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

Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras – from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity.

Ten-year-old Abdullah would do anything for his younger sister. In a life of poverty and struggle, with no mother to care for them, Pari is the only person who brings Abdullah happiness. For her, he will trade his only pair of shoes to give her a feather for her treasured collection. When their father sets off with Pari across the desert to Kabul in search of work, Abdullah is determined not to be separated from her. Neither brother nor sister know what this fateful journey will bring them.

On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession - a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only protection. Meanwhile Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh's past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled.

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the listener’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.

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.

Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing. But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie’s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present.

Born in East Africa, Yusuf has few qualms about the journey he is to make. It never occurs to him to ask why he is accompanying Uncle Aziz or why the trip has been organised so suddenly, and he does not think to ask when he will be returning. But the truth is that his ‘uncle' is a rich and powerful merchant and Yusuf has been pawned to him to pay his father's debts. Paradise is a rich tapestry of myth, dreams and Biblical and Koranic tradition, the story of a young boy's coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.

In Ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece – the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen – the gift of life. Now his wife, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own, and yearns for independence. In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, she is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost.

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.

Henry was the first to reach the girl, found sleeping on the beach, with his friends Gil and Susan. When they learn what has happened to her, they are thrown into a mystery that nightmares are made of. The young girl has been forced to host a hideous malevolence that insinuates itself into the bodies and minds of thousands of unsuspecting people. The only hope of saving them is to become Night Warriors, an ancient Order with the power to infiltrate the dream world, and destroy the original source.

AD 935 - Late Winter, City of Jorvik. Einar is destined to be a great Icelandic warrior. He has already defeated the men sent to kill him by his notorious father, Jarl Thorfinn, the 'Skull Cleaver' of Orkney. He has a gift that makes him lethal in battle. Yet he has cast it all off to be a bard. When three men attack him, Einar's poetry provides little protection. Luckily, the skilled archer and Norse-Irish princess Affreca saves him. She'd assumed Einar had left to raise an army, challenge Thorfinn and seize the Jarldom of Orkney. Now she's determined to set him back onto his rightful path.

Welcome to America. On the East Coast, homes are being swallowed by the ocean; on the West Coast, California is engulfed with wildfire. But for one family, the impending environmental disaster is the least of their worries. Party girl Cat just impulse-purchased a snake; her pious brother Cooper is wrestling with a tic bite; and their mom Ottilie has resorted to cooking with crickets. Everyone is drinking too much – and the bugs seems to be disappearing. It seems as if it's anything but blue skies ahead...

Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things and had many names.

Kathryn Brooker is the headmaster's wife. While her husband spends his days disciplining unruly teenagers in the grand halls of Mountbriers Academy, Kathryn spends hers baking scones for her son's cricket match in a beautiful cottage in the manicured school grounds. Anyone who peered through the downstairs sash window at the four figures sat easily around their scrubbed-pine kitchen table would see a happy family without a care in the world. They would envy Kathryn her perfect life. But they would be wrong. Kathryn is trapped in a nightmare.

'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.

Rachel is 24, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox-Jewish woman intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam - by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family - and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk and honey.

Herne - the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt - hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator. A shape-shifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time - at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced '60s party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake. But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive.

The postcard has been held at the sorting office for 91 years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse - Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides. Joe has never left England, never even left London. He is a British slave, one of thousands throughout the French Empire. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter. But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember and of a world that never existed - a world where English is spoken in England and not French.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea swimming, sunburn and poetry.

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so.