Pulling the Rug

“You have to come, now.”

Those were the words that up ended Emma’s world and pulled the rug firmly out from under her feet. Up until that point her life had been relatively charmed: A good job. A lovely house. A handsome husband. Fancy coffee. Holidays with sun and adventure. One day she would settle down. One day she wanted children. One day.

One car accident and her world spun out of its axis. A ready-made family crashed her ordered world. A mutinous teenager, a traumatized little girl, crazy twins and a long-suffering cat. Everyone had advice. Everyone had an opinion. She thought she was strong, capable, she always had a plan. She always had a plan A, B and C to be precise. But what happens when someone pulls away the rug?

Purely for The Money and Not A Little Love

Randall and Hannah, both East Londoners, survived the blitz as children and eventually settled in Suffolk, lured by the countryside’s peace, sun, and sea. Their children grew up, became independent, and started families of their own. As Randall’s health declined, they longed for a quieter and cleaner environment, a new adventure to seize. Life was good.

But fate had other plans. Over the years, they faced numerous challenges, but they always overcame them, never giving up. Until the final two challenges, which turned into their worst nightmares. They never could have imagined what lay ahead.

Their incredible story of perseverance and triumph is chronicled in this book. Keep it close, for you never know when you may need to draw inspiration from their experience to keep yourself safe.

Quartet of Human Love, Human Frailty

These four short stories embrace many emotions and characters: the man who goes back to his past to find a lost love; a woman with terminal cancer who finds a miracle in Australia; a shy girl who finds a lover and deals with her eccentric grandmother; and a visit to heaven, where a woman is amazed to find herself at the pearly gates.

There are intriguing characters and unusual stories in a collection that explores human tragedy and frailty, and also love.

Quest for the Island's Treasure

Ella is sent to the island of Jersey to stay with her aunt and has no idea what is in store for her once she arrives. Making new friends – both young and old – Ella has the opportunity to explore the island of Jersey and to discover many of its amazing sights. With her friends James and Marcus, she embarks on a mysterious trail in the quest for long-forgotten treasure. With the amazing help of a startling source, the children begin to realise that there is something more important in life than treasure.

Rainbow over Rocheville

Meet Jacques, a charming yet aimless singer-songwriter and carpenter residing in the quaint French town of St Auban. Irresistibly good-looking and laid-back, Jacques seems content to let life happen around him, whether strumming his guitar for an enchanted audience or crafting intricate woodwork. Business savvy may elude him, but talent and affability are in abundant supply.

In a life unmarred by grand ambitions, Jacques finds solace in the simple things – a moment of daydreaming, the fleeting beauty of a rainbow. When a vivid rainbow arcs over the neighbouring village of Rocheville, it inspires Jacques to pen a new song, but also leads him to question if such symbols of luck and happiness could ever truly be his.

As we follow the ups and downs of Jacques’ existence, an unforeseen love threatens to add a layer of complexity he’s never had to face: the commitment and responsibilities of marriage. Will love finally give Jacques the focus he lacks, or will it prove to be another fleeting moment in a life spent drifting?

Journey with Jacques through the undulating terrains of love, friendship, and self-discovery, as he grapples with the possibilities of a life that could either find direction or continue to meander. Will Jacques unearth the fulfilment and happiness he unconsciously seeks, or will he remain a soul forever wandering?

Raised on Songs and Stories...

What many of us find challenging in life is to reach an understanding of existence. We search around for meaning in the strangest of places. Clare O’Reilly started with words and when the poems and images came, she was grateful. Often sad and sometimes tumultuous, her poems represent snapshots of her own experience and observations.
This evocative and diverse collection portrays the fragility of the human condition and our complex emotions. By sharing her insights. Clare has managed to turn some of her dreams, longings and disappointments into one big positive, finally achieving the self-empowerment she has long hoped for.
In the words of Allen Ginsberg, the American poet: ‘Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.’
Clare’s hope for Raised on Songs and Stories is that readers will find much to absorb them, allowing reflection and understanding to continue in earnest at some distance past the final page.

Raisham

Set in the Indian subcontinent, with a Muslim culture background, this is a fictional story of a migrant doctor who tries to win the heart and mind of a feudal lord who believes in tribal rules and dislikes migrants.

Eventually, the feudal lord gives in, mainly because of the excellent character of the migrant doctor, who also provides support to the daughter of the feudal lord, at a time when she has been left in a limbo due to the rules of the tribe.

The pair eventually wins and goes on an expedition in which the girl Raisham, an army officer, plays a key role.

Raising the Dead

Emeline Upswatch, a naive 20-year-old bride, is grief-stricken after the deaths of both of her beloved parents. Now, Emeline believes she has made a grave error in moving with her husband, Randy, from her California Delta childhood home to unknown Charles Town, Virginia. She questions her marriage and herself. Marooned in grief in an unfamiliar world and intimidated by her mother-in-law, Emeline is rescued by the appearance of a mysterious older woman, Felicity, who becomes her dearest friend, mentor, and “other mother” with whom she can share her innermost feelings. Unlike Emeline, Felicity divulges nothing about her history or personal life. When Felicity disappears as mysteriously as she arrived, Emeline is determined to unearth her older friend’s whereabouts. What she ultimately discovers forces her to question her sanity, world, memories, and newfound joy.

