Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in Literature & Fiction

1882. North of Edinburgh, on the edge of an isolated loch, lies an institution of crumbling stone, where a strange doctor collects orphans with unusual abilities. In London, two children with such powers are hunted by a figure of darkness—a man made of smoke.

Loveable full-time priest and part-time detective Canon Sidney Chambers is back, continuing his investigations. A mysterious stranger seeks sanctuary in Grantchester’s church; a shooting weekend in the country has a sinister end; a friend receives poison pen letters; a piano falls on a musician’s head; a school cricket match has an explosive finish; and on a holiday in Italy, Sidney is accused of stealing a priceless painting. On the home front, his new curate has become irritatingly popular with the parish and his daughter is starting to walk and talk.

Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers — and never stop dreaming.

Stalingrad, November 1942. Lieutenant Breuer dreams of returning home for Christmas. But he and his fellow German soldiers will spend winter in a frozen hell – as snow, ice and relentless Soviet assaults reduce the once-mighty Sixth Army to a diseased and starving rabble. Breakout at Stalingrad is a stark and terrifying portrait of the horrors of war, and a profoundly humane depiction of comradeship in adversity.

Rosaleen is still a teenager, in the early '60s, when she meets the famous sculptor Felix Lichtman. Felix is dangerous, bohemian, everything she dreamed of in the cold nights at her Catholic boarding school. And at first their life together is glitteringly romantic but it’s not long before Rosaleen finds herself fearfully, unexpectedly alone. Kate lives in '90s London, stumbling through her unhappy marriage. Aoife sits at her husband’s bedside as he lies dying and tells him the story of their marriage.

In 1527, a conquistador arrived on the coast of modern-day Florida with hundreds of settlers and claimed the region for Spain. Within a year of navigational errors, disease, starvation and fierce resistance from indigenous tribes, only four survivors remained: three noblemen, and a Moroccan slave known as Estebanico. The official record contains only the accounts of the noblemen. This is the story of Estebanico – a vibrant merchant from Barbary forced into slavery and a new name, reborn as the first African explorer of the Americas.

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatorial men, Ireland’s folklore and politics loom large and poverty - material, emotional, sexual - seeps through every crack.

Ever since hairdresser Poppy Day married her childhood sweetheart, Mart, she's been deliriously happy. Now Mart is fighting in Afghanistan, and Poppy is counting the days until he returns. It takes one knock at the door to rip Poppy's world apart. Mart has been taken hostage, and it's too dangerous for the army to rescue him. Poppy is determined to bring him home herself. But her journey will lead her to a heartbreaking dilemma. What price will she pay to save the man she loves?

The woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, through its shops and pools and bars. She slows her pace to watch a couple fighting, to take in the sight of an old woman in a waiting room; pauses to drink her coffee in a shaded square. Sometimes her steps take her to her grieving mother, sealed off in her own solitude. Sometimes they take her to the station, where the trains can spirit her away for a short while.

Sidney Chambers, the Vicar of Grantchester, is a thirty-two-year-old bachelor. Sidney is an unconventional clergyman and can go where the police cannot. Together with his roguish friend Inspector Geordie Keating, Sidney inquires into the suspect suicide of a Cambridge solicitor, a scandalous jewellery theft at a New Year's Eve dinner party, the unexplained death of a well-known jazz promoter and a shocking art forgery, the disclosure of which puts a close friend in danger. Sidney discovers that being a detective, like being a clergyman, means that you are never off duty.

John-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac’s bloody downfall threatens John-John’s very survival.

Ex-journalist Tash has been searching for a story to launch her freelance career. But she has also been searching for something else: new friends to help her navigate motherhood. She sees them at her son’s new playgroup. The other mothers. The sleek, the sophisticated, the successful mothers… The women she wants to be. And then one day they welcome her into their circle and Tash discovers the kind of life she has always dreamt of; their elegant London townhouses a far cry from her cramped basement flat and endless bills. They seem to have everything. But they also have their secrets.

Josephine Morrow is Girl One. The first of nine ‘Miracle Babies’ conceived entirely without male aid or intervention, and raised on an experimental commune known as the Homestead. After a suspicious fire at the ranch kills both the doctor behind the pioneering experiment and one of the youngest of the girls, the mothers and their children are scattered across the country, some embracing the media spotlight, others – like Josephine’s mother – refusing to talk about it.

For Thaniel Steepleton, an unexpected posting to Tokyo can’t come at a better moment. The London fog has made him ill and doctor’s orders are to get out. His brief is strange: the staff at the British Legation have been seeing ghosts, and his first task is to find out what’s going on. But staying with his closest friend, Keita Mori, in Yokohama, Thaniel starts to experience ghostly happenings himself. For reasons he won’t say, Mori is frightened. Then he vanishes.

A struggling silhouette artist in Victorian Bath seeks out a renowned child spirit medium in order to speak to the dead - and to try to identify their killers - in this beguiling new tale from Laura Purcell.

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first daughter in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known.

The 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

For seven-year-old Salim, the pillars upholding his small universe—his indifferent father, his adored uncle, his treasured books, the daily routines of government school and Koran lessons—seem unshakeable. But it is the 1970s, and the winds of change are blowing through Zanzibar: Salim’s father is gone, and the island convulses with violence and corruption the wake of a revolution. It will only be years later, making his way through an alien and hostile London, that Salim will begin to understand the shame and exploitation festering at the heart of his family’s history.

Science and technology have always been central to the plots that make up the world of Bond, and in Superspy Science Kathryn Harkup explores the full range of 007’s exploits and the arms, technologies, tactics and downfalls of his various foes. From the practicalities of building a volcano-based lair, to whether being covered in gold paint really will kill you, and—if your plan is to take over the world—whether it is better to use bacteria, bombs, or poison—this audiobook has all the answers and more.