Bellies, Nicola Dinan ( Hardback June 2023)
£14.99
It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at a university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant.Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition.
Through a spiral of unforeseen crises - some personal, some professional, some life-altering - Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?
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Grief is the thing with Feathers, Max Porter ( 2016)
£9.99
An extraordinary debut novella by Max Porter, loosely about a family dealing with the immediate period of grief following their mother’s death. Crow is the metaphorical visitor. Recently performed as a powerful stage play with Cillian Murphy.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. This extraordinary debut, full of unexpected humour and emotional truth, marks the arrival of a thrilling and significant new talent.
Stitches: A handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair
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A wise and compassionate exploration of how we ‘stitch by stitch ‘ put our lives back in order after loss or personal chaos. From the best selling American novelist and nonfiction writer.
What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one another and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable?These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's follow-up to her New York Times-bestselling work, Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, she explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped sheets of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together - one stitch at a time.
It's in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humour and humanity.
Wonder, by RJ Palaccio
£7.99
Auggie just wants to be a normal 10 year old ... but as he was born with a facial abnormality he has been homeschooled by his parents his whole life. Now it’s time to face the real world and a normal school ... Wonder is a funny frank and astonishingly moving book.
Suitable for both boys and girls 9-12.
The Poetry Pharmacy, edited by William Sieghart ( clothbound hardback)
£14.99
Not just poems, but words of wisdom and solace for a whole range of spiritual ailments. A lovely thing indeed.
'Truly a marvellous collection ... There is balm for the soul, fire for the belly, a cooling compress for the fevered brow, solace for the wounded, an arm around the lonely shoulder - the whole collection is a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss' Stephen FrySometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and that precious realization - I'm not the only one who feels like this.
In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary: those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.
New volume available from September 2019 'The Poetry Pharmacy Returns' with new reader chosen options and most popular requests.
