The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

    But Lythe was once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English tutor named William Shakespeare, and as Isobel investigates the strange history of her family, her neighbors, and her village, she occasionally gets caught in Shakespearean time warps. Meanwhile, she gets closer to the shocking truths about her missing mother, her war-hero father, and the hidden lives of her close friends and classmates. A stunning feat of imagination and storytelling, Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet is rich with the disappointments and possibilities every family shares.

    It takes the place of the pioneer edition edited by T.S. Eliot which was published in 1928.A representative group of early shorter poems is included; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius are printed complete; and there is a selection from the Cantos up to and including Drafts & Fragments (1969).Illustration by Wyndham Lewis

    Told through a variety of shifting perspectives- wives and husbands, friends and lovers, masters and their servants, and a gravedigger's son-Falling Angels follows the fortunes of two families in the emerging years of the twentieth century.

    A series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change. Every so often the sands shift enough to reveal great mysteries: the Star of Hope, wrecked on Mad Wharf in 1883 and usually just visible as a few wooden stumps, is suddenly raised one day, up from the depths - an entire wreck, black and barnacled, and on either side two more ruined ships, taking the air for a while before sinking back under the sand.And stranger still, perhaps, are the prehistoric footprints of humans, animals and birds on the beach: prints from the Late Mesolithic to mid-Neolithic period which are described as 'ephemeral archaeology' because they are preserved in the Holocene sediment, revealed briefly and then destroyed by the next tide.Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. Jean Sprackland, a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller, is the perfect guide to these shifting sands - this place of transformation.

    . . but this hill will be standing still to confound you." So curses Morty Donovan when Copper John Brodrick builds his mine at Hungry Hill.The Brodricks of Clonmere gain great wealth by harnessing the power of Hungry Hill and extracting the treasure it holds. The Donovans, the original owners of Clonmere Castle, resent the Brodricks' success, and consider the great house and its surrounding land theirs by rights. For generations the feud between the families has simmered, always threatening to break into violence . . .

    "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I'll be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."A tesseract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book.

    She soon escapes her fate for the loving arms of a wealthy young man, but misadventure and fate conspire to keep her from domestic bliss. Instead, Fanny discovers that sex need not be just for love; that it can be had for pleasure. She then sets out to explore those pleasures in as wide a variety as she can. With old men and young, and women as well; in positions of power, and situations where she has none; either watching or participating, Fanny's journey through the realms of sexual pleasure is a literary tour-de-force.

    The sheltered and unworldy Eugenia Malmains is one of the richest girls in England and an ardent supporter of General Jack and his Union Jackshirts. World-weary Noel Foster and his scheming friend Jasper Aspect are in search of wealthy heiresses to marry; Lady Marjorie, disguised as a commoner, is on the run from the Duke she has just jilted at the altar; and her friend Poppy is considering whether to divorce her rich husband.When these characters converge with the colorful locals at a grandly misconceived costume pageant that turns into a brawl between Pacifists and Jackshirts, madcap farce ensues. Long suppressed by the author out of sensitivity to family feelings, Wigs on the Green can now be enjoyed by fans of Mitford’s superbly comic novels.

    As two armies march, Commander Vimes faces unpleasant foes who are out to get him … and that’s just the people on his side. A great stage adaptation by Stephen Briggs of Terry Pratchett’s best-selling novel.Terry Pratchett has sold 27 million books worldwide. Stephen Briggs is his chosen stage adaptor.

    Merivel slips easily into a life of luxury and idleness, enthusiastically enjoying the women and wine of the vibrant Restoration age. But when he’s called on to serve the king in an unusual role, he transgresses the one law that he is forbidden to break and is brutally cast out from his newfound paradise. Thus begins Merivel’s journey to self-knowledge, which will take him down into the lowest depths of seventeenth-century society.

    For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane's life forever. As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.

    "On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet," commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, her Selected Poems (New Directions, 1964). The Selected won her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie in 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smith’s first published collection (London, 1937) was A Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, "images of joy and terror." A Newsweek reviewer wrote, "Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong."

    George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried - until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.Rich with Hollinghurst's signature gifts - haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism - The Stranger's Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.

    Examining how trauma becomes a part of the language we use, Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine.The collection crescendos to Scott's tour de force, 'Oh My Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps of Soho Square becomes a search for true lineage, a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves.