{"title":"February 2021","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"real-cambridge","title":"Real Cambridge","description":"\u003cp\u003eCambridge, ancient academic centre and fenland community, science\/tech centre and centre of radical religious and political thinking, home to grand museums and agricultural cottages. With an American war cemetery, folk festival, iron age fort, evensong and naked bike ride, it is a place alone as former student Grahame Davies finds on his return.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Seren","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31640062820430,"sku":"9781781725719","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/files\/9781781725719.jpg?v=1752240136"},{"product_id":"far-from-douala","title":"A Long Way from Douala","description":"\u003cp\u003eImportant issues of violence, terrorism, homosexuality and migration feature in \u003ci\u003eA Long Way from Douala\u003c\/i\u003e, the first  publication in English of a work by \u003cstrong\u003eMax Lobé\u003c\/strong\u003e, an important new voice in African writing. On the trail of Roger, a brother who has gone north in search of football fame in Europe, Choupi, the narrator, takes with him the older Simon, a neighborhood friend. The bus trip north nearly ends in disaster when, at a pit stop, Simon goes wandering in search of grilled caterpillars. At the police station in Yaoundé, the local cop tells them that a feckless \u003ci\u003eboza \u003c\/i\u003ewho wants to go to Europe is not worth police effort and their mother should go and pleasure the police chief if she wants help! Through a series of joyful sparky vignettes, Cameroon life is revealed in all its ups and downs. Issues of life and death are raised but the tone remains light and edgy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HopeRoad","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31905793638478,"sku":"9781913109011","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/Screenshot2021-01-15at16.34.23.png?v=1752240114"},{"product_id":"anxious-corporals","title":"Anxious Corporals","description":" \u003ci\u003eAnxious Corporals\u003c\/i\u003e is a celebration of the lost world of the self-educating working-class, from Mr Kipps, Leonard Bast and the Age of Hooper to Workington Man. Taking its title from Arthur Koestler's idea of the culture-thirsty conscript, Morrison recalls the men and women who once sought 'self-improvement' through correspondence courses, adult education, political parties and Pelican paperbacks. It’s an essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, Reason and Reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the post-war consensus.  ","brand":"Smokestack Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32684857065550,"sku":"9781916312128","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_3d3f9f64-d028-41d1-9a99-f2550f6c8c38.jpg?v=1752239404"},{"product_id":"the-1566-series-book-two","title":"The 1566 Series (Book Two)","description":" \u003cb\u003eGreed and mismanagement have almost toppled the Ming empire. \u003c\/b\u003eRaiders from beyond the Great Wall have set the north ablaze. Along the southern coast, Japanese pirates are severing heads. Hu Zongxian, the honourable governor of Zhejiang Province, is leading the charge of China’s heroes as they meet the invaders head-on.  In the capital, it is down to a humble magistrate named Hai Rui to restore justice. Peril unknown and opponents even more deadly than the ruthless Yan clan await him. If he discovers blood on divine hands, he will find himself on a collision course with the chief eunuch, Lu Fang, whose loyalty to the Taoist Emperor is matched only by Hai’s loyalty to the common people.   Criminals walk the halls in silk robes. Hidden eyes are everywhere. Will the path of righteousness prevail, or shall the corrupt go unpunished? The fate of all under heaven hangs in the balance. 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Preoccupied with\nwhiskey and cigarettes, sex and Catholic guilt, Lillie unknowingly sets in\nmotion events leading to death and estrangement from her two best friends. \n\n A decade on, Lillie is still haunted by the ghosts of\nthat summer. Did she act solely out of youthful naivety and adolescent\njealousy? Or perhaps there were darker forces at work: grief, guilt, sexual\nassault, and the double standards of her strict religious upbringing. Searching\nfor patterns and meaning in the events of that year, and anxious to understand\nthe person she has become, Lillie reflects on the darkness of her tarnished\nyouth and confesses her sins. \n\n   \n\n \u003cb\u003eLong blurb\u003c\/b\u003e \n\n \u003ci\u003eThe Essence of an Hour \u003c\/i\u003eis\nthe debut novel from Susan Furber. Set in the summer of 1941, the