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Now a major BBC drama.Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends who ordinarily would remain uncelebrated. It finds a value and specialness in them that is not immediately apparent and prompts the idea that maybe we could learn from the people that we overlook in life. Leonard and Hungry Paul change the world differently to the rest of us: we try and change it by effort and force; they change it by discovering the small things they can do well and offering them to others.

Wolf island lies in the Mid-Atlantic Ocean, where an old lighthouse-keeper at the end of his rope, challenges the universe and his place in it. The Lightning is a tale of unexpected visitors, their personal histories and navigating natural surroundings, whilst confronting the elemental rage of the sea.

I Am Not Your Eve is the story of Teha'amana, Tahitian muse and child-bride to the painter Paul Gauguin. She shares her thougths as he works on one of his masterpieces, The Spirit of The Dead Keeps Watch, a work so important to Gauguin that it haunts his later self-portrait. As Teha'amana tells her story, other voices of the island rise: Hina goddess of the moon, a lizard watching from the eaves, Gauguin's mask of Teha'amana carved from one of the trees.Woven in are the origin myths that cradled Polynesia before French colonists brought the Christian faith. Distant diary entries by Gauguin's daughter Aline - the same age as her father's new 'wife' - recall the other hemisphere of his life. This is the novel that gives Teha'amana a voice; one that travels with the myths and legends of the island, across history and asks to be heard.

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.Panenka has spent 25 years living with the disastrous mistakes of his past, which have made him an exile in his home town and cost him his dearest relationships.Now aged 50, Panenka begins to rebuild an improvised family life with his estranged daughter and her seven year old son. But at night, Panenka suffers crippling headaches that he calls his Iron Mask. Faced with losing everything, he meets Esther, a woman who has come to live in the town to escape her own disappointments. Together, they find resonance in each other's experiences and learn new ways to let love into their broken lives.

Simon's circumstances mean he takes a minimum wage job cleaning a factory. Every morning the cleaning team are left motivational notes by the supervisor. People and especially management only see them as cleaners but when Simon appears in a national newspaper their views change. It is a story of class, solidarity, kindness and comradeship where it it not the job you have that defines you but how you treat others that does.

"When Covid struck in early 2020, librarian Stu Hennigan volunteered to deliver food parcels to vulnerable people in Leeds who were self-isolating and had no other access to food during the savage days of the first lockdown; but when word got out that the council were giving away food, people on low incomes struggling to feed themselves and their families were quick to accept the offer of help and it became immediately apparent that the pandemic was not the whole story.Ghost Signs is Stu's account of the scandalous deprivation he encountered during that time, and shows up close how a decade of Austerity has ravaged our most vulnerable communities and left local authorities financially unable to cope with a crisis of this magnitude. It's also a day-to-day diary of the earliest months of the pandemic which holds up a mirror to the trauma inflicted by lockdown on the national psyche while the Prime Minister and his government partied in Downing Street in flagrant breach of their own draconian rules."

Mukesh Agarwal sits alone in the Black Eagle pub, unaware that a riot is brewing or that Billy, his youngest son, is still out on his bike ...A mile away in the family home in Church Street, Anila, one of the three Agarwal girls, is reading Smash Hits and listening to Radio One as she sprawls across the bottom bunk, oblivious to the monumental tragedy that is about to hit her family ...It is 1981 and Handsworth is teetering on the brink of collapse. Factories are closing, unemployment is high, the National Front are marching and the neglected inner cities are ablaze as riots breakout across Thatcher's fractured Britain. The Agarwals are facing their own nightmares but family, pop music, protest, unexpected friendships and a community that refuses to disappear all contribute to easing their personal pain and that of Handsworth itself.THE HANDSWORTH TIMES is a story of loss and transition, and pulling together because ultimately, there is such a thing as society.

Under the intense summer sun on the Essex coast a gull falls from the sky and strikes an unassuming local council worker sitting on the beach below. From that moment on he is obsessed, a crazed visionary repeatedly depicting the scene and the unknown figure within it which filled his view at the moment of impact.The mysterious beauty of his creations draw others to him but can they lay hold of that which possesses him? And what of his anonymous muse?

EVERYWHERE IS SOMEWHERE is a memoir from Naseem Khan, the daughter of an Indian father and German mother, whose seminal book, The Art Britain Ignores, framed the argument that by dismissing or ignoring 'minority arts' in Britain, the UK was depriving itself of one of the most enriching features of its artistic life. Without Naseem’s vision perhaps some of the most gifted writers, painters, dancers or musicians would never see their work reach an audience.As award winning poet Jacob Ross says `In hindsight, and in the light of the subsequent impact of BAME arts and culture on British society, Khan’s assertion was visionary. This is a writer whose legacy will remain for us, inspirational and lasting.’ But by highlighting the missed chances and opportunities of the past Naseem signals what hope there is for the future, written by someone whose gift was to bring people together, breaking down the walls of ignorance and enabling everyone to move forward.Naseem didn’t have all the answers and the arts can’t heal all divisions but EVERYWHERE IS SOMEWHERE may be the book we all reach to when we are in need of some kind of answer to what is going on today in these times.

