{"title":"January 2022","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"one-day-one-day-congotay","title":"One Day, One Day, Congotay","description":"\u003cp\u003eMerle Hodge’s rare achievement is to create a dynamic portrait of the life of an unquestionably good woman: Gwynneth Cuffie, teacher, lover of children and music, and pillar of her community. Though devastated by tragedy in her politically militant youth, Gwynneth never gives up the struggle against colonialism on the Caribbean island of Cayeri. Her triumph is to find a way between the aspirations of her wounded father, whom colonial education has taught racial self-hatred, and the world of her Mumma’s Spiritual Baptist community where, though the church is banned, Africa remains a real, enlivening presence. It is from the rhythms of Africa that the local youth, whom Teacher Gwynnie supports, develop the iron bands that grow into the national culture of steelband. If the class and racial tensions within the Cuffie family continue through the generations, Merle Hodge offers another vision of family that has little to do with biology, and everything to do with love. This is the family that gathers on the Cuffies’ gallery: the two men with whom the sisters have deep friendships, but from whom they maintain their independence; their neighbours – and Sonny, the child of Mumma’s carer who has left him in the sisters’ capable hands. It is Sonny, the pinnacle of Gwynneth’s life work, who promises to hold the future to account. This richly womanist novel shows the constant interpenetration of past, present and future. Its subject is life – tragic and comic – but moved onward by people who believe that through struggle better must come. It has much to say, by implication, about the present.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":39906775597134,"sku":"9781845235246","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_9607a801-957a-42bd-90f9-3e9b0d588b8f.jpg?v=1752241402"},{"product_id":"the-sons-of-red-lake","title":"The Sons of Red Lake","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn ailing mother forces Nuannuan to abandon her cherished metropolitan life and return to Chu Wang. Once there, she finds her birthplace fragmented and forgotten by modernity. Despite warnings, she quickly reconnects with Kaitian, a childhood sweetheart.  The village is centred around Red Lake, whose misty shores once provided solace to ancient kings and their entourages. The couple unearth forgotten treasures left behind from this royal past and are quick to capitalise, setting off a boom in tourism.  Word of the lake’s beauty spreads, attracting rampant outsider investment and infecting the sleepy village with dark tastes and unsettling appetites. Drunk on power, the newly elected mayor quickly starts to reshape Chu Wang to his own corrupt ends. Determined to share in this new abundance, will the villagers swap one type of poverty for another?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"ACA Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584332709966,"sku":"9781838905439","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_5b1750c1-dace-4c31-bf51-4cf441b8573a.jpg?v=1752241401"},{"product_id":"a-scream-in-the-shadows","title":"A Scream in the Shadows","description":"\u003cp\u003eGrittier than TV’s ‘A Death in Paradise’, this crime novel is set in the rural Caribbean (St Lucia) where traditional allegiances and a moribund criminal justice system provide a backdrop to the rape and murder of a young girl. When her father is accused of the crime, her brother joins the police to try and clear their father's name. While the suspect languishes in jail on remand, the young detective makes some alarming discoveries. Thwarted by his mother but supported by his girlfriend, a horrible truth finally emerges.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"papillote press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":45152292536609,"sku":"9781838041533","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_04c51e1f-b526-47a7-afa2-29ffc444a7b3.png?v=1752239624"},{"product_id":"the-1566-series-book-three","title":"The 1566 Series (Book Three)","description":" \u003cb\u003eThe fate of the Ming hangs on a knife edge.\u003c\/b\u003e In the south, defence against relentless pirate raids is escalating into all-out war. The beleaguered Chinese forces must rally for a desperate last stand fought across salt and sand. Nearby, fearless magistrate Hai Rui is tasked with investigating a major corruption scandal.  In Beijing, a chance to trump the embezzling viper Yan Song and his influential clan presents itself. There to snatch it is the Crown Prince, and his coalition of the righteous. At a time when the appearance of a mysterious ‘blood scripture’ could either turn the tide or unleash chaos untold, chief eunuch Lu Fang, a loyal and yet crafty kingmaker, is forced to choose sides.  In war as in the Forbidden City, the game is sudden death. Now, China’s heroes make their move: a perilous gambit to salvage centuries of progress. If they fail… everything burns.    ","brand":"ACA Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584332841038,"sku":"9781910760635","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_538025c0-afa5-40a4-9187-e1fa75bcac89.jpg?v=1752240771"},{"product_id":"the-last-one","title":"The Last One","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transport to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy – her longest relationship. As she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn’t know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Through fiction, I was able to explore everything that had made me,' Daas says. 'Being a woman, but not what was expected of a woman. Being a north African woman, but also French, the only member of the family born in France. Being lesbian, being Muslim. It was almost a luxury for me, through fiction, to make all those identities coexist in my central character. I knew that those identities were in tension and confrontation in society, but for once, through fiction, I felt like I was liberating and reconciling them'.