story follows\neighteen-year-old Lillie Carrigan as she experiences first love with her\nlifelong friend, Teddy McCalman. Bound together by shared experiences of early loss\nand grief, Lillie and Teddy spend their time drinking and smoking, clinging to\neach other and their intense romance. Desperate to lose her virginity, but held\nback by Catholic guilt, past assault, and the judgement of her best friend,\nLara, Lillie battles with her sexual awakening and the double standards which\ncome with it. She is intoxicated by the summer’s heady mix of alcohol and\npheromones, not realizing that the events she sets in motion will lead to\nanguish, trauma, and loss. Ten years on, Lillie recounts the story of that\nsummer, confessing to the sins of her past. \n\n The ideas behind \u003ci\u003eThe Essence of an Hour\u003c\/i\u003e came\nfrom the author’s own interest in the cyclical nature of trauma, and her effort\nto understand why ordinary people hurt each other, either intentionally or\nunintentionally. Susan’s experience of being raised Catholic, and receiving a\nCatholic education, sparked her desire to explore the struggles of young women\ncaught between sexuality and religion, the double standards they experience,\nand the burden of carrying secrets of assault and abuse. Though \u003ci\u003eThe Essence\nof an Hour \u003c\/i\u003ehas all the ingredients of a classic young adult novel, it is\ncertainly not a story you have heard before. You won’t find clichés, prom\nqueens, or happy endings within its pages. \u003ci\u003eThe Essence of an Hour \u003c\/i\u003eis an\nexquisite example of beautifully written literary fiction which will leave you\nreeling. 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Suitable for readers aged 8+.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Emma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32795204419662,"sku":"9781912915682","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_32794de5-f09e-48b2-8d85-cc75ed86c6fe.jpg?v=1752239634"},{"product_id":"the-ciphermaster","title":"The Ciphermaster","description":" \u003cb\u003e1927.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eCHINA IS IN TURMOIL.\u003c\/b\u003e  The Communist Party and the Kuomintang government, long at each others’ throats, are now locked into a conflict set to claim the lives of millions. History remembers the bodies and battlefields, but for some, fate was decided between the ciphers.  \u003cb\u003eJi Zhenren’s\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e mind is the Red Army’s prize asset. \u003c\/b\u003eHis task: to break the enemy’s near-impenetrable codes. 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Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death. \u003cbr\u003e\n While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"ACA Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32795204517966,"sku":"9781838905064","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_28ecad25-2e37-4f9e-b6bc-65a5011895ed.jpg?v=1752240792"},{"product_id":"aliens","title":"Aliens","description":"\u003cp\u003eThese short stories look at aliens in many forms; they may be bug-eyed monsters from outer space, they may be boat people  washed up on a South coast beach, or they may be a westerner culturally adrift in a far-flung country. 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Through collaboration with Thomson, the project expanded to consider how design and visual intervention might alter the nature and impact of the text.  The outcome is a book which explores the subjects of illness, crisis, creativity, caring, death and grief, alongside the aesthetic and formal concerns of cross-genre writing, including how image, formatting and text work together to create tension, understanding and pace, expanding the possibilities of the essay and the artist’s book.  Formally audacious, linguistically fluid, sensitive and intricate in its visual presentation, \u003ci\u003emicrobursts\u003c\/i\u003e uses the potential and elasticity of the essay form to explore intensely personal, yet universal, experiences and considers the ways in which we can express and communicate these through spatial and linguistic form. 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Written in the voice or guise of the art-restorer, the poems are precise in their observations and meticulous about recovering memories, building their surfaces up carefully with layers of thoughts and images.    Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue, glass houses, collections, seed, crinolines and barometers, memory itself. The collection roams through these subjects, and others, exploring how they mourn, or celebrate, or distort, or resist, the mutability of experience within the physical universe.  