Malka grows up in the Old City of Jerusalem in the confines of the Ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Meandering through the narrow streets she finds herself at the door of one of the city's most renowned and reclusive mystics and discovers her father's top rabbinical student, Russian immigrant Moshe studying forbidden Kabbalistic texts. She has a disturbing vision of a tree of prayers growing up inside the house, and the prayers all seem to be talking to her. The prayers become a giant bird, and chase her from the house. Malka has unwittingly uncovered a great mystical gift. Kabbalists believe that since the world was spoken into existence, if they can hear and understand that original Divine language, they can use it themselves, to shape and manipulate reality. Once in a millennia, a kabbalist is born with this ability. It turns out that Malka is one of them. After a disastrous first date with Moshe, Malka flees Jerusalem for Safed where she is drawn into a cult called Mystical Encounters, run by charismatic cult leader Avner Marcus. Avner is unsettled by Malka's authenticity, and she is not allowed to attend classes. Her only friends are former night club singer Shira, and traumatised ex-soldier Evven. Malka sets up her own mystical retreat in the woods, at an abandoned construction site. When she reveals this to Avner, he forces her to take him there and tries to rape her. Malka manages to evade him, and then burns down the cult after manipulating the Modern Hebrew word for Electricity, Chashmal Malka heads for Tel Avi, and sleeps rough on the beaches of the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa. Here she is discovered by legendary Arab chef Rukh Baraka, who is seeking to rekindle his career by training Arab and Israeli street children to create extraordinary food for his new restaurant, the Leviathan. Malka bonds with fellow runaway Mahmoud, who is escaping the wrath of his Imam father at his "deviant" sexuality. Mahmoud reveals the city behind the city, the hidden Palestinian history of which Malka has been ignorant. Moshe has been trying to find Malka and is forced to confront some of his own demons, including the disappearance of his younger sister when she was in his care. Moshe swears that he will not lose another girl he loves.

To write about the North West coast is to do battle with the tenacity of stereotype. It is to dodge well-worn evocations of depressed, down-at-heel seaside towns, gaudy sea-front arcades, Ferris wheels, roller coasters and caravan parks and of past-their-best Lakeland towns with stunning views and grim prospects. To write about these places is to somehow acknowledge a variety of well publicised truths about the social and economic struggles of neglected and disenfranchised populations and also to dig deeper - to find the views and perspectives that surprise and make strange. No collection, even one including writers as varied and accomplished at the ones you'll meet in this anthology, could claim to provide a complete, exhaustive account of a region which encompasses hundreds of miles of coastline with centuries of complex history, a myriad of urban and natural habitats, and the entire available spectrum of human experience. Under these grey skies and rain-spotted sands lurk teeming hidden myriad of secret wildlife. Yet the stories included in Seaside Special succeed in gifting us readers with `postcards from the edge.' These ten writers, some of them established and some being published here for the first time, answer the challenge to `surprise and make strange' in an array of startling, often discomforting and most of all vivid glimpses of some of the lives and landscapes contained in this stretch of coast.

Eva and her son Torin have to leave London and move back to Ireland. Eva to find the daughter she left behind and Torin from a life that was threatening his freedom. It is about dislocation and becoming unanchored and the need for a home and belonging and the disturbance when you're wrenched out of your environment.

Eva and her son Torin have to leave London and move back to Ireland. Eva to find the daughter she left behind and Torin from a life that was threatening his freedom. It is about dislocation and becoming unanchored and the need for a home and belonging and the disturbance when you're wrenched out of your environment.

Two hundred years ago, neighbouring Yorkshire landowners Miss Lister and Miss Walker find their lives become entwined in a passionate, forbidden relationship and retreat to the Moss House, their private sanctuary away from an unaccepting world. Their tranquillity does not last long as they are drawn into the turmoil of a changing society and a divided family, testing their love for each other, eventually driving them from their home. The world was not yet ready for the likes of Miss Lister.Landowner, scholar, traveller, mountaineer and non-conformist, but in The Moss House we discover her lifelong battle to be her true self as she finds Ann Walker and together they try to live life on their own terms.

Two hundred years ago, neighbouring Yorkshire landowners Miss Lister and Miss Walker find their lives become entwined in a passionate, forbidden relationship and retreat to the Moss House, their private sanctuary away from an unaccepting world. Their tranquillity does not last long as they are drawn into the turmoil of a changing society and a divided family, testing their love for each other, eventually driving them from their home. The world was not yet ready for the likes of Miss Lister.Landowner, scholar, traveller, mountaineer and non-conformist, but in The Moss House we discover her lifelong battle to be her true self as she finds Ann Walker and together they try to live life on their own terms.

A post-postmodern crime novel set on the clean streets of Dublin’s leafiest suburb, Sloot has at its heart an accidental detective who’d rather write his own Celtic-screwball-noir than solve the crime, and a narrator who loses the plot. Literally. Sound complicated? Not so. Thanks to a revolutionary structure, The Inquisitive Bullet, it’s simplicity itself.Detours include proof that psychoanalysis is the oldest profession, validation of the dictum `For what is comedy but tragedy with loose trousers’, and a brief aside on the possibility of an Irishman having multiple birth mothers. While the plot bullet speeds, inquisitively, towards its target – the final full stop.