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hope Road","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584332906574,"sku":"9781913109851","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_d7008e1e-4e3d-49e9-abfb-e286b1ffbb6b.jpg?v=1752240984"},{"product_id":"go-back-at-once","title":"Go Back at Once","description":" Completed\nby Robert Aickman in 1975, but never before widely available, \u003ci\u003eGo Back at Once\u003c\/i\u003e is a delicious,\ndelirious comic fantasia about the joys and terrors of a life devoted to\nresisting the degradations of conformism. It tells the story of Cressida\nHazeborough and her friend Vivien, two mordantly intelligent young women trying\nto find their ways in a misty, pre-Depression Britain. The pair have little\npatience for the company of the marriageable men they are meant to endure, yet\nneither do they possess the means to live as they might wish: together, and\napart from the demands of modern society. What’s a girl to do? \n\n\n\n Having left\nschool and taken the sorts of London job available to women of their age and\nstation, remarkable news arrives: a great foreign poet, playwright, athlete,\nand soldier named Virgilio Vittore has successfully conquered the tiny country\nof Trino, on the Adriatic Sea, and is now governing it ‘according to the laws\nof music’. Could this new utopia be a refuge for Cressida and Vivien, and\nindeed all who seek a life less ordinary? Or should the women, having arrived\nin this chaotic land, where love, life, and politics must submit to the rules\nof the beautiful, take to heart the advice of the novel’s title? \n\n\n\n Snobbish\nyet humane, reactionary yet camp, strait-laced yet queer, old-fashioned yet\nradical, \u003ci\u003eGo Back at Once\u003c\/i\u003e reveals\nRobert Aickman as a master not only of the ‘strange story’, but a satirist\ndeserving of a place alongside the mischievous and venomous greats of the\ninter-war canon: Firbank, Compton-Burnett, Waugh, Powell.  \n\n\n\n\n\n  ","brand":"And Other Stories","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584333070414,"sku":"9781913505202","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_4e7f374b-7e67-4a01-92fe-54bb4753042e.jpg?v=1752240983"},{"product_id":"phenotypes","title":"Phenotypes","description":" Federico\nand Lourenço are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic pathologist\nfor the police; their mother is white. Federico – distant, angry, analytical –\nhas light skin, which means he’s always been able to avoid the worst of the\nracism that Brazilian culture has to offer. He can ‘pass’ as white, and yet,\nbecause of this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenço, on the\nother hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the brothers’\nhometown of Porto Alegre – and has become a father himself.  \n\n\n\n As\nFederico’s fiftieth birthday looms, he joins a governmental committee in the\ncapital. It is tasked with quelling the increasingly violent student protests\nrocking Brazil by overseeing the design of a software program that will\nadjudicate the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black\nto warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before he can come\nto grips with his feelings about this initiative, not to mention a budding\nromance with one of his committee colleagues, Federico is called home: his\nniece has just been arrested at a protest carrying a concealed gun. And not\njust any gun. A stolen police service revolver that Federico and Lourenço hid\nfor a friend decades before. A gun used in a killing. \n\n\n\n Paulo Scott\nhere probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a\nblack identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than\ndidactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel\nof ideas, \u003ci\u003ePhenotypes \u003c\/i\u003eis a seething masterpiece of rage and\nreconciliation.  \n\n\n\n\n\n  ","brand":"And Other Stories","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584333135950,"sku":"9781913505189","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_7722b734-3a29-4956-95e6-6233f1b8e7c8.jpg?v=1752240455"},{"product_id":"nadir","title":"Nadir","description":" There are 35\nmillion child refugees in the world today; over a million children were born in\nflight, in exile, in camps. While a great deal has been written about the suffering\nof those who are fleeing persecution, displacement, hunger and war, in \u003ci\u003eNadir\n\u003c\/i\u003eLaura Fusco attempts to record the voices of the refugees themselves,\nespecially the women and the children. \n\n \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e \n\n \u003ci\u003eNadir \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about desert\ncaravans, dangerous sea-crossings and desperate marches, about fences, camps, detention\ncentres, squats and underpasses. It is a portrait of ‘a crowd of a hundred\nsolitudes’, the wretched of the earth, the defeated who refuse to accept\ndefeat.  \n\n ","brand":"Smokestack Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584334020686,"sku":"9781838465346","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_4bd2d03c-7bf2-4a9b-a0a7-37ed438380d7.jpg?v=1752239623"},{"product_id":"overlap","title":"Overlap","description":"Valerie Bence’s latest poetry pamphlet is a testament to ordinary lives, and a meditation on grandmothers. Part memoir, part family history, \u003ci\u003eOverlap \u003c\/i\u003eis a series of vivid vignettes from the poet’s childhood, courtship, motherhood and grandmotherhood, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.  Winifred and Harriet are at the heart of this book: Bence’s grandmothers, whose hardy, steadfast lives she comes to reflect on as she too becomes a grandmother, in very different times. Stranded from her family in the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet conjures up their ghosts, walks in their footsteps and – sometimes – feels herself become them. \n  We mash tealeaves and bran for the rabbit,\n the sweet aroma fogging her glasses,\n and every day, for five shillings a week,  she scrubs bloody butcher’s aprons.  We take the clean ones back on the bus,  until the day she faints outside Boots in the rain,  sliding down the wall like in a cartoon,  her wartime hat slipping over her eyes.  ","brand":"The Emma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584334053454,"sku":"9781912915941","price":6.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_045bb8e1-6c76-48f7-9d35-15fe01afcfe7.jpg?v=1752239122"}],"url":"https:\/\/inpressbooks.co.uk\/collections\/january-2022\/fatima-daas.oembed","provider":"Inpress Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}