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Born to Croft

May 14, 2024 , posted in

‘Ena’s views and stories are enjoyed far beyond the shores of these islands and, without question, she is one of the best newspaper columnists in Scotland’ – Iain Stephen Morrison (Editor of Am Paipear, 2012–2022) One of the most revered crofters in Scotland, Ena MacDonald is renowned for her lifetime’s dedication to traditional crofting methods and for her passionate advocacy of sustainable farming practices that preserve the precious machairs and grasslands of her beloved Kyles on the Scottish island of North Uist. Born in 1940, Ena paints vivid pictures of growing up on a croft before machinery and ‘going barefoot to collect the peats’. She records a way of life that has changed beyond recognition and is perhaps gone forever. Ena’s gift and skills working with animals and her love for cattle, sheep, chickens, dogs and cats are apparent on every page. Ask people about her and they say, ‘She’s a legend.’ Paperback: 9781739443184 Price £15.00

Skeins

September 23, 2024 , posted in

The Fine Art of Grieving

February 6, 2024 , posted in

‘The Fine Art of Grieving is the most honest, profound, beautifully written, and shockingly illustrated account of the grieving process I’ve ever witnessed. Absolutely brilliant!’ - Dr. Sandra Bertman, author of Facing Death: images, Insights, and Interventions. Jane Edberg’s creative muse vanished when a switch flipped from child alive to child dead. How was she supposed to process her loss? This lyrical, original, beautifully written story is about how, after the tragic death of her adored nineteen-year-old son, she rediscovers the power of art to create an unconventional pathway through grief. This is not your typical grief memoir. It is an introspective and thought-provoking story which explores the profound power of creativity to transform trauma and anguish into resilience and healing. Her journey is illuminated with breathtaking, fine art photographs of reimagined loss. Publication: 24 March 2024 Paperback: 978-1-7394431-2-2 £19.99 Digital: 978-1-7394431-7-7 £9.99 For orders to the US please contact Lynn Michell for postage rates: lynnmichell0@googlemail.com

Duo poetry by women

February 6, 2024 , posted in

the water all around us

September 28, 2023 , posted in

When you are alone, adrift and displaced, how do you find yourself? Set on a small Scottish island, The Water All Around Us is a poignant novel about loneliness, roots and belonging. Recently arrived crofters’ child Fenn is troubled by being different and not fitting in. Incomer and marathon swimmer Jess is running away from personal tragedy. A young whale, separated from his pod, swims in the wrong direction and embarks on an arduous, heart-breaking journey. All three are at home in the water, but when their lives connect in the sea that fringes the white sand beaches, their paths converge and collide with disastrous consequences. Under the surface of this thought-provoking novel are messages, carried quietly and bravely by the whale, about the damage we are doing to our oceans. ‘A meditation on loss, longing and belonging.’ – Derek Thomson, Thomas Bladen thrillers, Long Shadows, West Country Murder. Paperback: 9781739177775 Price £8.99 Digital: 9781739443115 Price: £5.99

The Silent Women

June 27, 2023 , posted in

In 1875, Simone Gastrell is conveniently committed to Long Meadows Asylum by her adulterous husband. Distraught but not defeated, she meets the silent women whose lives within the institution are ordered and defined by men. Alice Semple, a herbalist and wise- woman, does not speak, but gives testimony in her notebook. Phoebe Baines, a fragile, damaged young woman, lives within the soundless universe of her interior monologue. In a powerless world, relieved only by precious hours spent in the Airing Courts and gardens, the three women come together in unvoiced friendship. When life behind the asylum walls grows even more dangerous and brutal, they find their voices and use them to fight for survival. In their story, readers will hear echoes of women today locked away in our institutions, often brutalised, still silenced and living invisible lives. Publication: 27th July 2023 (available to pre-order from 27th June) Paperback: £8.99 Digital: £5.99

My Blue Peninsula

September 14, 2023 , posted in

My Blue Peninsula is a confession that fills seven notebooks. In them, Dora Giraud tries to explain to her adult daughters why she remains in Istanbul after escaping death at the hands of extremists, and why she risks her life to campaign for the truth about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides, ferociously denied for a century by the Turkish state.

Dora’s desperate need to understand her family history is the thread that binds this story’s conflicting fragments. As the direct descendant of the genocides’ victims and perpetrators, she carries a tangled legacy of loss and betrayal, lies and ill-gotten gains. With this confession, she hopes to set her daughters free. But can she?