How would it be if four lunatics went on a tremendous adventure, reshaping their pasts and futures as they went, including killing Mussolini? What if one of those people were a fascinating, forgotten aristocratic assassin and the others a fellow life co-patient, James Joyce's daughter Lucia, another the first psychoanalysis patient, known to history simply as 'Anna O,' and finally 19th Century Paris's Queen of the Hysterics, Blanche Wittmann? That would be extraordinary, wouldn't it? How would it all be possible? Because, as the assassin Lady Violet Gibson would tell you, those who are confined have the very best imaginations.

Tamara is going to kill her mother, but she isn't the villain. Tamara just has to finish what began at her birth and put an end to the damage encoded in her blood.Quitting her job in Communications, Tamara dresses carefully and hires a car, making the trip from London to her hometown in Kent, to visit her mother for the last time. Accompanied by a chorus of ancestors, Tamara is harried by voices from the past and the future that reveal the struggles, joys and secrets of these women's lives that continue to echo through and impact her own.'The Sound Mirror spans three familial generations from British Occupied India to Southern England, through intimately rendered characters, Heidi James has crafted a haunting and moving examination of class, war, violence, family and shame from the rich details of ordinary lives.

BBC Two Book Club Choice - Between The CoversJimmy Noone walks from one side of a sprawling city to the other, looking for Betwa, a friend he found and lost on the bustling city streets. Jimmy becomes the catalyst for lost lives colliding, exposing stories of tenderness, devotion, displacement and tragedy, and the subtle threads of commonality which intersect them all, making the invisible, visible again.

As university term gives way to the summer break she is plagued by dark memories and the only person there for her is her cousin - a cousin that no one else can see - together they embark on a journey that changes Jen and her world forever.

Sally lives with husband Bill, adult son Dan, and four of Dan's friends. Sally's best friend Jen confesses that she may accidentally have murdered her first husband which complicates her own husband's ambitions when he becomes embroiled in political scandal resulting in his surprise nomination as the least worst candidate for Prime Minister.

"When three brothers find a dead magpie and peg it to the washing line, the resurrection re-enactment becomes a portent of tragedy to come, and a reminder of past guilt and trauma.In Captain Jesus we see a family struggle to cope as loss rips through their lives; through the teenage eyes of their mother, twenty years earlier, we glimpse the events that shape her response.The icons, influences and family histories that define faith connect the two narratives as the family gradually heals, thanks to the quietness of love and the natural world."

When Michael Connolly was a child in the 1970s, his mother told him about all the things that happened to her in that place. All that the nuns had done. The doctors encouraged her to talk, and talk she did.She even tried to tell the public. She wrote letters to the newspapers. She made signs and picketed Mass. The good pious parishioners silenced her. The doctors told her she was delusional. Her husband didn't post her letters. Her son didn't believe her.Three decades later, still caught in the guilt from that time, Michael sits watching the news about the mother and baby homes unfolding, and realises, with his mother long gone, that she had been telling the truth all those years ago. *Fallen *is a stark and beautifully written account of the impact on one family of a shameful chapter in modern Irish history.

When Michael Connolly was a child in the 1970s, his mother told him about all the things that happened to her in that place. All that the nuns had done. The doctors encouraged her to talk, and talk she did.She even tried to tell the public. She wrote letters to the newspapers. She made signs and picketed Mass. The good pious parishioners silenced her. The doctors told her she was delusional. Her husband didn't post her letters. Her son didn't believe her.Three decades later, still caught in the guilt from that time, Michael sits watching the news about the mother and baby homes unfolding, and realises, with his mother long gone, that she had been telling the truth all those years ago. *Fallen *is a stark and beautifully written account of the impact on one family of a shameful chapter in modern Irish history.

John Wilson dreamt of becoming a renowned composer. John sets aside music for literature, writing under the name Anthony Burgess. Decades later, alone once more in Manchester, he encounters three spectres from his past. They refer to him as Our Jackie, and he senses the facade of Burgess begin to crumble.Walking rain-soaked streets he is drawn back to his past lives in pre-independent Malaya, wartime London, 1960s Europe, and 1970s America. Traversing continents, this once working-class lad becomes one of twentieth century Europe's literary greats, but what of those left behind, and of those bound to him and is it possible to recreate your own history?We've dug three graves for you, Mr Burgess.One for your body,One for your books,And one for your ego.

John Wilson dreamt of becoming a renowned composer. John sets aside music for literature, writing under the name Anthony Burgess. Decades later, alone once more in Manchester, he encounters three spectres from his past. They refer to him as Our Jackie, and he senses the facade of Burgess begin to crumble.Walking rain-soaked streets he is drawn back to his past lives in pre-independent Malaya, wartime London, 1960s Europe, and 1970s America. Traversing continents, this once working-class lad becomes one of twentieth century Europe's literary greats, but what of those left behind, and of those bound to him and is it possible to recreate your own history?We've dug three graves for you, Mr Burgess.One for your body,One for your books,And one for your ego.