Tender, precise, comic & chilling by turn, the stories in A L Kennedy's new collection confirm her reputation as one of the most exciting new writers to have appeared in the past decade. Exposing & exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish & love, she examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation & society, as characters define & deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy & the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family & the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed. ...

Tender, precise, comic & chilling by turn, the stories in A L Kennedy's new collection confirm her reputation as one of the most exciting new writers to have appeared in the past decade. Exposing & exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish & love, she examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation & society, as characters define & deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy & the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family & the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed. ...

With his richly praised sequence of novels featuring Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, John Harvey created not only an unforgettable character of great depth & complexity, but a realistic & richly people inner-city world of struggling heroes & feckless villains.
A woman is beaten; a charred body is found in a warehouse: another 4 a.m. call for Charlie Resnick. Gathered together in Now's The Time are twelve short stories featuring Resnick, including a new story written especially for this edition. ' Billie's Blues' reunites Resnick with the troubled & beautiful Eileen, former stripper & mistress of a gangland boss, & now on the run & in fear for her life.
From old foes to upstart pretenders, the city & the jazz-soaked, night-time world of Charlie Resnick come vividly to life.

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Brought up in a mixed-race community
- part Scots, part Native American
- in the forests of North Carolina in the mid-nineteenth

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Asia expert Gordon Chang follows up his successful & controversial debut The Coming Collapse of China, with the first ...

Asia expert Gordon Chang follows up his successful & controversial debut The Coming Collapse of China, with the first ...

Fifty years after Jetty Paerl took to the Lugano stage & burst into ' The Birds of Holland', the Eurovision Song Contest is still luring 450 million of us to the sofa on that special Saturday night in May. But where once we settled down to admire the 'top-quality original songwriting' that the contest was inaugurated to showcase, throughout the long post-ABBA decades Eurovision has come to entertain us for all the wrong reasons: we chortle at its magnificent foolishness, its stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, at a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship & hatred.

And as post-modern connoisseurs of showbiz meltdown, our focus has shifted from the blandly competent winners to the spangled, hapless, table-propping losers, those left to wander the lonely, windswept summit of Mount Fiasco. The gold standard of farcical failure, the benchmark of badness, to score nul points is to suffer international ignominy & find sympathetic understanding replaced by brutal guffaws.

Remorseful of his own longstanding contributions to the latter chorus, yet darkly fascinated with those lives shadowed by the entertainment world's most grandiose humiliation, Tim Moore sets off to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who have come & gone without troubling the scorers since Norway's Jahn Teigen twanged his silver braces & leapt splay-legged off the Palais des Congres stage in 1978.

From Lisbon to Lithuania, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Moore travels the continent to hear their extraordinary stories
- 'poignant, ludicrous & heartwarming in almost equal measure'
- recounting as he does so the no less improbable history of Eurovision itself, a towering cathedral of cheese that can nonetheless claim responsibility for keeping Norway out of the EU & catalysing the overthrow of a Portuguese dictatorship.







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Fifty years after Jetty Paerl took to the Lugano stage & burst into ' The Birds of Holland', the Eurovision Song Contest is still luring 450 million of us to the sofa on that special Saturday night in May. But where once we settled down to admire the ...