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The Kingdom of Watetu and Songaland
The Kingdom of Watetu and Songaland is an autobiographical story about Mpeki, the princess of the Watetu tribe who realised early that FGM in her tribe was wrong and who sought out to bring about a change, a journey that caused her and her loved ones a lot of pain, because the Watetu tribe practised FGM while the neighbouring tribe, the Songa, appreciated sexuality. The differences that their cultures represented brought about a clash after the prince of Songaland assisted Princess Mpeki to run off after she hindered the mutilation of her sister.
This started a rift between both tribes that resulted in the abduction of the prince of Songaland, and the princess’s sister, whose mutilation the princess had hindered, was bought back by the missionaries. The prince of Songaland ended in Portugal as a slave, making his father furious – reason for a war that lasted for two decades.
It was finally after the abolition of slavery worldwide that the prince of Songaland came back with Mpeki and the missionaries who had travelled with her to help her evade her own mutilation.
Upon the arrival of the prince, his father ordered him to leave the princess, claiming that she was cursed. In fact, the princess was not cursed as all had thought. It was through her sacrifices that the two tribes reunited, becoming one under the prince and princess’s rule in the new kingdom of Watetu and Songaland, a kingdom of peace, justice and harmony. The story ends with a bombastic marriage between the two tribes, the result of the eradication of FGM.
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The Icky Wick Bowls Club
The Icky Wick Bowls Club invites you to join them at their private table known as the Gin Club Table, come and listen to hilarious tales of the past, or maybe witness the steamy night at The Vicars and Tarts party with a different story on every table. Travel to Ireland in the 60s with Molly and the gang as they cleverly remove marble fireplaces from a mansion in the wilds of Ireland and ship them off to the USA. Meet Micheal the renowned Irish raconteur singer/songwriter. Stay with Benny the septuagenarian gangster while he plans to bring his finest cannabis down from his factory in London filling up three golf bags, which he hides in the holiday coach carrying all the OAPs, to France. His journey with his wife Beryl, into and out of France with no passport, due to the fact he is on a lifetime ban from leaving the UK due to his criminal record.
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The Highway Store and Other Stories
Trevor’s had a rough life. Growing up in the crime ridden suburb of Blacktown, struggling with PTSD from his tour in Afghanistan, and his girlfriend’s tragic overdose. All he wants is to get away from it all and find some peace. Opening a highway store in the remote outback seemed like a great opportunity for him. Little did he know, he wasn’t prepared for the unsavory characters that came his way. As these nefarious figures start to emerge, he is forced to confront a past he thought he had left behind.
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The Girls of Fog
At the end of the world, or in the middle of nowhere, there is a small village called Bukojna. It is located in Gora, a province of Albania inhabited by an ethnic minority called the Gorani. They speak their own unique language, tell their own legends, follow their own rites and customs, and are believed to be of Bogomil origins. According to the legends, in Bukojna, the sun rises twice every day and the moon sets twice every dawn.
The ancient settlement has also welcomed more inhabitants of various origins, from the good-looking Vlachs and the knowledgeable Jews to the brave and proud highlanders. It is a village where “men of turn grey when still children and see better at night than at daylight,” as Majka, a supposedly 300-year-old woman forgotten by death, says.
It is precisely in this microcosm of the Albanian Gora - where the obligatory norms of a new life stipulated by the dictatorship of the proletariat try to enroot themselves with the ruthlessness and harshness that characterized the fifties – that the novel’s events are narrated through the scrutinizing and suspicious outlook of a child.
The violent attempt to uproot a person’s memory, their identity, turns into savageness towards everything that is human, including the ownership of the land, the use of pastures in the border area, the celebration of St. George, wedding customs, Majka’s prayers, the song of the girls.
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The Gibraltar Conspiracy
The Gibraltar Conspiracy is the story of life around one of the most unusual land borders in Europe. This work of fiction is based upon a real environment with a few real people. Gibraltar – The Rock – which visually dominates this part of Southern Europe, is the dramatic setting for a story of intrigue, rivalry, international diplomacy, and corruption on a massive level. The influence of powerful governments and people, the self-serving politicians and officials, continues through the book, as does the dedication and loyalty of the leading characters in this fictional but reality-reflective story. The writer has spent many years in the area, enjoying the culture, the wonderful food and wine, and the friendship and hospitality of the people of Gibraltar, La Linea, San Roque, and Torreguadiaro. Truly a melting pot of international cultures and traditions.
