Showing results by publisher "Manilla Press" in All Categories

1933. Cornelia Stover is headstrong and business-minded—not the kind of woman the men of Boldville, New Mexico, expect her to be. Then she stumbles upon a secret hidden out in the hills. 1970. Decades later, Joanna Riley, a former cop, packs up her car in the middle of the night and drives west, fleeing an abusive marriage and a life she can no longer bear. Eventually, she runs out of gas and finds herself in Boldville, a sleepy desert town in the foothills of the Gila Mountains.

Carl may be 72 years old, but he's young at heart. Every night he goes door-to-door delivering books by hand to his loyal customers. He knows their every desire and preference, carefully selecting the perfect story for each person. One evening as he makes his rounds, nine-year-old Schascha appears. Loud and precocious, she insists on accompanying him - and even tries to teach him a thing or two about books. When Carl's job at the bookstore is threatened, will the old man and the girl in the yellow raincoat be able to restore Carl's way of life, and return the joy of reading to his little town?

Charles Wheeler, the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent, was one of Britain's greatest news reporters. For more than four decades, he reported for radio and television from most of the world's trouble spots. Wheeler's investigative skill and sense of judgement made him one of the most authoritative reporters of his generation. But what was it like to have been witness to the events that shaped our modern world? In this book, his daughter, Shirin Wheeler, examines her father's journalistic legacy and brings her personal knowledge to bear on the project.

I love stories. I have mostly told other people's, but now, in telling my own, I realise how all our stories are connected by that great leveller of acclaim, loss, fortitude and fortune: being human. When I look at my life from the alleged halfway point, some patterns are revealed: one, that the story does not necessarily begin or end where it should; two, happy endings are overrated. And three, happy endings are almost never the end. This book is memoir-ish. A tell-most. Largely because there's a lot I don't remember, and a lot that's not worth talking about.

Twenty-five-year-old Takano has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Ojisan, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoki left him five years earlier. When Takano's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takano is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian-Australian-American making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children.

Together for thirty-odd years, Bea and Niklas live a comfortable life in Stockholm. But one evening, following a trivial argument, Niklas disappears. Bea expects him home as soon as he's calmed down, but the hours go by and there's no trace of him. During the days that follow he ghosts her completely as her anger amplifies. Not letting his apparent mid-life crisis wreck their summer holiday, Bea brings their children to stay with Niklas' family at their island summer house. When it emerges that Niklas has met someone else, everything is brought to a head nevertheless

In Stories of Hope, Heather will explore her extraordinary talents as a listener - a skill she employed when she first met Lale Sokolov, the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the inspiration for her bestselling novel. It was this ability that led Lale to entrust Heather with his story, which she told in her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz and the bestselling follow up, Cilka's Journey.

In Tokyo, there is a neighbourhood with the highest number of bookstores in the world. It is called Jinbocho where book lovers can browse to their heart's delight and where hunters of first editions or autographed copies prowl the bookcases. The Morisaki bookshop, a small family-run shop, is so packed with books that barely five people can fit inside. Books crowd the shelves and invade every corner of the floor; when a customer arrives, the owner, Satoru, immediately pops out from behind the counter.

Hidden away in a corner of the Ginza neighbourhood is a venerable stationery shop. To venture inside is to find everything your stationery-loving heart desires, from the most delicate paper to fountain pens that fit exactly to the shape of your hand to gorgeously coloured inks. The shop owner intuits your every need, inviting you to take a seat at a small wooden table on the top floor, where you'll find the words flowing, helping you unlock repressed memories, secret longings and your own mysteries.

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.

The Future We Choose is a passionate call to arms from former UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, and Tom Rivett-Carnac, senior political strategist for the Paris Agreement. We are still able to stave off the worst and manage the long-term effects of climate change, but we have to act now. We know what we need to do, and we have everything we need to do it.

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.

A.N. Wilson, one of England's most beloved writers, imagines the Queen reflecting on her early life. We watch as she discovers, at the tender age of ten, that she is heir to the throne. We witness her meet the dashing Prince Phillip of Greece, who she loved steadfastly from the age of fifteen, and see their friendship blossom into passionate love. Above all, we learn of her astonishing sense of vocation and public duty, which grew during the dark years of WWII and her father's subsequent years of ill health.

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.