Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.

    His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.

    In 18th-century England, Mary's shrewd instincts will get her only so far, and she despairs of the plans made for her to carve out a trade as a seamstress or a maid. Unwilling to bend to such a destiny, Mary strikes out on a painful, fateful journey all her own. Inspired by the obscure historical figure Mary Saunders, Slammerkin is a provocative, graphic tale and a rich feast of an historical novel. Author Emma Donoghue probes the gap between a young girl's quest for freedom and a better life and the shackles that society imposes on her. "Never give up your liberty."

    She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons and they grow up as friends in ignorance of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a blood-bath. 'Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit story about the working of fate and destiny … it carries one along with it in almost unreserved enjoyment" Guardian One of the longest-running and most successful ever West End musicals, Blood Brothers premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in January 1983.

    A perfect evening of comedy. Scenes Include:ACT ONEWord Dance (Part One)The Night the Bed FellFables for Our Time (Part One)The Wolf at the DoorThe Unicorn in the GardenThe Little Girl and the WolfIf Grant Had Been Drinking at AppomattoxCasuals of the KeysThe Macbeth Murder MysteryGentleman ShoppersThe Last FlowerACT TWOThe Pet DepartmentFile and ForgetMr. Preble Gets Rid of His WifeTake Her Up TenderlyThe Secret Life of Walter MiddyWord Dance (Part Two) Only material authorized for the production of this play may be used."Of belly laughs there is abundance...Small, cozy, and completely captivating revue...a sheer delight... joyous, magnificently lunatic festival" - New York Daily News

    A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. Jean's travels leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.

    A short critical essay which considers the significance of the title.

    He regularly gives lifts to Valerie—beautiful, haunting, but terminally ill—from 13 Wish Road to her "positive thinking classes" at the community center. When he is no longer asked to drive her, he fears that she is dead, and questions Sal, one of the night operators. Her response turns Stephen’s world upside down. "But Stephen," she tells him, "there is no such address. Wish Road doesn’t have a number 13." As time passes, the world gets weirder. People appear (and disappear) who know far too much about Stephen and his past, and who lure him further and further into the twilight world of Thirteen. But if he asks any questions, he gets hurt. Ultimately, he decides, for the sake of both his safety and his sanity, he must walk away—but Thirteen has no intention of letting him go

    Clerks was the independent film success story of 1994, winning the Prix de la Jeunesse and the International Critics Week Award at Cannes, and the Filmmakers' Trophy at Sundance. Set in the everyday world of a New Jersey QuickStop and its adjacent video store, the film revolves around the obsessions, love lives, and friendships of the clerks. Janet Maslin of the New York Time called it "a buoyant comedy...and exuberant display of ingenuity," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times raves, "Clerks is boisterous and irreverently funny...an example of what is best and most hopeful about the American independent film scene."

    When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return.

    It is the start of the journey for an entirely different group of survivors and begins with their desperate battle to escape what has become ground zero for the sudden apocalypse, the mecca for hundreds upon hundreds of the Walking Dead.

    Lew McCreary's brilliant, chilling novel enters the mind of a harmless drifter whose idea of intimacy is murder. Vann Siegert is by all appearances an ordinary man. With only his truck and a few possessions, he has moved cross-country to start a new life, taking a temporary holiday job at the post office in a small Massachusetts town. But when the urge calls him, Vann takes to the road-armed with a poisoned flask of liquor and a smile that strangers trust. Woe to those who accept his comfort-junkies, hitchhikers, a high school football star, Vann gathers his victims like moths to a flame. A harrowing journey inside the mind of a disquietingly compassionate psychopath, The Minus Man is an unforgettable literary experience and is sure to be one of the year's most talked-about movies.

    A family. And that is exactly what she gets-a daddy and two "wifeys." So what if she has to go out and earn some coins to keep her place? It seems a fair enough exchange for love.Dime never meant to become a prostitute. It happened so gradually, she pretty much didn't realize it was happening until it was too late.But when a new "wifey" joins the family and Dime finds out that Daddy doesn't love her the way she thought he did, will Dime have the strength to leave? And will Daddy let her?

    Ann and Joe, with more than thirty years of marriage and two sons between them, are torn between giving up and pressing on with their struggling farm. Max, their older son, is set to inherit the farm and his wife Primrose has news to share, but is he ready for these new responsibilities? Their younger son, Bartholomew, escaped to the south as soon as he could, building a new life for himself with his girlfriend Ruby. But when tragedy strikes he is forced to return home �- and must come to terms with his past, in order to create a future.Filled with both the joys and losses of ordinary life, Homecoming is a big-hearted drama about how a family falls apart and comes back together again from a hugely talented new writer.

    In that small apartment, Black and White, as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.