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The Cottage
This novel by Cornelius Buckley, follows the two previous collections of poetry. The Last Irish Romantic, was launched by Gabriel Fitzmourice, the noted poet, at the Listowel literary festival. He described the collection as a striking series of works reminiscent of T. S Eliot and Michael Hartnett. The book was praised by the famous Dublin publisher and poet, Pat Boran, as a “truly distinctive debut volume”, and the noted British poet Bernard O’Donoghue described it as “brilliant”. Cornelius’s second collection, Poems from Heartlands, was published recently. It was uniquely innovative in that it contained both printed poems of note, but also hand-written poems woven into distinctive artwork by the author. The colour edition received fulsome praise. It has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement award, the San Francisco Literary Festival award for Poetry; the Author’s Circle award for novel of excellence, the Firebird book award, the Titan award, and the Outstanding Creator award. The Cottage continues that innovative approach. The poetry scattered throughout may seem extraneous, but it is an essential part of the character of the protagonist, a poet and lecturer in literature. It is partly autobiographical. But the novel also owes much to Agatha Christie as a mystery and as such should keep the reader guessing to the end. But it is more than that; the author feels that books should operate on different levels, and The Cottage also embodies literary riches and philosophies that should challenge the reader. It contains theological material also which some might shy away from, but it is part of the character of the author as a priest, and the protagonist as a deacon. The general quality of the work and its mystery should offset any criticism and make this a must-read, full of fascinating byways and twists of the imagination which make this a major work of literary excellence like the author’s previous praised and multi-award-winning poetic art.
Cornelius is a graduate of St. Patrick’s College Maynooth, and has a doctorate from Oxford University, where he specialised in modern American poetry. He has already published two prose works, Wheels of Light and Learn from Me, and is busy finishing two further novels, The Mountain and The Island. They should be published soon by whatever lucky publisher takes them up.
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The Bricken Arch
The lives of two teenage sisters and their cousin boyfriends are forever changed by the mores of their time, by separation to different parts of the world, by relationships with others and by a cruel tragedy. When, after seventeen years, there are reunions and liaisons over two decades, in furtive circumstances, none can imagine that the questionable and consequential actions of one of the lovers will lead to savage repercussions for all: repercussions that will bring on further catastrophic tragedies but more importantly, risk fulfillment of their enduring loves as a foursome.
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The Box
The Box tells the story of Rupert and Lucille; their lives, loves, families, achievements, and failures. Lucille is the last child born to a family of generationally poor dirt farmers, while Rupert is the only child born to multi-billionaire parents. Rupert and Lucille’s paths cross due to a confluence of seemingly random events, and, as their business relationship grows, so do their friendship, love, and respect grow for each other. The Box tells how a simple invention has the potential to transform not only their two lives, but the story tells how the invention has the potential to change the lives of thousands of people. Where does it all lead though? Does the invention lead to the good that Rupert first envisioned? Does the invention help Lucille out of her generational poverty? Does the invention help anybody? Or, is the old adage that says, “No good deed goes unpunished,” really true?
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The Beautiful Anatomy of Despair
It’s 2014 in San Francisco and Tristan thinks he’s found love. Meanwhile in London, Toby is at work in the City. On the Amalfi Coast, Cordelia and Freddie are fighting about a secret.
The Beautiful Anatomy of Despair is a novel about hope and hopelessness.
It is a portrait of four friends figuring out how to live a meaningful life, and what it takes to survive one that isn’t.
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The Anemone Bowl
“If the inability to see other than that which you wish to see can be considered a kind of heaven, then presumably the inability to escape self-knowledge must be one version of hell.”
The ill-fated consequences of happenstance: Born into an English country village community in the 1950s, a young boy is led, through a series of events over which he in effect has little or no control, to take the life of a neighbour’s child, and subsequently his own. And this is the tale, if there can be any, of the subsequent accounting.
The book itself is set in an ever-mutating afterlife that also provides an interim existence before rebirth – an illusory world where, of necessity, it is in large part conveniently repressed memories that hold sway, and where for Eric (if we can suppose that to be his name), each step forward is also leading (with some level of perversity) to the truths of his own personal past transgressions.
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Tales of Tynant
An 11-acre plot of land on a remote hillside in mid-Wales and its current guardians come together to witness the everyday, sometimes magical, sometimes bizarre goings on; from mating frogs and marauding otters in the pond to the daredevil swallows and RAF pilots above; from Roland the debonair pheasant to Dixie the drag queen who lost their way. Tina Hughes’ stories and illustrations bring to life an uplifting escape to the much-loved land of Tynant.
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Sunset Collector
Illusion and disillusion
Friendship and betrayal
Ecstasy and madness
Two young Englishmen arrive in LA in 1980, hungry for experience. They dive headlong into technicolour Hollywood days, sunkissed and free beneath exotic palms. At night they slide on charm through a Sunset Strip parade of hookers, pimps, dealers, gigolos, hitmen, punks and struggling actors. They set up camp in a glamorously sleazy joint and befriend the eccentric barflies. They are a million miles away from Thatcher’s grey, dreary London town, where everything closes by 11.
Innocence collides with experience and there gradually emerges a darker vision of LA: a Manson-haunted, coke-addled, hedonistic playground. A beautiful girl appears at their door at 3am and breaks up the bachelor party. Triangular mind games herald cracks in the unbreakable friendship, then reality itself starts to unravel, on a tragicomic journey of self-discovery, reaching a climax with a mind-bending trip out into the desert.
At the dawn of the 80’s, a rite of passage journey through an impressionistic whirlwind of sex, drugs and mental illness.
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