The masterworks mentioned have as much to say through the chemistry of their pigments as they do through the acknowledgement of their place in a historical timeline. These poems contemplate the personality of the artist and the fugitive, shifting quality of subject-matter. Genteel attitudes are curtailed by a generous use of slang: ‘this stinks!’ There is also a way in which the artistic is also culpable, inevitably involved with the political and socio-political such as in ‘Goebbels’s Violin’, which relates the tale of Nazi Goebbels’s gift of a Stradivarius violin to a young, musical prodigy.    Because change is always temporal, time is also at the heart of this tension. Entwined, is a more personal story about the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters like the explorer, Isabel Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen) who lived in Llangrannog, a small beachside village in Wales. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed. 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Erotic and tense, in Quin’s compelling third novel the author allowed her writing freer rein than before and created a work ahead of its time: her most poetic, evocative and mysterious novel yet.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"And Other Stories","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32795204812878,"sku":"9781911508939","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_5aa3def0-eb98-4324-924e-25860d3fbc0f.jpg?v=1752240475"},{"product_id":"attempts-on-death","title":"Attempts on Death","description":" Baghdad 2003.\nThe city is in flames, caught between a violent dictatorship and an illegal\ninvasion. For the US it is ‘mission accomplished’. For Iraqis it is the\nbeginning of a nightmare apocalypse in which over half a million people will die.\nMeanwhile the world’s cameras ‘stuff themselves with dust and human flesh.’ \n\n\n\n \u003ci\u003eAttempts on Death \u003c\/i\u003eis an\nattempt by the Iraqi poet and diplomat Chawki Abdelamir to understand the historic\ndestruction of his country and the breaking of its millennia-old past into fragments.\nIt’s a book about oil and sand, soldiers and civilians, heroes and martyrs, the\ninnocent and the dead. Drawing on Sumerian mythology, Islamic history, Arab\npoetry and the everyday horror of twenty-first century warfare, Chawki tries to\nexplain how Mesopotamia – the legendary paradise of palm-trees and vineyards,\nand the birthplace of human civilisation –is reduced to a delirious hell ‘where\nthe dead are dying of thirst and the living of madness’. Grim, despairing and\ndesperate,\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eAttempts on Death \u003c\/i\u003eis also a rich, sensual and ultimately\noptimistic book.  \n\n ","brand":"Smokestack Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32795204845646,"sku":"9781916312159","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_7e1fe8a6-6f3e-40ba-9416-c4b382e3173d.jpg?v=1752239634"},{"product_id":"the-out-islands","title":"The Out-Islands","description":" The Caribbean Out-Islands are a long way out, just over the horizon. Christopher Columbus made landfall here. Atlantis is said to lie beneath the waves. The Out-Islands have been safe-havens for pirates, escaped slaves and the super-rich. Although these islands are mostly uninhabited today, they carry names like Paradise Island, Peace and Plenty Island and Eleuthera Island. When the ice-caps melt they will disappear forever. \n \u003cb\u003eMartin Edwards \u003c\/b\u003elived close to the Out-Islands for a number of years. Although he never found the time to visit them, they are still there, a long way out, but just over the wide horizon. \u003ci\u003eThe Out-Islands\u003c\/i\u003e is a book about Paradise and its discontents, about homesickness and utopian longing, about travellers and tourists, surfers, swimmers and drowned sailors. 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Traumatised by events in her Cambridge lab, she has stopped eating and speaking, but her calculations allow her to feel, map and assess her way forwards. With her estranged mother Elektra riding out the pandemic in Bali, these mathematical incantations are her only hope for survival.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eEnter Jill Purce, a cult '70s documentary maker who Chinna, from her grandmother’s bed in Sumatra, watches fervently. Chinna is enamoured: by Jill and her belief in the vitality of change, and by the piercing gaze of her son, Chinna’s professor Merlin, whose vision of fungi as flesh, life as polyphony, has turned viral.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eExuberant and unforgettable, Nada Holland takes the reader beyond easy stoicism and into more puzzling terrain. 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