Acts of Desperation, Megan Nolan ( paperback Jan 2022)
£8.99
She's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She's intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other's ideals. He keeps emailing his thin, glamorous ex, and she's starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own.
The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn... We're all looking to get what we want - but do we know what we need?
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The Faerie Thorn and other Stories, Jane Talbot ( paperback, 2015)
£10.99
Man Donaghy crept silently around the back of the farmhouse and over the field to the faerie thorn. The thorn was shimmering as he knelt before it. Whispering directly to the roots of the tree, Man Donaghy said, "I want you to take Wife Donaghy."'Jane Talbot's seven bewitching tales will draw you into a world of fairy tales and magick, a world of devilish debts, trysts and trades, of broken bargains and unjust trials, of quick-wittedness, of hoodwinking, of revenge.A dark, tender, dazzling collection that will make you remember why you love stories. The stories in this collection follow many conventions associated with traditional, oral storytelling. For this reason, as well as enjoying the stories in the privacy of your own head, you might also find that they're even better when read aloud and shared with others.
Ruth & Pen, Emilie Pine ( hardback May 2022)
£14.99
The brilliant debut novel from Emilie Pine, author of the international bestseller NOTES TO SELF
Dublin, 7 October 2019 One day, one city, two women: Ruth and Pen. Neither knows the other, but both are asking the same questions: how to be with others and how, when the world won't make space for you, to be with yourself? Ruth's marriage to Aidan is in crisis. Today she needs to make a choice - to stay or not to stay, to take the risk of reaching out, or to pull up the drawbridge.
For teenage Pen, today is the day the words will flow, and she will speak her truth to Alice, to ask for what she so desperately wants. RUTH & PEN is the fictional debut from Emilie Pine, author of the international bestseller NOTES TO SELF. Deeply involving, poignant and radiantly intelligent, it is a portrait of the limits of grief and love, of how we navigate our inner and outer landscapes, and the tender courage demanded by the simple, daily quest of living.
The Quiet Whispers Never Stop, Olivia Fitzsimons ( hardback, April 2022)
£16.99
In 1982, Nuala Malin struggles to stay connected, to her husband, to motherhood, to the smallness of her life in the belly of a place that is built on hate and stagnation. Her daughter Sam and baby son PJ keep her tethered to this life she doesn't want. She finds unexpected refuge with a seventeen-year-old boy, but this relationship is only temporary, a sticking plaster on a festering wound.
It cannot last and when her chance to leave Northern Ireland comes, Nuala takes it. In 1994, Sam Malin plans escape. She longs for a life outside her dysfunctional family, far away from the North and all its troubles, free from her quiet brooding father Patsy, who never talks about her mother, Nuala; a woman Sam barely knew, who abandoned them twelve years ago.
She finds solace in music, drugs and her best friend Becca, but most of all in an illicit relationship with a jagged, magnetic older man.
Linda - I found this coming of age story powerful, toxic and very very readable - loved the imaginative voice and thoughts of Sam
Seven Steeples, Sara Baume ( paperback, Apr 22)
£11.99
The mountain remained, unclimbed, for the first year that they lived there. Bell and Sigh, a couple in the infancy of their relationship, cut themselves off from friends and family. They turn their backs on a city divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees, by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows.Them in and the world out. From the top of the nearby mountain, they are told, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. All you have to do is climb.
Taking place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland, this rich and vivid novel spans seven years and speaks to the times we live in, asking how we may withdraw, how better to live in the natural world, and how the choices made or avoided lead us home.
