Tinder Press This Thing Of Darkness Thompson Harry

Three Decades of Stories is a unique collection of Patrick Gale's two volumes of dark, moving, often witty and eccentric stories, Gentleman's Relish and Dangerous Pleasures. It also includes the acclaimed long story, Caesar's Wife • Ranging from a lonely prisoner governor's wife, to a housewife desperate for a makeover; a father's trip to his former school to a long-term mistress offered an unexpected marriage, this is a volume that highlights Patrick Gale's skill of digging beneath the surface of relationships and exposing the often brutal mechanisms that drive them

Ana is born in Galilee at a time when women are seen as possessions, only leaving their fathers' homes to marry • Ana longs to control her destiny. Taught to read despite her mother's misgivings, she wants to be a writer and to find her own voice. A voice that will speak for the silenced women around her • Betrothed to an elderly widower, Ana almost despairs. But an encounter with a charismatic young carpenter in Nazareth awakens new longings in her, and a different future opens up • Yet this is not a simple love story. Ana's journey will bring both joy and tragedy, but it will also be enriched by the female friendships she makes along the way • The Book of Longings is an exquisite tale of dreams and desire, and of the power of women to change the world

A reclusive ex-film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells is a woman whose first instinct, when a stranger approaches her home, is to reach for her shotgun. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out of her cinematic career when she had the whole world at her feet? • Her husband Daniel, reeling from a discovery about a woman he last saw twenty years ago, is about to make an exit of his own. It is a journey that will send him off-course, far away from the life he and Claudette have made together. Will their love for one another be enough to bring Daniel back home?

Sarah Grimke is the middle daughter. Her mother says she's difficult and her father says she's remarkable. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, Hetty 'Handful' Grimke is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift. Sarah knows that what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept another person as a present. And so, indeed, the trouble begins • A powerful, sweeping novel, inspired by real events, and set in the American Deep South in the nineteenth century, The Invention of Wings evokes a world of shocking contrasts, of beauty and ugliness, of otherwise respectable people living daily with cruelty they fail to recognise; and celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood against all the odds

Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and has lived alone in a remote Cornish creek for nearly all her life. Lately she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it • Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the Second World War. When his promise to fulfil a dying man's last wish sees him wash up in Marvellous' creek, broken in body and spirit, the old woman comes to his aid • A Year of Marvellous Ways is a glorious, life-affirming story about the magic in everyday life and the pull of the sea, the healing powers of storytelling and sloe gin, love and death and how we carry on when grief comes snapping at our heels

Sylvie and Gabe meet and fall in love at boarding school in Northern California when they are just teenagers. Their headmaster is the enigmatic and mysterious Dr Keller, a man obsessed with the idea that people's waking stress and trauma can be cured in their dreams. The young couple can't help but be drawn into his magnetic pull and slowly become involved in his research • Years later, Sylvie and Gabe are once again working on Dr Keller's experiments and Sylvie slowly begins to realise there is more both to her employer and her lover than meets the eye, and that the line between dreams and reality has become dangerously blurred

From swimming on Hampstead Heath to house-sitting with troublesome dogs, or illicit afternoon trysts in Soho to pedicures in Florence with recalcitrant teenagers,. this collection of short stories includes some previously unpublished in book form, and covers the gamut of human nature - our foibles, our loves, our desires, hopes, ambitions and failures • Rich in observation and speckled with a delicious dark humour, Fool for Love: The Selected Short stories confirms Deborah Moggach's place as one of our finest observers of human life

Эта книга - неотразимый сборник рассказов • От купания на Хэмпстед-Хит до сидения дома с беспокойными собаками, от незаконных дневных свиданий в Сохо до педикюра во Флоренции - этот сборник рассказов охватывает всю гамму человеческой натуры - наши слабости, нашу любовь, наши желания, надежды, амбиции. и неудачи • Богатый наблюдательностью и приправленный восхитительным черным юмором, сборник "Безумства ради любви: Избранные рассказы" подтверждает место Деборы Моггач как одной из наших лучших наблюдательниц человеческой жизни • Книга на английском языке • In one new volume, an irresistible collection of stories from two previous works, Smile and Changing Babies, with additional stories, previously unpublished in book form • From swimming on Hampstead Heath to house-sitting with troublesome dogs, or illicit afternoon trysts in Soho to pedicures in Florence with recalcitrant teenagers, this collection of short stories includes some previously unpublished in book form, and covers the gamut of human nature - our foibles, our loves, our desires, hopes, ambitions and failures

I lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards • Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly – her clever, headstrong daughter, now on the cusp of leaving home • Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday’s book. Soon they are in and out of each others’ homes, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before

You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed • July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was also present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July's mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides - far too many for me to list here

Florence, the 1560s. Lucrezia, third daughter of Cosimo de' Medici, is free to wander the palazzo at will, wondering at its treasures and observing its clandestine workings. But when her older sister dies on the eve of marriage to Alfonso d'Este, ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father to accept on her behalf • Having barely left girlhood, Lucrezia must now make her way in a troubled court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate her appears before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble? • As Lucrezia sits in uncomfortable finery for the painting which is to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear

The party has to end sometime • It all starts on New Year's Eve. A night that has to be a success, whatever the cost. For Joni and her friends, it'll be a party that promises all the high stakes and glamour of any other, but by sunrise they'll be dealing with something darker than the usual post-party comedown • Not that they let this stand in their way. For this is their year to revel in all that the playground of London has to offer: sneaking into places they shouldn't, breaking every rule, falling in love with the wrong people. All the while avoiding one undeniable truth: it's not if the party ends, it's how • Just For Today is a bittersweet evocation of the end of innocence, and an exhilarating celebration of having nothing to lose - until suddenly, you do