Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now, after being dropped by her latest lover, Mr. Mackenzie, Julia is running out of luck and chances. A visit to London to see her ailing mother might offer an opportunity to start over—but it also brings her face to face with her distrustful sister, Norah, who can’t help but feel that Julia has only changed for the worse in the years since they last saw one another. And it proves difficult to escape the desultory romantic entanglements of Paris when a suitor follows her to England.Nowhere is Jean Rhys’s talent for fully inhabiting the minds of her characters more apparent than in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, her masterful second novel. Rhys lays bare the desires and contradictions of the mercurial Julia, and all those trapped in her orbit, in this haunting depiction of life after the end of a tumultuous affair.

    Each of the stories introduces a different side of the twentieth century's most ingenious detective hero.This book also features a biographical essay by Janet Hitchman, Sayers' first biographer.

    The Evening Standard described Bilgewater as "one of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love."Motherless and 16, Marigold is the headmaster's daughter at a private backwater all-boys school. To make matters worse, Marigold pines for head boy Jack Rose, reckons with the beautiful and domineering Grace, and yanks herself headlong out of her interior world and into the seething cauldron of adolescence. With everything happening all at once, Marigold faces the greatest of teenage crucibles. A smart and painterly romp in the rich tradition of The Hollow Land and A Long Way From Verona, Gardam's elegant, evocative prose, possessed of sharp irony and easy surrealism makes Bilgewater a book for readers of all ages.

    

    It remains as fresh as when it was first published.

    In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

    350 copies.(Out of print).Contents: "Introduction by Glen Cavaliero, "The School Friend", "Ringing the Changes", "Choice of Weapons", "The Waiting Room", "The View" and "Bind Your Hair".As Dr Glen Cavaliero states in his introduction to this new edition of Dark Entries, "It is Robert Aickman's peculiar achievement that he should invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night".Dark Entries was the first solo collection of "strange stories" by British short story writer, critic, lecturer and novelist, Robert Aickman. First published in 1964 it contains the classic "Ringing the Changes" and perhaps Aickman's best femme fatale in "Choice of Weapons." The version of "The View" is slightly re-written from its first appearance in We are for the Dark.

    In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire--the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."In Heavy Water and Other Stories, Amis astonishes us with the vast range of his talent, establishing that he is one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation.

    The walking wounded. These are the stories of ordinary people.

    Tebrick sends away all the servants in an attempt to keep Sylvia's new nature a secret. Both then struggle to come to terms with the problems the change brings about.(Summary by Annise )

    The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.

    Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands - suddenly and with awe - the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her. On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life. Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions - whether successful or not - also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us - and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures.

    Most of the stories, including such improbable ones as "Kill Them! Kill Them!," "The Whitaker Negroes" & "A Toast to Ava Gardner" are, the author insists, true. Written between 1924 & 1962, each stands on its own; but together, as autobiography, this collection makes a fascinating companion to GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, Robert Graves' famous account of his life at Charterhouse School & as a young officer in WWI.

    Dawson writes very well, with a tender awareness of the ironies of her theme and a poetic perception of how tremulous is the distinction between the mad world and the sane.’ - Glasgow Herald‘A remarkably talented first novel ... Miss Dawson is neither sentimental nor sensational ... Her heroine is a convincing and sympathetic character, and when her mind begins to shift into the nightmare perspective of schizophrenia the writing creates an atmosphere of quiet terror.’ - Observer‘Cool, short, tender and occasionally as prettily ruthless as the impact of a stiletto heel . . . twice as alarming because everything is implied rather than explicit.’ - Tatler‘A cool, clever, well-constructed novel about – smoothly speaking – the nature of reality. . . . Miss Dawson writes very well indeed, with remarkable calmness and detachment . . . [B]rilliant.’ - Penelope Mortimer, Sunday Times‘A little masterpiece.’ - Bookman‘A novel about madness which succeeds completely.’ - Daily Telegraph‘I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.’ So says Josephine, the heroine of Jennifer Dawson’s remarkable novel, an exploration of a young woman’s mental illness that met with universal critical acclaim and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best novel of the year. After suffering a breakdown following the death of her mother, Josephine finds herself confined to an institution where patients are ‘treated’ by such means as electroshock therapy and lobotomies. But when she falls in love with Alasdair, a fellow patient she meets on the grassy bank of the ha-ha, she decides that her recovery will be on her own defiant terms. Inspired by the author’s personal experiences, The Ha-Ha (1961) remains a moving and powerful examination of mental illness and the treatment of those who suffer from it. This new edition includes an afterword by the author and an introduction by John Sutherland.

    She's frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and Rose travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant, Dr. Gomez—their very last chance—in the hope that he might cure Rose's unpredictable limb paralysis, but Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Rose's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective—tracking Rose's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain—deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.