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'An impeccable work of folk horror' Irish Times The worst thing possible has happened. Richard and Juliette Willoughby's son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of five. Convinced that the boy still lives on in some form, and desparate to make contact, Juliette seeks the help of the Beacons, a seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Whereas Ricahrd, an art historian, tries to blot out the pain of his grief by turning his attention to the field opposite their house, Starve Acre. Patiently he digs in the barren soil looking for the roots of a legendary oak tree but unearths something which ought to have remained buried. 'I will confidently predict that no reader will guess where it's heading . . . Hurley's ability to create a wold that's like ours in many ways and really not in many others is again on full display' The Times
"A gripping and unsettling new novel by the award-winning author of The Loney that asks how much we owe to tradition, and how far we will go to preserve it"--
Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories. 'An impressive line-up of established and emerging names.' The Sunday Times 'These eerie, unsettling stories are guaranteed to send shivers down your spine.' Daily Express Eight authors were given the freedom of their chosen English Heritage site, from medieval castles to a Cold War nuclear bunker. Immersed in the past and chilled by rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. 'Subtly evocative of human relations loss, grief, or the fear of loneliness.' TLS 'A satisfying and spooky read.' Sun Also includes a gazetteer of English Heritage properties which are said to be haunted.
A couple attempt to recapture a lost relationship but their memories disintegrate the world about them...A widow tries to understand the brutality of her husband's death...Three soldiers confront the image of man's struggle with his own aggression...A writer finally begins to understand the frailty of words. Often stark, often brutal, often hopeful, these stories find lives falling apart under the strain of entrapment but also celebrate the pleasurable cages that we wilfully and inevitably impose upon ourselves.
Twenty years ago, Liam Corwen and Dee Dee Ahmed were on the cusp of a better future, Liam as a promising footballer and Dee Dee as a singer in a girl band. Now they're both eking out an existence back in their home town. As the old steelworks rust and the local football club limps towards relegation and liquidation, Dee Dee recalls the tragic events that changed their lives. Liam thinks back to the great players of the past, and wonders: could redemption, greatness even, still wait for them, here among the abandoned cranes and docks and housing estates? Evoking the landscape and myth of old, forgotten England, Iron Towns is a story of our dreams of youth, football, and industrial progress - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past. New paperback edition featuring Cartwright's acclaimed essay on the EU referendum.
Interest in the ancient, the occult, and the "wyrd" is on the rise. The furrows of Robin Hardy (The Wicker Man), Piers Haggard (Blood on Satan's Claw), and Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General) have arisen again, most notably in the films of Ben Wheatley (Kill List), as has the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, Juganets, cursed Saxon crowns, spaceships hidden under ancient barrows, owls and flowers, time-warping stone circles, wicker men, the goat of Mendes, and malicious stone tapes. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange charts the summoning of these esoteric arts within the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, using theories of psychogeography, hauntology, and topography to delve into the genre's output in film, television, and multimedia as its "sacred demon of ungovernableness" rises yet again in the twenty-first century.
M. R. James was a prolific and hugely successful author, now credited with having redefined the ghost story for the 20th century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. Originally published in 1904, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to you, My Lad' ranks amongst his best and most underrated tales. Many of the earliest ghost stories and tales of hauntings, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Eerie, unsettling and hauntingly beautiful - a new collaboration from the bestselling creators of Holloway, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood 'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb -- it is an aftertime song' Max Porter, Booker-longlisted author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a ritual with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him. Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving to the point where they will converge and become Ness. ...
A BBC TWO BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK After a car accident Jarred discovers he’ll never walk again. Confined to a ‘giant roller-skate’, he finds himself with neither money nor job, a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and strangers treating him like he’s an idiot. Worse still, he’s forced to live back home with his estranged father. Trying to piece himself together, Jarred comes to realise that things don’t have to stay broken after all. The Coward is about hurt and forgiveness, how the world treats disabled people, and how we write and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about our lives – and try to find a happy ending.
'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times Humour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers. 'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer 'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman