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Love Like Salt: A Memoir
by Helen StevensonCHOSEN BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL IN THE GUARDIAN AS ONE OF HER BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR'It's a slice of a life . . . a complex, intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful, rather lyrical book' -Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love'A moving treatise on inheritance, not just of a disease like cystic fibrosis, but of our attitudes to living and loving, our sense of cultural and familial landscape, and how these intangibles pass down through generations. Stevenson picks apart her life like a strand of DNA to uncover just how we become the sum of our parts' Daily Telegraph'A beautiful memoir . . . [Stevenson] is a novelist and a translator and her memoir is about translation in the larger sense. Translating the world is what we all do but she reminds us that one can hope - with a mind as intricately well read and original as hers - to translate misfortune; to absorb and see beyond it . . . Stevenson makes of poetry, fiction and philosophy a protective shawl for her story . . . Although intense she has a carefree wit' Kate Kellaway, Observer'Love Like Salt is a human triumph ... Ultimately, Love Like Salt follows in the hallowed footsteps of Helen MacDonald's brilliant H is for Hawk or Cathy Rentzenbrink's The Last Act of Love. These are not misery memoirs but reminders that life comes in all shades - that in the darkest moments, beauty and humour can be found' Francesca Brown, Stylist'Did Clara taste salty when I kissed her? She did. She tasted of mermaids, of the sea.'Love Like Salt is a deeply affecting memoir, beautifully and intelligently written. It is about mothers and daughters, music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and story-telling. It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt and following its lead - in this case to rural France, where the author and her family lived for seven years. And back again.'I had always written, and until the birth of Clara I wrote for a living. Once I knew the Cystic Fibrosis gene had unfolded itself in our daughter's body, like a paper flower meeting water, I felt that to write, even if I had had time, or been able, would have been to squander a kind of power which was needed for tending and nurturing. Every moment became a moment in which I protected my baby. Some of it I did in secret, like a madwoman muttering spells. I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.A beautifully written memoir, in the vein of H is for Hawk and The Last Act of Love, about motherhood, music and living the best life you can, even in the shadow of illness.
Love Like Salt: A Memoir
by Helen StevensonCHOSEN BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL IN THE GUARDIAN AS ONE OF HER BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR'It's a slice of a life . . . a complex, intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful, rather lyrical book' -Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love'A moving treatise on inheritance, not just of a disease like cystic fibrosis, but of our attitudes to living and loving, our sense of cultural and familial landscape, and how these intangibles pass down through generations. Stevenson picks apart her life like a strand of DNA to uncover just how we become the sum of our parts' Daily Telegraph'A beautiful memoir . . . [Stevenson] is a novelist and a translator and her memoir is about translation in the larger sense. Translating the world is what we all do but she reminds us that one can hope - with a mind as intricately well read and original as hers - to translate misfortune; to absorb and see beyond it . . . Stevenson makes of poetry, fiction and philosophy a protective shawl for her story . . . Although intense she has a carefree wit' Kate Kellaway, Observer'Love Like Salt is a human triumph ... Ultimately, Love Like Salt follows in the hallowed footsteps of Helen MacDonald's brilliant H is for Hawk or Cathy Rentzenbrink's The Last Act of Love. These are not misery memoirs but reminders that life comes in all shades - that in the darkest moments, beauty and humour can be found' Francesca Brown, Stylist'Did Clara taste salty when I kissed her? She did. She tasted of mermaids, of the sea.'Love Like Salt is a deeply affecting memoir, beautifully and intelligently written. It is about mothers and daughters, music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and story-telling. It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt and following its lead - in this case to rural France, where the author and her family lived for seven years. And back again.'I had always written, and until the birth of Clara I wrote for a living. Once I knew the Cystic Fibrosis gene had unfolded itself in our daughter's body, like a paper flower meeting water, I felt that to write, even if I had had time, or been able, would have been to squander a kind of power which was needed for tending and nurturing. Every moment became a moment in which I protected my baby. Some of it I did in secret, like a madwoman muttering spells. I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.A beautifully written memoir, in the vein of H is for Hawk and The Last Act of Love, about motherhood, music and living the best life you can, even in the shadow of illness.
Rebel Girls: How votes for women changed Edwardian lives
by Jill LiddingtonRejecting the deadening conventions of their Victorian elders, the rebel girls demanded new freedoms and new rights. They took their suffrage message out to the remotest Yorkshire dales and fishing harbours, to win Edwardian hearts and minds. 16-year-old Huddersfield weaver Dora Thewlis on arrest was catapulted onto the tabloid front-pages as 'Baby Suffragette'. Her life was transformed. Dancer Lilian Lenton waited till her twenty-first birthday - then determined to burn two buildings a week until the Liberal government granted women the vote. Rebel Girls shows how this daring campaigning shifted from community suffragettes to militant mavericks.
