The Lie

The Lie

Helen Dunmore

Literature & Fiction / Science Fiction & Fantasy / Poetry

Set during and just after the First World War, The Lie is an enthralling, heart-wrenching novel of love, memory and devastating loss by one of the UK’s most acclaimed storytellers. Cornwall, 1920, early spring. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about to step into the unknown. But will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?
Read online
  • 503
How It Went

How It Went

Wendell Berry

Poetry / Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature

Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present momentFor those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry's offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it's taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that's what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy’s life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.
Read online
  • 503
Travelling Light

Travelling Light

Vickie Johnstone

Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Children's Books

A collection of 44 poems - long and short, written in various styles. The majority are free verse. I have three other published poetry books: 'Kaleidoscope' - 119 poems, written from the age of 16 until 2010; 'Life's Rhythms' - 316 haiku, composed in the traditional pattern of three lines with 5-7-5 syllables, written from 2011-12; and'Mind-spinning Rainbows' - 150 poems written since 2013.A collection of 44 poems - long and short, written in various styles. The majority are free verse. I have three other published poetry books: 'Kaleidoscope' - 119 poems, written from the age of 16 until 2010; 'Life's Rhythms' - 316 haiku, composed in the traditional pattern of three lines with 5-7-5 syllables, written from 2011-12; and'Mind-spinning Rainbows' - 150 poems written since 2013.Sample poem... Dreamers She lives among the dragons, stars and unicorns The fairytale world born in her wildest dreams Of childhood wandering on the darkest nights Beneath the chill of the star-speckled moon In the dark the dragons shine their fiery red In the light the unicorn bows its silvery head She dreams the dreams she yearns to live Ascending the high, jagged mountain reaches Descending the bleakest, deepest chasms She rides the unicorn, outpacing green forests Dead set distancing the thickset woods, screams The day, the light, the shake of morning dew Lifted on breezes the silent wails of the dreamer Spinning on tiptoes across the surface of a lake Never crack the mirrors in this lingering escape Take the dreamer in one hand, bend to fate Where she dances in a stream of starlit skies Never wandering from the bending, stony path In the dark the dragons shine their fiery red In the light the unicorn bows its silvery head Darkest eyes penetrate the watching innocence Of the dreamer floating through the skies Never falling, always flying, asleep, suspended Travelling in this mystic world so shimmering Vickie Johnstone, all rights reserved
Read online
  • 503


The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

Louise Murphy

Literature & Fiction / Poetry

A poignant and suspenseful retelling of a classic fairy tale set in a war-torn world In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel." They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children. Louise Murphy's haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children. "Lyrical, haunting, unforgettable." --Kirkus Reviews "No reader who picks up this inspiring novel will put it down until the final pages, in which redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a heartening message of hope." --Publishers Weekly
Read online
  • 502
The Essential Faulkner

The Essential Faulkner

William Faulkner

Fiction / Poetry / Southern Gothic

A collection of the essential works by William Faulkner, the American novelist and short story writer. “I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner
Read online
  • 502
The Collected Stories

The Collected Stories

Dylan Thomas

Poetry / Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

This gathering of all Dylan Thomas's stories, ranging chronologically from the dark, almost surrealistic tales of Thomas's youth to such gloriously rumbustious celebrations of life as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Adventures in the Skin Trade, charts the progress of "The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive" toward his mastery of the comic idiom.Here, too, are stories originally written for radio and television and, in a short appendix, the schoolboy pieces first published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine. A highpoint of the collection is Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and...
Read online
  • 501
Reproduction

Reproduction

Ian Williams

Poetry

A hilarious, surprising and poignant love story about the way families are invented, told with the savvy of a Zadie Smith and with an inventiveness all Ian Williams' own, Reproduction bangs lives together in a polyglot suburb of Toronto.Felicia and Edgar meet as their mothers are dying. Felicia, a teen from an island nation, and Edgar, the lazy heir of a wealthy German family, come together only because their mothers share a hospital room. When Felicia's mother dies and Edgar's "Mutter" does not, Felicia drops out of high school and takes a job as Mutter's caregiver. While Felicia and Edgar don't quite understand each other, and Felicia recognizes that Edgar is selfish, arrogant, and often unkind, they form a bond built on grief (and proximity) that results in the birth of a son Felicia calls Armistice. Or Army, for short. Some years later, Felicia and Army (now 14) are living in the basement of a home owned by Oliver, a divorced man of...
Read online
  • 501
The Great When

The Great When

Alan Moore

Comics & Graphic Novels / Literature & Fiction / Poetry

From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new fantasy series about murder, magic, and madness in post-WWII London. The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How? Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out...
Read online
  • 501
183