Susan Finlay – författare

Margaret O''Shea never thought she''d find herself praying for the life of an English soldier. But with her grandson Eoin fighting in Iraq, Margaret can''t do anything but say the rosary and hope that he comes home unscathed. His fiancée Katarzyna is a good Catholic girl, even if she goes to Nottingham''s Polish church rather than its Irish one. What Margaret doesn''t know is that Kathy''s way of coping with Eoin''s absence goes beyond prayer or reading horoscopes. Her friend David has been studying Chaos Magic to distract himself from his new post-PhD career selling figurines of rat men to acne-ridden teenagers and wants Kathy to participate in his Rite of Internet Love. But everyone gets more chaos than they bargained for when a video of a wounded Iraqi and a soldier who looks a lot like Eoin starts circulating.This is a sharp, wry and moving debut novel about love, faith and what normal people do when they don''t have any of the answers.

Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs , Lex Rameses, has recently discovered and purchased Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely. Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, ne -space-age high

"There was something so unreal about the neat Georgian houses opposite and the laurel ball trees in front of them that once again I saw England as a piece of antique porcelain. As something no longer used or displayed due to its unfashionable appearance and propensity to crack..." June 2016, and world-famous cellist and former "sexiest classical musician" Allegra Le Clef is suffering from a compound wrist fracture. Europe also crumbles... From the initial break in London, to the crisis in Athens, to trying and failing to patch things up in Amsterdam Allegra traverses the continent to the accompaniment of a Late Romantic soundtrack (plus Vangelis via Nigel Havers). When not sending emails to a BDSM obsessed catfish, or wondering whether a piece of Nazi jewellery might "lift one of my more sombre evening gowns," she attempts to ease her conscience by volunteering at a refugee centre known for its Syrian cuisine, yet remains oblivious to the numerous other personal and political disasters that are looming. Shocking, camp-and shockingly camp-My Other Spruce and Maple Self is nevertheless a profoundly sad book about a woman unable to come to terms with her own declining status, as well as that of the West.