Black Swan Strange Flowers Ryan Donal

While the Celtic Tiger rages, and greed becomes the norm, Johnsey Cunliffe desperately tries to hold on to the familiar, even as he loses those who all his life have protected him from a harsh world. Village bullies and scheming land-grabbers stand in his way, no matter where he turns • Set over the course of one year of Johnsey’s life, The Thing About December breathes with his grief, bewilderment, humour and agonizing self-doubt. This is a heart-twisting tale of a lonely man struggling to make sense of a world moving faster than he is • Donal Ryan’s award-winning debut, The Spinning Heart, garnered unprecedented acclaim, and The Thing About December confirms his status as one of the best writers of his generation

An old man looks into the fearful eyes of a burglar left to guard him while his brother is beaten; an Irish priest in a war-torn Syrian town teaches its young men the art of hurling; the driver of a car which crashed, killing a teenage girl, forges a connection with the girl’s mother; a squad of broken friends assemble to take revenge on a rapist; a young man sets off on his morning run, reflecting on the ruins of his relationship, but all is not as it seems • Donal Ryan’s short stories pick up where his acclaimed novels The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December left off, dealing with the human cost of loneliness, isolation and displacement. Sometimes this is present in the ordinary, the mundane; sometimes it is triggered by a fateful encounter or a tragic decision

It is the hottest August in living memory • A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. From the moment he invites her in, his world will never be the same again • She will tell him about her family, and their strange life in the show home of an abandoned housing estate. The long, blistering days spent sunbathing; the airless nights filled with inexplicable noises; the words that appear on the windows, written in dust • Why are members of her family disappearing, one by one? Is she telling the truth? Is he? • In a world where reality is beginning to blur, how can we know what to believe?

A strange craft falls from the stars and crashes into the jungle near an isolated West African community. Inside, the locals discover the broken body of a man unlike any they have seen before – a man who is perhaps something more than human • His name is Samara and he speaks with terror of a place called Tartarus – an orbiting prison where hope doesn’t exist • As Samara begins to heal, he also transforms the lives his rescuers. But in so doing, he attracts the attention of a warlord whose gunmen now threaten the very existence of the villagers themselves – and the one, slim chance Samara has of finding his way home • And all the while, in the darkness above, waits the simmering fury at the heart of Tartarus

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of over forty is in possession of a major defect • Cassandra Leigh has woken as if from a bad dream: desperate for a baby, and finally out of patience waiting for her 20 year affair with Max to end happily ever after. Maybe Max is not the only man for her? • Perhaps she could find love with her friend Jason - though he's perhaps a little too rugged, and there's something strange about the way his wife disappeared . . . Or there's Dante, the mysterious stranger she meets on a dark night in his haunted manor house • Cass must throw caution to the wind and claim the life she's always wanted. Suddenly, it's a choice between Mr Right, Mr Wrong or Mr Right Now • Fantastically funny and whimsical, this heart-warming novel will charm fans of Milly Johnson and Jill Mansell

Издание полностью на английском языке • Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake - but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface. This is where Framboise, a secretive widow, plies her culinary trade at the creperie - and lets her memory play strange games. As her nephew attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes Framboise has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers, memories of a disturbed childhood during the German Occupation flood back, and expose a past full of betrayal, blackmail and lies

Traditional ploughland is disappearing. Seven cornfield flowers have become extinct in the last twenty years. Once abundant, the corn bunting and the lapwing are on the Red List. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare is running for its life • Written in exquisite prose, The Running Hare tells the story of the wild animals and plants that live in and under our ploughland, from the labouring microbes to the patrolling kestrel above the corn, from the linnet pecking at seeds to the seven-spot ladybird that eats the aphids that eat the crop. It recalls an era before open-roofed factories and silent, empty fields, recording the ongoing destruction of the unique, fragile, glorious ploughland that exists just down the village lane

A fascinating and revelatory journey along the Danube to appeal to fans of Michael Palin's New Europe • The Danube is Europe's Amazon. It flows through more countries than any other river on Earth - from the Black Forest in Germany to Europe's farthest fringes, where it joins the Black Sea in Romania. Andrew Eames' journey along its length brings us face to face with the Continent's bloodiest history and its most pressing issues of race and identity • As he travels - by bicycle, horse, boat and on foot - Eames finds himself seeking a bed for the night with minor royalty, hitching a ride on a Serbian barge captained by a man called Attila and getting up close and personal with a bull in rural Romania. He meets would-be kings and walks with gypsies, and finally rows his way beyond the borders of Europe entirely

Sue Black confronts death every day. As a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster • In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and examining what her life and work has taught her • Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue's book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel • Part memoir, part science, part meditation on death, her book is compassionate, surprisingly funny, and it will make you think about death in a new light

At sixty-four, Jenni Murray's weight had become a disability. She avoided the scales, she wore a uniform of baggy black clothes, refused to make connections between her weight and health issues and told herself that she was fat and happy. She was certainly fat. But the happy part was an Oscar-worthy performance. In private she lived with a growing sense of fear and misery that her weight would probably kill her before she made it to seventy • Interwoven with the science, social history and psychology of weight management, Fat Cow, Fat Chance is a refreshingly honest account of what it's like to be fat when society dictates that skinny is the norm. It asks why we overeat and why, when the weight is finally lost through dieting, do we simply pile the pounds back on again? How do we help young people become comfortable with the way they look? What are the consequences of the obesity epidemic for an already overstretched NHS? And, whilst fat shaming is so often called out, why is it that shouting 'fat cow' at a woman in the street hasn't been included in the list of hate crimes? • Fusing politics, science and personal pain, this is a powerful exploration of our battle with obesity

Meet Felix Pink. The most unlikely murderer you'll ever have the good fortune to spend time with • When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath • But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the police - after making the biggest mistake of his life • Now his world is turned upside down as he must find out if he's really to blame, or if something much more sinister is at play. All while staying one shaky step ahead of the law

1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk - as long as it's vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need • Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann • Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind