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The Vicar of Abchurch
At the end of his working life, a vicar in the City of London thinks of himself as a failure: no one now seems to treasure the beliefs and religious practices of his youth; the church hierarchy is seemingly obsessed only with modern marketing and business methods which he doesn’t appreciate; and any love between him and his wife has long since vanished. Lacking any personal ambition, he takes on a rundown church and conducts his ministry there in the only way he knows: with understanding, compassion and Christian forgiveness. But in a few short months, the very building and its circumstances change him and his wife forever.
£7.99 -
The Vagrant
Where do you go for answers in the age of information? How do you love in grey areas of echoed ideas? When does understanding become manipulation? Forced into self-reflection, Eilidh explores the idea that no single answer is an entirely palatable truth – not when it comes to friends, philosophies or men.
£8.99 -
The Unsteady Wheel
Most of us dream of that life-changing moment: news of a lottery win, a surprise inheritance, becoming famous. Pasquale yearns to reach the city, to leave behind his village and humble origins. A young man, whose thoughts and desires lie beyond his time and place in the world. Someone set apart from the start. A hopeless case, as far as his people are concerned.
And then, suddenly, he acts upon a stroke of good fortune: the opportunity for a new name, a new identity. The life he has always craved. No longer trapped in his own skin and narrow horizons, his journey will take him through diverse landscapes, mental, physical, and emotional, as he clings onto the childhood image of owning a grand villa overlooking the sea.
Life is never simple though and escaping one’s roots is next to impossible, even for the narcissistic and single-minded Pasquale. How will he face life’s big questions: love, death, the significance of parenthood, friendship? Just how secure his place, in the hazy underworld of Fascist Italy?
£10.99 -
The Unofficial Good Turn Society
Six swallows dance for a girl who felt luck was against her. Buoyed, a spontaneous good turn passes from her through a cast of characters, amongst them a woman in a beret on the New York subway, a retired maestro in Lisbon and a shy diver in the Coral Sea.
Each story is a link in a chain of apparently random acts of generosity, which reaches around the globe, and eventually makes its way to London where disaster is averted.
This poignant story is the perfect book for our times and captures the goodness of the human spirit. Buhagiar’s original style creates an engaging immediacy and by exploring the domino effect of small gestures of goodwill, he reminds us that everyone has a story, and that there is beauty to be found in everyday acts of kindness.
£15.99 -
The Time Thief
“You have Parkinson’s Disease, Mr Preshevski”
The Time Thief is the remarkable story of Marco Preshevski who one day in March 2001 just after his 30th birthday was diagnosed with Adult Early Onset Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease. In the minutes, hours and days following his diagnosis many questions raced through his mind, but they all came back to one central challenge: would it be possible to finance his way through life, in the face of a relentless, stealth-like adversary such as Parkinson’s Disease?
Marco’s principal aim was to gain and retain enough income from employment to achieve his life goals. Most caring parents would agree that these goals amount to providing for your children, ensuring they have the full life that Marco always wanted his children to experience. Was it possible to retain enough time for him to fulfil these goals, while The Time Thief mercilessly chipped away at the block of precious time that Marco valiantly tried to preserve?
In this moving and inspiring memoir, Marco takes us deep into his innermost thoughts as he battled with Parkinson’s Disease in its unabating covert campaign to steal our most precious of resources.
The Time Thief is the second book from Marco Preshevski, following his successful debut novel, the best-selling Drivin’ Daughters and Parkinson’s which charted Marco’s relationship of twenty years with Parkinson’s Disease. Written with the same degree of wit and hilarious accounts of his real-life employment experiences, The Time Thief is a moving, inspirational novel that is a worthy sequel to Marco’s debut novel.
£9.99 -
The Ties That Bind
How the hell do you persuade your elderly, sick mother that she can’t stay in her own home? She’s confused and belligerent, talking about Hitler and ironing boards! All she really wants is to be left alone to die in her own bed, in peace and without any fuss. But her daughters have other ideas.
Sisters Diana and Vanessa face a rollercoaster of emotions as they battle the practicalities of looking after their mother Edwina as her life draws to a close. As she becomes increasingly frail, Edwina becomes more determined to wear them down by her refusal to accept their help. And now their eldest sibling, a convicted criminal, is back on the scene and that can only spell trouble.
