Showing results by publisher "Manilla Press" in Literature & Fiction

When Yui loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami, she wonders how she will ever carry on. Yet, in the face of this unthinkable loss, life must somehow continue. Then one day she hears about a man who has an old disused telephone box in his garden. There, those who have lost loved ones find the strength to speak to them and begin to come to terms with their grief. As news of the phone box spreads, people will travel to it from miles around. Soon, Yui will make her own pilgrimage to the phone box, too. But once there she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver.

London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate daughter Clara at London's Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the child she has never known. Dreading the worst, that Clara has died in care, she is astonished when she is told she has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl - and why.

Seren Doughty is a forty-two-year-old author who has written nothing in the five years since her daughter's murder. Divorced and alone in her Edinburgh flat, Seren's only relationship has been with Alex, a library research assistant too young and eager for her. So when her former editor approaches her agent with the idea for a ghost story, Seren immediately thinks of the abandoned island of Finish in the Outer Hebrides and seizes the opportunity to commit herself to a new project.

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them from London to Sheffield, and with his success hinged on a hunt, an old tradition looms over the home; the hunt is a time to settle old scores. If a bullet finds a human home, then it is only that they were foolish to become prey. In the weeks leading up to the hunt, a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life.

When Emily meets the enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black-and-white to technicolour, and the two women become inseparable. Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious, and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past.

Brought up in a devout household in Ireland, Jay is now living in London with her girlfriend, determined to live day to day and not think too much about either the future or the past. But when she learns that her beloved older brother, who died in a terrible accident, may be made into a Catholic saint, she realises she must at last confront her family, her childhood and herself . . .

It is 1946 and in the village of Oakbourne the men are home from the war. Their bodies are healing but their psychological wounds run deep. Everyone is scarred - those who fought and those left behind.

Every December, a huge Christmas tree arrives in Trafalgar Square. Bedecked in lights, it is a shimmering, festive beacon in the heart of London. But even more enchanting than the twinkling decorations and scented pine is the story behind the tree; a story of loyalty, friendship and resistance. On a cold evening in 1940, German warships made their way towards Oslo. It seemed inevitable that Norway, like so many other European nations, would soon submit to the Nazi regime. But the country's indomitable King Haakon VII refused to surrender.

Alice, fifteen years old and evacuated to a cruel home in the north of England, dreams of a better future and a loving family. While the Second World War rages, a brutal assault decides Alice's fate and she finds herself banished to America. 1993, Marnie, a struggling drug addict, riding the highways of America dealing and stealing, dreams of her past, when she was happy and secure in the love of her grandmother, Alice. Junction of Earth and Sky is the story of two women, grandmother and granddaughter, plagued by the whims of fate and at times, a darkness that seems impossible to shake.

A young woman returns home to the small claustrophobic town of Knife River. When Jess was thirteen, her mother went for a walk and did not return - now, fifteen years later, bones have been discovered in the woods nearby. Jess's sister has remained in their childhood home - her life, their home and the town itself seemingly frozen in time. As days turn into weeks, Jess's understanding of the past, her sister, and herself become more and more complicated - and the list of suspects responsible for her mother's terrible fate more and more ominous.

1914. A boy enrols in the army, hoping to find peace in the great adventure of war. Handed a rifle, he discovers the grim reality: grey days distinguished only by the ever-present spectre of death. In the midst of horror, he finds close friendships, love and companionship. In an unexpected act of courage, he changes the course of history, bringing German and Brits to put down their weapons for a celebration of peace.

A young woman, Jane O, arrives in a psychiatrist's office. She's been suffering a series of worrying episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations and an inexplicable sense of dread. But as the psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening in Jane's mind, she suddenly goes missing. When she is found a day later, unconscious in a park, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

In the notorious Conciergerie Prison, Marie Antoinette is having her cards read. What solace can the tarot give her now, in the midst of the Reign of Terror, when outside her cell the mob is baying for her blood? Kate, a young Irishwoman whose fortunes have seen her travel from maid to closest confidant of Mademoiselle Lenormand, the infamous Tarot Reader of Versailles, sees the Queen of France's cards and knows what's in store for her. As the French Revolution is consumed by frenzied violence, Kate must use all her wiles to ensure that Marie Antoinette's fate doesn't become her own.

Cleopatra: the beguiling, legendary Pharoah and Queen of Egypt - the arch seducer who used her beauty to grasp for ever more power. But with her character only ever recorded by men who despised her, how can we be sure this was the real story? From the lauded author of Fair Rosaline: a powerful, unmissable untelling, unravelling Shakespeare's Roman plays to draw out the woman behind the myth.

In 1945, twenty-five children, between the ages of four and fifteen, were welcomed to Sir Benjamin Drage's large country villa, Lingfield House. There they would receive the care of psychoanalyst, Anna Freud, daughter of the great Sigmund, and Alice Goldberger, her trusted colleague. Having endured childhood in the confines of the concentration camps, orphanages and the hideouts where their parents left them during the war, each of the children has a different, terrible and special story, each carries their own personal hell. Alice and her team fight to give them back a childhood.

When Suyin Lim is offered the opportunity of a lifetime - a place as a trainee nurse in London's Bethnal Green Hospital - she jumps at the chance to leave her job as a seamstress and unite with her sister, who left for the same path a year before. However, without warning her sister returns to Penang, a shadow of her former self and Suyin is forced to leave without any answers. Suyin soon finds herself starting a new life in London, falling in love with the vibrant city and its people.

Iceland, 1910. In the middle of a severe storm two sisters - Freyja and Gudrun - rescue a mysterious, charismatic man from a shipwreck near their remote farm. Sixty-five years later, a young woman - Sigga - is spending time with her grandmother when they learn a body has been discovered on a mountainside near Reykjavik, perfectly preserved in ice.