Showing results by publisher "Manilla Press" in All Categories

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.

Harlem 1969; it's the height of the Civil Rights era and the community is still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King. Arthur Mitchell, the first Black principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, takes his protest to the stage and establishes the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Here begins the story of the five extraordinary women at the heart of this book. This is a book about ballet, the enduring allure of ballet for young girls, and about how these pioneers broke into a world that was closed to them and changed ideas of what a classical dancer could be.

Simon Woolley is a member of the House of Lords, the first Black man to head an Oxbridge college and a policy changemaker who has the ear of prime ministers and the future king. But this is a lord who wants to shake up the establishment, an outsider who knows how important it is to bring underrepresented voices to the table. Raised by loving white foster parents on the impoverished St Matthew's Estate in Leicester, young Simon soon learnt about politics while in line at the barber's and about racism as one of the few Black children in the neighbourhood.

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 2017 Christa Parravani had recently moved her family from California to West Virginia and was surviving on a teacher's salary and raising two young children with her husband, screenwriter Anthony Swofford. Another pregnancy, a year after giving birth to her second child, came as a shock. Christa had a history of ectopic pregnancies and worried that she wouldn't be able to find adequate medical care. She immediately requested a termination, but her doctor refused to help.

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.

Jane Rosenberg is America's pre-eminent courtroom sketch artist. For over forty years, she's been at the heart of the story, covering almost every major trial that has passed through the New York justice system. In Drawn Testimony, Rosenberg brings us into the high-stakes, dramatic world of her craft, where art, psychology and courtroom drama collide.

1542. A French noblewoman is left abandoned on a small island north of Nova Scotia. She has a crossbow, arquebuses and gunpowder. The island is populated only by wild beasts. She may be pregnant at this time. Centuries later, whilst mothering her young children, a woman begins writing what she believes to be a television script about the life of Marguerite de la Rocque and her incredible story of survival against the odds. As she draws closer to the nature of Marguerite, the woman begins to question her ability to tell this story.

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.