Through laughter, tears and lots of wine, Vanessa and Diana navigate the challenges of dealing with all the emotional and practical paraphernalia of a dying parent. Two middle aged women who appreciate that dark humour is sometimes what you need to get you through the day and that family ties run deep in good times and bad.
£9.99 -
The Sum of all Parts
‘Our entire lives we are told what to think, what to feel, what to say. We are told who we are. All those personas we are given... But who am I really?’
The Sum of all Parts is a shattered story of life, love, pain, memories, betrayal, and hope. Told through the eyes of six women, it reflects on how our thoughts create feelings, our feelings create behaviour, and our behaviour creates feelings: the endless cycle that drives life.
£9.99 -
The Spaces Between
Catherine has come to feel that we have hardly begun to understand the forces in us and around us, and our connections with them and with each other.
Underlying daily life, other forces exist. Intersecting work-life dramas, vibrant language, sea swimming, and the dunes and gardens of the sea, all held together by a tenuous thread, other means of communication and other presences take their place, alongside which relationships flourish or fail.£13.99 -
The Sky Is Bluer
Kathy Barron is a nurse in the war-torn African country of Rhodesia. In 1974 while on honeymoon in South Africa, a stranger triggers her long-suppressed memory.
‘I know you’ll think I’m crazy, Rick, but that’s the man I saw kill my brother.’
But the police consider Kathy an unreliable witness.
‘You were six-years-old, the light was poor and you’ve only come forward fifteen years later…leave the detective work to the police and go back to Rhodesia, Mrs Barron.’
Three years on, the Rhodesian Bush War has intensified. Kathy and her family leave the country they love and emigrate to South Africa. She revisits the scene of her brother’s murder – then starts her own search for his killer.
£9.99 -
The Shadow of the Cross
When Sally Schofield and her husband, Tristan, buy the house that Sally has always dreamt about, Sally thinks they have found the perfect place to live out the rest of their lives.
Unbeknownst to her, the sleepy Dorset Village of Upper Chilling has been a battleground between good and evil for the last 800 years, and destiny now sees Sally as part of the final conflict.
Finding herself increasingly aware of supernatural forces at work both in the village and in her life, Sally must unlock the secrets of the Upper Chilling’s past to save her future dreams. In a battle that she could never win by herself, could Sally’s only hope lie with the mysterious ‘Lady in Blue’?
£9.99 -
The Runaways
Andrew Munroe gets declared bankrupt after his building business in Leeds West Yorkshire suddenly collapses. Andy is diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression. He abandons his wife and daughter hoping to kick-start his life finding work down in London. He feels that he has let his family down badly and assures himself that they would be far better off without him. After hitching a lift that takes him down to the South East Coast, Andy meets up with a kind and caring pair of star-struck elderly lovers, one of whom owns a boarding house in Basildon.
Two other main characters in the book enter the story intermittently. The first is a girl named Gita from Birmingham, who is running away from an arranged marriage. As her story unfolds she too will eventually end up living down on the South East Coast.
The other is Sam, a loveable rogue born and bred in the East End of London. After serving an eight-year prison sentence in one of Her Majesty’s Correctional Facilities for manslaughter, he too shuns his place of birth and makes his way towards the South East Coast.
All three will eventually meet up but not in the circumstances that you may expect or predict.
£9.99 -
The Rule of Optimism
In the Autumn of 1991, a group of young social work students meet at university in Cardiff, each filled with positivity and ambition. With a backdrop of widespread sexual abuse in Cleveland, Rochdale and Orkney, public perception of social workers is deeply cynical and the profession is already defined by negative media reporting. But this does not dampen their spirits.
Tara is a headstrong pragmatist, a single mother raised in the South Wales Valleys and of Irish lineage. Proud and fiercely independent, she approaches life without fear, bolstered by a secure and loving relationship with her family. Alison is a beautiful but fragile young woman, a gifted musician who is haunted by her parents’ toxic and destructive relationship. As a means of escape, Alison moves to live with her beloved Aunt Clem in rural West Wales and finds an unexpected purpose to her life. Neither Tara nor Alison have ever enjoyed an enduring female friendship before. But when their paths cross, a special bond is formed. Over the course of twenty-five years, the lives of Tara and Alison become cruelly enmeshed by events beyond their control. Despite their devotion to one another, nothing can prevent the terrible unravelling that is about to take place.
£8.99