growing fleet of French & American privateers. As a junior officer Bolitho is often bewildered by swiftly changing events, but in a ship of the line, under a hard & determined captain, he has little opportunity for uncertainty. At a time of shortages & sudden death even a lieutenant can find himself faced with tasks & decisions more suitably given to officers of greater experience
- & as the Trojan goes about her affairs the threat to Bolitho & his companions makes itself felt from New York to the Caribbean.



...

The tenth Richard Bolitho novel in Alexander Kent's spectacularly successful series deals with Bolitho's life as a young lieutenant aboard the Trojan, an eighty-gun ship of the line.
The year is 1777 when the revolution in America has erupted into a full-scale war. The navy's main task is to prevent military supplies from reaching Washington's armies & to destroy the fast-growing fleet of French & American privateers. As a junior officer Bolitho is often bewildered by swiftly changing events, but in a ship of the line, under a hard & determined captain, he has little opportunity for uncertainty. At a time of shortages & sudden death even a lieutenant can find himself faced with tasks & decisions more suitably given to officers of greater experience
- & as the Trojan goes about her affairs the threat to Bolitho & his companions makes itself felt from New York to the Caribbean.



...

In a tense, divided court, a young princess watches her mother struggle to hold the throne. On a remote coastal estate, a scholar finds a child washed up on the shore.

Anne. Henry. A Christian princess of the royal blood. A pagan bastard, groomed all his hidden, lonely life to make a grab for the crown.

In this work of stunning imagination, Kit Whitfield has written a fictional history at once familiar & alien. Since the ninth century, when the deepsmen invaded Venice, an uneasy alliance has held between the people of the land & the sea. That alliance was brokered by the warrior queen, Angelica, half landsman, half deepsman, the mother of the royal houses of Europe. Now, centuries later, no navy can cross the seas without allies in the ocean
- & without deepsmen guarding its shores, no nation can withstand invasion. The hybrid kings keep the treaty between both sides, protecting their people from the threat of war.

The royal blood is the key to peace, & ferociously protected. The penalties for any landsman who tries to breed with a deepsman are severe; the fate of any 'bastard' child, born of such an illegitimate union, is terrible. But the royal house of England is staggering, collapsing under the weight of centuries of inbreeding.

Anne prays for guidance, a way into the future without hatred or bloodshed. Henry holds with fierce certainty that only the strong survive. But if either of them is to outlive the coming conflict, they may need more than faith alone








...

In a tense, divided court, a young princess watches her mother struggle to hold the throne. On a remote coastal estate, a scholar finds a child washed up on the shore.

Anne. Henry. A Christian princess of the royal blood. A pagan bastard, groomed all his hidden, lonely life to make a grab for the crown.

In this work of stunning imagination, Kit Whitfield has written a fictional history at once familiar & alien. Since the ninth century, when the deepsmen invaded Venice, an uneasy alliance has held between the people of the land & the sea. That alliance was brokered by the warrior queen, Angelica, half landsman, half deepsman, the mother of the royal houses of Europe. Now, centuries later, no navy can cross the seas without allies in the ocean
- & without deepsmen guarding its shores, no nation can withstand invasion. The hybrid kings keep the treaty between both sides, protecting their people from the threat of war.

The royal blood is the key to peace, & ferociously protected. The penalties for any landsman who tries to breed with a deepsman are severe; the fate of any 'bastard' child, born of such an illegitimate union, is terrible. But the royal house of England is staggering, collapsing under the weight of centuries of inbreeding.

Anne prays for guidance, a way into the future without hatred or bloodshed. Henry holds with fierce certainty that only the strong survive. But if either of them is to outlive the coming conflict, they may need more than faith alone








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