Soothing Music for Stray Cats
Jayne Joso
Mark's best friend Jim just jumped from the twentieth floor, forcing him to reassess the way he's been living. This contemporary rites of passage novel is a calm, cool, and well-controlled fiction debut flooded with warmth and humanity. With the reflection of "The Catcher in the Rye" and the depth of Anne Enright's "The Gathering", it captures the moment following disaster where things can swing either way. Music and literature save Mark as he faces the question: is it ever right to intervene in others' lives? Themes include friendship; class; compassion; altruism and intervention; trust and innocence; belonging.
Soothing Music for Stray Cats is a reflective novel set in central and north London, which will appeal to a youthful male readership and NME fans, with its themes of male suicide, Samurai philosophy, male bonding, and songwriting. Driven by its distinctive colloquial voice, wacky monologues on subjects as diverse as Mike Skinner, Ellen MacArthur and Nelson, its philosophy is upbeat, committed to a world in which strangers still help each other, even though we can seldom intervene when it really matters. "Catcher in the Rye" meets Kenzaburo Oe's "An Echo of Heaven", by way of Anne Enright's "The Gathering", the text is framed by two suicides, but the messages are positive, in favour of altruism, male friendship, and the camaraderie of strangers in straightened circumstances (the latter a topical theme for the Credit Crunch era). Set in a chilly February in Finsbury Park and central London with its tourist landmarks, the author's background as an architecture journalist shows through in her strong sense of atmosphere and city spaces. Literary aspects include the shadowing of Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway", and beautiful imagery ranging from cricket, London Tube lines, failing shoes on city streets, naval heroes and monuments.
ISBN: 9780955527258   £9.99   full details

The Sleepwalkers Ball
Alan Bilton
Hans is a dreamer, a waiter, a security guard, a young man tending elderly parents, a layabout, an old man scribbling his memories.
Driven out in his pyjamas into a strangely black and white Scottish town, Hans sets off in search of both his girl and the one mysterious thing that will solve the riddle of his life. Clara is the art school girl with the lovely round face and ants in her pants, the crazy girl from the pub, always hindered by luggage or her dodgy innards, the sleepy waitress at the ball in the castle grounds, the blowzy dame with the world's most beautiful mouth. But can they find each other in time?
Set sometime around now, and yet also any time, this is a beautifully surreal romantic comedy wrapped around the forms of the silent film and the Gothic city ghost tour. A cross between Kafka and Mary Poppins, "The Sleepwalkers' Ball" is filmic, funny and lyrical in turns. Always moving, it follows two lives: a man and a woman, and their many attempts to hook up together.
ISBN: 9780955527265   £9.99   full details

Twenty Thousand Saints
Fflur Dafydd
Archaeologist Deian returns to the island of his childhood, where his mother disappeared without a trace. Sister Viv, closet heretic and host of the annual conference of hermits, has erected a gold plaque in her memory, declaring her official sainthood. Meanwhile, documentary-maker Leri is keen to portray the island's inhabitants as anything but saintly, pursuing a story that has less to do with birds and saints' bones than with real bloodshed.
During this hot August week, a writer-in-residence observes lives colliding, as Bardsey Island twirls once more for the cameras...
A black comedy about finds, losses, secrets, privacy and intrusion, and how the most important things always happen off-camera.
ISBN: 9780955527227   £9.99   full details

Salvage
Gee Williams
A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Elly and Martin it is the chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following scandal. But Elly makes a life-changing find on the tideline. It is a huge pink diamond ring, finger bones still attached. Scroll back a few months and at Martin's place of work - a Chester hospital - we meet new nurse Hayley. Twenty-five; gorgeous (even by her own admission); she is a player, and totally turned off by the ward surgeon, Richard Congreve. Until, that is, she catches a whiff of something expensive in his Jag and is ensnared by a gift so desirable it may prove fatal. As we begin to question who the ring and its finger belong to, the cottage collects the secrets of those friends and strangers who have stayed there. Why has Elly such power over them all? Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a novel about possession, betrayal, violence - and just how much we can afford to lose.
JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINEE
ISBN: 9780955527203   £9.99   full details

Liminal
Chris Keil
Aled is used to his dad Geraint waxing lyrical about some saint's clifftop lookout; some Greek temple or another hosting a thousand sacred prostitutes; some village near Corinth. Geraint is the county archaeologist, after all. So when travel agent Aled takes a recce trip to that same Peloponnese village, his father is surprised. When Aled fails to return on the eve of his marriage, Geraint becomes alarmed and sets out on his trail. This quest, which is also a pilgrimage, will change all those involved.
ISBN: 9780955527210   £9.99   full details

The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum
Penny Simpson
It is Berlin, 1929. The inflation-hungry city is edging towards disaster, but seven foot Jewish orphan Esther Rosenbaum is serving up a banquet for friends.
They are the bohemians, artists and kabarett composers who have sampled her finest recipes in the legendary Schorns restaurant, and long declared her Germany's most celebrated chef. Except it is a life built on quicksand: Schorns' proprietor is owned by gay black marketeer Leon Wolf - but patronised by Nazis. The revolutionaries who briefly seized power ten years earlier are distracted by personal feuds and vendettas, manipulated by one Bertolt Brecht. Whilst Esther, once a towering presence clad in her peacock tapestry skirts, has started to dress as a man to blend into Berlin's vicious night streets. The cook capable of creating delicacies such as chocolate hearts stuffed with saffron pen nibs, has stopped eating and is reducing herself to bone.
Using a burlesque brand of magic realism, Penny Simpson conjures fantastical elements to show how cookery can be an act of storytelling, and imagination itself an act of subversion and survival.
ISBN: 9780955527234   £9.99   full details

The Untogether
Jeb Loy Nichols
A Love story - intimate, warm, drily humorous - about the missing parts of our lives, and the things we fill them with... Lee is a grown man with a sweet tooth and a mild case of uniform fetish. A phone call from a distant hospital summons him to the bedside of his father, Arthur; a man he barely knew. He seeks solace in his father's nurses, despite being told they attend mandatory training on not dating the bereaved...
ISBN: 9780955527241   £7.99   full details