My Blue Peninsula is Maureen Freely’s fourth novel set in Istanbul, the city of her childhood. In each, a character from the sidelines of the preceding novel takes centre stage to probe a mystery left pending. We first met Dora in Sailing Through Byzantium as the observant daughter of a famously bohemian household who could not, then, speak the truth.

Publication: 26th September 2023

Paperback: 978-1-7391777-1-3

Price £9.99

Digital: 978-1-7391777-8-2

Price: £7.99

The Dolphin

June 21, 2023 , posted in

‘He knew that this was as close to the sea as he could ever get.’

In 1937 Larry Lambert has a vision of a magnificent pub built on frozen fields ‘like a grassy sea’. It is an echo of a single, failed, gay encounter in a fishing boat, and in its construction he invests his energy and his thwarted dreams. He calls it The Dolphin.

And so unfolds a moving exploration of the constraining expectations of society on three generations of one family. For Larry, there is the cruel impossibility of being gay in 1930s Britain and his ensuing loveless marriage with the embittered Rosemary. For his daughter, Joanie, there is the crushing weight of duty and respectability during the post-war years. Only granddaughter Lottie pulls free and finds the freedom her grandfather and mother were denied.

Larry’s decision to build The Dolphin sparks events that play out over decades, tearing one generation apart while bringing another back together.

With artfully simple prose, Susan Clegg invites you to look beyond the surface. Insightful, understated and finely observed.

—Elise Valmorbida, award-winning author of The Madonna of the Mountains

Publication: 5th July 2023

Paperback: 978-1-7391777-4-4

Price £8.99

Digital: 978-1-7391777-5-1

Price: £5.99

Tabula Rasa

January 18, 2023 , posted in

Birds and Ghosts

January 5, 2023 , posted in

From the acclaimed author of Costa shortlisted Snake Ropes, Cooking with Bones and City of Circles. How do you grieve for him, when you can’t visit his grave? I grieve in the language of birds and ghosts. Jess Richard’s beloved father died suddenly at the age of sixty-seven in Scotland. Three months later, she travelled to Aotearoa, New Zealand, to a new relationship. This is the story of her grief and her love, of a place lost and a place found, of a memory-packed past and a poised present. Birds and Ghosts was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when international travel was impossible. In this achingly empty space, away from her mother and her father’s grave, Jess reconstructs her early life and ponders the self who is lonely, different, and invisible. A late diagnosis of Autism adds a conventional label to a uniquely personal portrait. This intimate story edges the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, confident in its experimental style. It is memoir in a pure, unconstrained form, brave and beautiful, moving and utterly compelling. “Birds and Ghosts blurs and transcends the borders between life and death, poetry and prose, drawing and language. Tracing the arc of grief, Richards reveals how loss opens us into a deeper truth of love. - Diane Comer, author of The Braided River: Migration and the Personal Essay Publication: 14 February 2023 Paperback: 978-1-7391777-0-6 Price: £9.99

Dead Drop

October 4, 2022 , posted in

A fast-paced, intelligent thriller that exposes the undercover world of art heists and takes us on a roller-coaster ride through Vienna’s renowned galleries and museums as skilled art thief, Leisl, steals paintings for private collectors, until she comes up against a truth that makes her question everything she knows.

"Malby’s novel proves once and for all that thrillers can be both hugely compelling and beautifully written. This is virtuosic storytelling, as vibrant as a Klimt painting, as lyrical as a Viennese waltz, as atmospheric as a Carol Reed film. I loved it." – Jonathan P Taylor, author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester

Publication date: October 31, 2022 Available on advance order 978-1-9196248-6-0 Paperback Price: £7.99 978-1-9196248-7-7 Digital Price: £5.99

A Child in the Middle

April 25, 2022 , posted in

From the acclaimed author of The Well and The Half Sister. ‘Need. Crave. Fear. Lovely monosyllabic verbs which perch like hungry gulls on top of the iceberg floating in a cold sea.’ This is no ordinary book about adoption. It is Catherine Chanter’s story of her search for her birth parents and follows the twists and turns of that extraordinary detective story. But Catherine also sits on adoption panels and has spent her working life supporting vulnerable children from fractured families. And so it brings together the personal and the professional in a rich and insightful exploration of adoption. This book is for everyone interested in or touched by adoption. It speaks to you all from a base of acknowledgement, wisdom, and honesty. Publication date: June 14th 2022 Paperback 978-1-9196248-8-4 Price £8.99 Digital 978-1-9196248-9-1 Price £5.99