Rebel Girls: How votes for women changed Edwardian lives
by Jill LiddingtonRejecting the deadening conventions of their Victorian elders, the rebel girls demanded new freedoms and new rights. They took their suffrage message out to the remotest Yorkshire dales and fishing harbours, to win Edwardian hearts and minds. 16-year-old Huddersfield weaver Dora Thewlis on arrest was catapulted onto the tabloid front-pages as 'Baby Suffragette'. Her life was transformed. Dancer Lilian Lenton waited till her twenty-first birthday - then determined to burn two buildings a week until the Liberal government granted women the vote. Rebel Girls shows how this daring campaigning shifted from community suffragettes to militant mavericks.
All Of Us There
by Polly DevlinPolly Devlin grew up in County Tyrone, on the shores of Lough Neagh, in the fifties -- but it might as well have been another time and place altogether. In this memoir she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland.'A brooding, evocative study of Irish childhood, of the strong bonds of love and jealousy that sisters especially feel, the guilt-ridden pressures of religion, the magical countryside, the eccentric villagers. A hauntingly lovely work ... beautifully written with poetic intensity which seems to encapsulate the Irish character with all its wit and bitterness and gift for words' HOMES AND GARDENS
All Of Us There (Virago Modern Classics #103)
by Polly DevlinPolly Devlin grew up in County Tyrone, on the shores of Lough Neagh, in the fifties -- but it might as well have been another time and place altogether. In this memoir she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland.'A brooding, evocative study of Irish childhood, of the strong bonds of love and jealousy that sisters especially feel, the guilt-ridden pressures of religion, the magical countryside, the eccentric villagers. A hauntingly lovely work ... beautifully written with poetic intensity which seems to encapsulate the Irish character with all its wit and bitterness and gift for words' HOMES AND GARDENS
London Lies Beneath
by Stella DuffyBased on a true story, London Lies Beneath is a compelling historical novel from the award-winning writer Stella Duffy.'As gloriously alive as the turn of the century south London streets it portrays' REDIn August 1912, three friends set out on an adventure. Two of them come home. Tom, Jimmy and Itzhak have grown up together in the crowded slums of Walworth. All three boys are expected to follow their father's trades and stay close to home. But Tom has wider dreams. So when he hears of a scouting trip, sailing from Waterloo to Sheppey and the mouth of the Thames - he is determined to go. And Itzhak and Jimmy go with him.Inspired by real events, this is the story of three friends, and a tragedy that will change them for ever. It is also a song of south London, of working class families with hidden histories, of a bright and complex world long neglected. London Lies Beneath is a powerful and compelling novel, rich with life and full of wisdom.'Vivid and full of heart, Duffy's new novel is a fitting hymn to the city that inspired it' FINANCIAL TIMES'A paean not just to South London, but to a vanished way of working-class life . . . Duffy's narrative is as fluid as a costermonger's patter, carrying the reader along' DAILY MAIL
The Hidden Room
by Stella Duffy'Nobody turns the screw of tension tighter than Stella Duffy' VAL MCDERMID'Fast and bold and thrilling' CHRISTOBEL KENT'A stunner' THE TIMESLife is good for Laurie and Martha. They have three great kids, a much-loved home in the countryside, and after years of struggle, Laurie's career as an architect is taking off at last. Everything's perfect.But someone is about to walk into their happy family and tear it apart. Laurie has been hiding from him for years. The question is, now that he's found her, can she keep her family safe? And just how far will she go to protect them?'A haunting tale that lingers in the memory' SUNDAY TIMES'Utterly gripping' SUNDAY MIRROR
Daughter Of The Queen Of Sheba
by Jacki Lyden''I am the Queen of Sheba, my mother announced to me in a regal voice''. She was wrapped in toga of bedsheets, with eye-pencil hieroglyphics drawn on her bare arms, a tiara on her head. I was twelve years old.' When she was well, Jacki Lyden's mother was a pretty but powerless suburban 60s housewife, very much under the thumb of a cruel doctor husband (Jacki's stepfather), but when she was gripped by the illness (later diagnosed as manic-depression) she got revenge for all the disappointments in her life. She became, among others, Marie Antoniette, dressed in Victorian bustiers, spent money she didn't have on fabulous cars and presents, painted slogans on the furniture and murals on the walls, went places she wouldn't normally have dared and - became someone she wanted to be. She frightened her three girls, but her bids for power fascinated and inspired them too. If Jacki's mother could escape to exotic places, so would she. In her 20s Jacki set out on her own impassioned journeys - she became a radio journalist, fearlessly reporting from war zones. But always her mother's fantasies remained a frustrating and compelling lure.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir
by Carrie BrownsteinBefore Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one of the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance. With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. They would be cited as "America's best rock band" by legendary music critic Greil Marcus for their defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations, and redefined notions of gender in rock.Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era's flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later.With deft, lucid prose Brownstein proves herself as formidable on the page as on the stage. Accessibly raw, honest and heartfelt, this book captures the experience of being a young woman, a born performer and an outsider, and ultimately finding one's true calling through hard work, courage and the intoxicating power of rock and roll.
Free Love And Other Stories
by Ali SmithA teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.
Free Love And Other Stories
by Ali SmithA teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.