In her second book, Jayne Lisbeth cements her reputation as a “sensitive, entertaining and deeply moving writer.” In Raising the Dead her quirky, mysterious, home-spun and loveable characters keep the reader engaged and entertained from the first page to the last.

Early reviews praise Raising the Dead as “a deep and emotional account of Emeline’s introspective journey with a wholesome, spiritual, supernatural angle ... Inspirational ... A poignant plot, with a well-structured, assured writing style, sure to appeal to a wide audience.”

Rally ’Round the Flag

“A timely reminder of how the past colours the future”

Mary Cleeves

Rally ’Round the Flag is a thrilling historical novel set during the American Civil war.

The story begins in the mid-19th century in a large, Lancashire cotton mill,

which never stops production for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Here a family with rich and privileged men controls the lives of the desperately poor men, women and children who are forced to work for them...or be turned out onto the street with no income nor roof over their heads.

In 1861 events move to the USA, where the first real battle of the Civil War started.

The history of the (first) Battle of Bull Run is told realistically until, close to its end, it takes on an alternative life as a result of just one military action, which historically changes the remaining years of war. Senior General in the Confederate Army Robert E. Lee at that moment speaks of how he now sees war in this new version of victory: “Once you get 'em on the run don’t stop. Never give up the pursuit.”

This fascinating account of the war, doomed to kill a quarter of the entire population
of the USA, leads the reader through many of the major locations and actions of the war. The grim reality of the five years from 1861 describes both the true historical characters, as well as the three imagined young Englishmen whose lives now lie in the USA. Here they are destined to see, and even to experience at first-hand, the appalling bloodshed, death and destruction of a war so often fought at very close quarters. Here a brother could find his father or his son aiming a rifle at him across a battlefield; a general could be responsible for the death even of his grandson.

The story roars faster and faster through the hell of shot and shell.

Cannons, and shells from these cannons, and also from mortars, were designed to slice through great swathes of human flesh, while at close quarters Bowie knives appeared to rip out the throats of an enemy fighting for his own life within an arm’s reach.

The bodies of the enemy lay scattered across innumerable battlefields

and became food for the crows. An observer of a huge battle recorded in his diary that he had seen: “Entire regiments disappeared in a few minutes. Legs, arms, knapsacks and rifles thrust high into the air and then scattered on the bloody grass.”

The reader may ask: “Can history be changed by the alteration of one small event?”

But is there more than a little similarity in the 19th century between slavery in the USA and the penury, desperate hardship and death from disease walking the streets of Oldham, as well as the lack of any security existing for all those working in the mills, factories and mines of Great Britain?

One part of the same American country wants to destroy the neighbour it has lived with peacefully for more than one hundred and fifty years.

An extraordinary read awaits you...if you rally ’round the flag, but which flag do you choose?

Rame

This gripping story is set in the secretive, dark days of smuggling Cornwall. One family falls foul of the violent men who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Dom, his friends and family are caught up in the deadly rivalry of the two connected villages. Murder and mystery threaten their challenging lives where even the sea can be an unpredictable rival. However, when a deadly plague occurs, it is a force beyond their control; all are endangered; none are safe. In the final conflict can love overcome hatred or will violence and greed destroy love?

Raspberry Juice

Although this is a novel, it is full of true life experiences that we all encounter at times: the break-up of a marriage and the anger and heartache it brings to all who are involved, our children being bullied at school and the pain surrounding that, the feeling of failure, lack of confidence in ourselves and the torture of following the procedures when someone dies, let alone dealing with our emotions. This book offers a possible way to look back at these experiences and view them from a totally different perspective, a more healthy and accepting one and not full of guilt for not being ‘good enough’. We are all ‘good enough’ and we do the best we can with the resources we have at the time, we can do no better. Scattered throughout there are references to books, song lyrics and poetry that give a positive aspect to changing our whole view of our lives and seeing it all as a true learning experience to accept and welcome even though some of our experiences may have been horrendous at the time, there is still a way to gain from them, in retrospect.

Razor in the Wind

Only once before has a fascination for a falcon resulted in a prose-poetry novel.

Forty years since J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, here comes Razor in the Wind.

This novel follows a pair of hobbies across the skies of their summer, vividly painted in poetic vignettes based on years of observations, here condensed to a single season.

Only the most spectacularly successful of hunts will mean the survival of the hobbies’ young and the next generation of falcons, before autumn sees them and their newly fledged family leave for Africa.

Based entirely on personal observations and a rare insight into a falcon’s world, what follows has almost never been done before.

Unique in the complete absence of any person in a novel – even the author is almost entirely silent and invisible – this book is nonetheless a meditative and human one, in which the reader can soar with the hobby and live the season while lost in nature.