Cried Out The River For Love

November 24, 2021 , posted in

What is it to be a parent? What is it to be the parent of a child who is distant and different and fragile? In this magical fable, a larger-than-life sculptor father and a costume-maker mother watch over their angel Sybilla. They live in a nameless city on a mythical river aboard a barge with a moon-and-stars clock and a camomile lawn and festoons of velvet. And then their beloved child is missing. This is a fable but it is also real, about loving a child and losing her. What does lost mean? And found? A profoundly original look at the unfathomable complexity of family relationships. The story tumbles and flows with the energy of the river, breathless yet poised, the words sparkling with a fierce and perfect originality. Brilliant, absorbing, moving, insightful, beautifully written book about familial love. Just SO good https://www.instagram.com/p/CcXGvv3IZSr/ Publication date: March 18th 2022 978-1-9196248-2-2 Paperback Price: £8.99 978-1-9196248-3-9 Digital Price: £5.99

The strange lockdown life of Alice Henry

October 24, 2021 , posted in

this One Wild Place

July 29, 2021 , posted in

A new collection of stories which brings together Avril Joy’s finest published and unpublished work. From the Costa winning Millie and Bird to the recent A Morning Tide, listed for the Fish Short Memoir Prize, she weaves narratives of hope in the face of loss, transformation and redemption, and writes of the enduring power of love.

Combining a poet’s gift for language with a keen naturalist’s eye, Avril Joy takes her readers on journeys across landscapes from Venice to the East Anglian Fens, from Cape Cod to the shore temples of Mahabalipuram. Moving and poignant, told with an unerring compassion, the characters are both vulnerable and strong in adversity. Avril Joy explores first love, families, marriage, childhood, mothering, social class, escape, gardens, birds, seas, tides and stray dogs. These are stories about the wild places we call home. Publication date: September 30 2021 - available for advance order 978-1-8380603-6-7 paperback Price: £8.99 9780957596870 digital Price £5.99

Tongues and Bellies

July 29, 2021 , posted in

Sensual and surprising stories that play a tantalising game of hide-and-seek with lies and truth. Chameleon-like characters slip in and out of shadows as they construct elaborate ruses and clutch at worlds that remain just out of reach. Their appetite for life is bitter and sweet but never predictable. An old recipe, an outing, a robot, a key – clues to people they once were or hope to be. A third collection of short-form stories from The Whole Kahani. The mood is mischievous and ingenious as characters invent and seek half-hidden truths and half-forgotten memories. From these pages floats a mouth-watering aroma of cherished childhood meals, meals eaten by lovers and meals flavoured with nostalgia and loss. Publication date: November 10 2021 978-1-8380603-1-2 paperback Price: £9.99 978-1-8380603-4-3 digital Price £5.99 'A kaleidoscopic, humanistic delight! It consists of fourteen short stories, written by eight members of The Whole Kahani. Together these individual authors have given the reader a dazzling, multihued work as stylistically diverse as it is thematically united.’ - The Yorkshire Times

Letters in the Sand

July 29, 2021 , posted in

If you enjoyed Breeze from the River Manjeera and Blue Eyes, you’ll love this new novel from best-selling author, Hema Macherla. Set in the 70s in a small village in India, Letters in the Sand is an engaging story of one girl’s quiet rebellion against her traditional, dysfunctional family and their non-negotiable plans to marry her at fifteen to any suitable boy. In this layered narrative, the political and the personal are interwoven when Kiri’s beloved brother, Rajiv, runs away to join an extremist group fighting for fair pay and justice, and is caught up in the escalating violence. Against this volatile backdrop, Kiri yearns for an education as the only way to escape a life of subjugation defined by her gender. Can she find the courage to follow a lonely, challenging path to freedom? ‘I was no better than a cow, brushed and groomed, neck and ankles festooned with bells, flowers around its horns to be put on display for someone to choose.’

Gripping and powerful and heart touching. Couldn't put it down... The author has a real gift for storytelling! A must-read kind of book. – Amazon reader Five stars The author transports the reader back in time to a very different era in India. Beautifully written story. Definitely a must read. – Maddie S Letters in the Sand is a beautifully written story set in 1970 India...about a young girl Kiri who is determined to fight for her rights as a woman in a society dominated by men. Her trials and tribulations...are vividly written. The author's descriptive style of writing had me transported back to 1970 India. Compelling to read, it is a page turner. I am waiting for the author's next book. Best wishes to the author. – Devi G

Publication date: October 20 2021 – available on advance order 978-1-9196248-0-8 paperback Price: £9.99 978-1-9196248-1-5 digital Price £5.99

Almost Then

January 28, 2021 , posted in