Like
by Ali SmithThere's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday
Like
by Ali SmithThere's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (Virago Modern Classics #74)
by Angela CarterIn the pursuit of magnificence, nothing is sacred,' says Angela Carter, and magnificence is indeed her own achievement. One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, her work as a journalist and critic was no less original. Long autobiographical pieces on her life in South Yorkshire and South London are followed by highly individual inspections of 'abroad'. Some of her most brilliant writing is devoted to Japan - exotically and erotically described here - so perfectly suited to the Carter pen. Domestically, Angela Carter used her mordant wit and accurate eye to inspect England and Englishness as it manifested itself throughout the land. Then she turns to her own craft, and her extraordinarily wide-ranging book reviews are masterpieces.
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings
by Angela CarterIn the pursuit of magnificence, nothing is sacred,' says Angela Carter, and magnificence is indeed her own achievement. One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, her work as a journalist and critic was no less original. Long autobiographical pieces on her life in South Yorkshire and South London are followed by highly individual inspections of 'abroad'. Some of her most brilliant writing is devoted to Japan - exotically and erotically described here - so perfectly suited to the Carter pen. Domestically, Angela Carter used her mordant wit and accurate eye to inspect England and Englishness as it manifested itself throughout the land. Then she turns to her own craft, and her extraordinarily wide-ranging book reviews are masterpieces.
Angela Carter's Book Of Wayward Girls And Wicked Women
by Angela CarterThis bestselling collection of stories extols the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners Here are subversive tales - by Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles, Angela Carter, Colette, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid and Katherine Mansfield among others - all have one thing in common: the wish to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to their rightful position as models for all womenReflecting the wide-ranging intelligence and deliciously anarchic taste of Angela Carter, some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.
Angela Carter's Book Of Wayward Girls And Wicked Women (Virago Modern Classics #71)
by Angela CarterThis bestselling collection of stories extols the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners Here are subversive tales - by Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles, Angela Carter, Colette, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid and Katherine Mansfield among others - all have one thing in common: the wish to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to their rightful position as models for all womenReflecting the wide-ranging intelligence and deliciously anarchic taste of Angela Carter, some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.
Fireworks (Virago Modern Classics #72)
by Angela CarterIn the short fiction of Angela Carter, the landmarks of reality disappear and give way to a landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility. The city of Tokyo turns into a mirrored chamber reflecting the impossible longings of an exiled Englishwoman abandoned by her Japanese lover. An itinerant puppet show becomes a theatre of murderous lust. A walk through the forest ends in a nightmarish encounter with a gun-toting nymph and her hermaphrodite 'aunt'. Not simply a book of tales, Fireworks is a headlong plunge into an alternate universe, the unique creation of one of the most fertile, dark, irreverent, and baroquely beautiful imaginations in contemporary fiction.
Several Perceptions (Virago Modern Classics #75)
by Angela CarterCentre stage in Angela Carter's unruly tale of the Flower Power Generation is Joseph - a decadent, disorientated rebel without a cause. A self-styled nihilist whose girlfriend has abandoned him, Joseph has decided to give up existing. But his concerned friends and neighbours have other plans.In an effort to join in the spirit of protest which motivates his contemporaries, Joseph frees a badger from the local zoo; sends a turd airmail to the President of the United States; falls in love with the mother of his best friend; and, accompanied by the strains of an old man's violin, celebrates Christmas Eve in a bewildering state of sexual discovery. But has he found the Meaning of Life?
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History
by Angela CarterSexuality is power' - so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinaire. His virtuous Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality. In a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields.But now Sade has met his match. With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.
Shadow Dance (Virago Modern Classics #76)
by Angela CarterThe scar drew her whole face sideways and even in profile, with the hideous thing turned away, her face was horribly lop-sided, skin, features and all, dragged away from the bone. She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago.'And yet the men still hover around her, more out of curiosity than lust, and none more so than the wildly seductive, dangerous funny man, Honeybuzzard; lithe as a stick of liquorice, he is the demonic puppet master at the swirling centre of the tale.'In a modern day horror story gleaming with perfect 1960's detail, she performs a double act, conjuring up just the right amount of unease and perversion beneath the idiosyncratic business of relatively ordinary lives' THE TIMES
The Magic Toyshop (Virago Modern Classics #77)
by Angela CarterThis crazy world whirled around her, men and women dwarfed by toys and puppets, where even the birds are mechanical and the few human figures went masked . . . She was in the night once again, and the doll was herself.One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the home of her childhood, she is sent to live with relatives she has never met: gentle Aunt Margaret, mute since her wedding day; and her brothers, Francie and Finn. Brooding over all is Uncle Philip, who loves only the toys he makes in his workshop: clockwork roses and puppets that are life-size - and uncannily life-like.Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
The Passion Of New Eve (Virago Modern Classics #78)
by Angela CarterI know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . 'New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales
by Angela CarterOnce upon a time fairy tales weren't meant just for children, and neither is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. This stunning collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world- from the Arctic to Asia - and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters. This fabulous celebration of strong minds, low cunning, black arts and dirty tricks could only have been collected by the unique and much-missed Angela Carter. Illustrated throughout with original woodcuts.