We were inundated with thousands of disgusterous entries! To discover our winners, we waded through burps, farts and rotten eggs; bogies, vile stew and goo to find the funniest and most revolting specimens. This eBook contains the crème de la phlegm-hand picked by children's author, songwriter and McFly frontman, Tom Fletcher, and Wales's Children's Poet Laureate, Anni Llyn.A huge thank you to our revolting partners Puffin Books, the National Literacy Trust, Literature Wales, Magic Light, and the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre for all their help and support!

    “Well written and I was left wanting to read on.... It is certainly an intriguing concept” (Troubador)“Writing is dynamic and fast-paced. There's a definite charm about the novel that, I think, would appeal to the kind of audience cultivated by writers such as Marina Lewycka” (HHB Agency)“What a charming novel. I’m from Dundee myself, and the masterful way you wove together setting and culture was admirable. Your characters, too, were powerful yet compassionate, and the prose had a lovely twisting quality” (Canongate Press)“This is fresh and intriguing” (Andrew Lownie)Mrs Keiller's Marmalade is a book about marmalade, the isolation of old age, respect for tradition and the pain of abandonment. Maggie Keiller is a fictional descendent of John Keiller, the last patriarch of Keiller marmalade, whose clan famously created the first ‘Dundee Marmalade’. She is married John's son Billy Keiller in 1909 but lost him in the same year to a storm which visited their small enclave of Auchobane, a village perched precociously on the Dundee coastline of North-East Scotland. Forward fifty years, and Maggie lives a lonely life in Rose Cottage surrounded only by her jars of fine and vintage homemade marmalade. Her only visitor is Dougie, an elderly grocery man and decorated veteran. Maggie’s life is changed when she unexpectedly receives a letter from her estranged niece in London, asking for haven for her teenage daughter. Maggie takes her on, not out of affection for her niece whom she loathes, but to fill the void left by her childless marriage. Isla arrives in 1969, a year on the cusp of a revolution in the London she has just left, and in her own life, hiding the pregnancy she has kept from her mother. Maggie teaches Isla about her heritage, and hopes to pass on to her the tradition of marmalade making. For Isla, abandoned by mother and lover, and struggling to cope with the imminent arrival of an unwanted child, her bond with Maggie becomes a channel to help regain the self-esteem taken from her over her young years. The book culminates in Isla’s entry into the silver spoon Marmalade competition, fifty years after Maggie Keiller had taken the same prize.

     A shadow hangs over John Thomas Fury in this his first voyage as a midshipman aboard the 32-gun frigate Amazon. Fury is already seen as a pariah by his fellow sailors. Ten years earlier his father, a brig commander in the Service, became mentally unbalanced and violent and his ships crew mutinied and went over to the French. Now, as Amazon heads southwards on her voyage to India, Fury is involved in a dreadful shipboard accident and he finds himself working doubly hard to prove that he isn't cursed just like his father. Redemption arrives when Amazon reaches Bombay, only to discover that ships of the East India Company have disappeared, including the Company's warships - somewhere in the Indian Ocean a very powerful privateer is at work and the Governor despatches Amazon to find and destroy her. Soon afterwards Amazon is in a fight for her life against a much stronger foe, resulting in many of her officers killed. Fury finds himself, in his first ever combat, in charge of the gun deck. In such crucibles of fire are the officers in His Majesty's Service forged. Showing exceptional courage and coolness, the shadows of the past are forever banished and Fury's naval career begins in glory as he becomes a leader of men.

    

    The bus was unthinkably tall, made of yellow, orange and pink rice paper. That was a dream, but this romance soon intersects with reality.

    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

    

    This new collection has a bonus section: in a series of wonderfully funny poems, responding to Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife McGough gives voice to a number of forgotten and longsuffering male figures: Lord Godiva, Mr Sappho, Mr Blyton, etcPresenter of Radio 4's Poetry Please and Britain's foremost popular poet, McGough brings us this happy collision of life, language and imagination with his unique and witty wordplay. His recent adaptation of The Hypochondriac playing at the Liverpool Playhouse has had fantastic reviews where, as with all his writing, McGough "produces that rare sound, an audience rocking to rhyme" (Susannah Clapp, Observer)

    As a black child of the American South and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, Komunyakaa brings his singular vision to this outstanding volume. Included here is a diverse mix of senior masters, crowd-pleasing bards, rising stars, and the fresh voices of an emerging generation. With comments from the poets elucidating their work and series editor David Lehman's eloquent foreword assessing the state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2003 is a must-have for readers of contemporary poetry. Jonathan Aaron • Beth Anderson • Nin Andrews • Wendell Berry • Frank Bidart • Diann Blakely • Bruce Bond • Catherine Bowman • Rosemary Catacalos • Joshua Clover • Billy Collins • Michael S. Collins • Carl Dennis • Susan Dickman • Rita Dove • Stephen Dunn • Stuart Dybek • Charles Fort • James Galvin • Amy Gerstler • Louise Glück • Michael Goldman • Ray Gonzalez • Linda Gregg • Mark Halliday • Michael S. Harper • Matthea Harvey • George Higgins • Edward Hirsch • Tony Hoagland • Richard Howard • Rodney Jones • Joy Katz • Brigit Pegeen Kelly • Galway Kinnell • Carolyn Kizer • Jennifer L. Knox • Kenneth Koch • John Koethe • Ted Kooser • Philip Levine • J. D. McClatchy • W. S. Merwin • Heather Moss • Stanley Moss • Paul Muldoon • Peggy Munson • Marilyn Nelson • Daniel Nester • Naomi Shihab Nye • Ishle Yi Park • Robert Pinsky • Kevin Prufer • Ed Roberson • Vijay Seshadri • Alan Shapiro • Myra Shapiro • Bruce Smith • Charlie Smith • Maura Stanton • Ruth Stone • James Tate • William Tremblay • Natasha Trethewey • David Wagoner • Ronald Wallace • Lewis Warsh • Susan Wheeler • Richard Wilbur • C. K. Williams • Terence Winch • David Wojahn Robert Wrigley • Anna Ziegler • Ahmos Zu-Bolton II

    Don Marquis' creations have been constantly in print since 1934.

    They celebrate the wonders of nature and explore the nature of love and friendship.

    It's a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

    Instead, she's a teacher, a mum and wife to Julian, a very English husband. When disaster befalls her best friend, Karina feels forced to question the very foundations of her existence.

    Over the course of the novel, he leads us through a series of encounters and adventures from industrial North Kent to the sleazy sex clubs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn. A powerful sequel to Childish's first novel My Fault

    The poet Donald Davie writes: 'Vikram Seth's poems should have an impact far beyond much noisier pieces; for when did we last see a volume in which the poet's eye is on what is objectively before him, rather than on the intricacies of his own sensibility?'