Candia Mc William had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed like an assault especially tailored for someone whose life consisted of reading & writing. The necessity to look inwards that followed took her on an even more painful personal journey through a waste of snows punctuated by shards of ice as she attempted to write her life back into human shape.

At first she could only dictate, & the unfamiliar process unblocked a flow of memory & association concerning her childhood in Edinburgh, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, finding & losing bearings in Cambridge & London, her marriages, her children &, stalking all these, her increasing alcoholism. In What To Look For In Winter, we see her rifling through her many selves for that elusive thing, a sense of self, as all the time she searches the wilder shores of medicine for a cure for her blindness.

This is a writer's book, fascinated by the process & wellsprings of writing. While love & loss are at its centre, it also celebrates friendship, reading, love of children & the consolations of landscape, particularly that of Colonsay, the Hebridean island where, after three years in the dark, & thanks to an unexpected message from a wise & sympathetic reader, she begins to face up to how, falteringly, she might come to see once



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I'm a lamb & I leap... Leaping lambs, wriggling worms, marching ants.... are just a few of the fabulous creatures eager to show off their skills! The joy of this first picture book is the artwork. Reg Cartwright's stunning, bold paintings introduce a host of wonderful creatures who tell us what they do
- very simply & in their own words.
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This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men & women who drink, fish & play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration & razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s. ...

Film musicals: you either love them or they make you want to kill yourself slowly with plastic cutlery. Nothing has the power to lift your heart or turn your stomach like Howard Keel in fake sideburns singing Bless Your Beautiful Hide or Julie Andrews singing ...

Film musicals: you either love them or they make you want to kill yourself slowly with plastic cutlery. Nothing has the power to lift your heart or turn your stomach like Howard Keel in fake sideburns singing Bless Your Beautiful Hide or Julie Andrews singing ...

The waiting is over for Joey Pigza fans! In this brilliant third book Joey is attempting a breath-taking balancing act as he tries to keep a handle on his wild, wired behaviour without letting his hyperactively helpful ways spin him out of control
- again. Joey is being home-schooled alongside Olivia, a really sneaky, annoying girl, who is blind. He's still living with his mum & grandma, who is now dying, but his dad is also around
- roaring past on his motorbike from time to time-

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