Into Creative – förlag

One in two of us will get cancer in our lifetime, yet it so often remains the elephant in the room. In this unprecedented book, talented novelist, Gillian Shirreffs, collects and curates her own emails, WhatsApp messages, tweets, short stories, photographs and other found texts to tell the story of 800 days. 800 days in which she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, had 22 infusions of chemotherapy, two surgeries, 15 sessions of radiotherapy, learned to live with the aftermath of treatment, and saw her debut novel, Brodie, published. None of what is contained within Elephant was written with a book in mind and that is its power. Unvarnished yet beautiful, Elephant is a book that doesn't realise it is a book, providing a unique insight into a writer's life disrupted by illness. It offers a gamut of emotions; you will laugh, cry, think. Shirreffs' technique for surviving the most difficult days was to get through them five minutes at a time; this powerful testament to life, friendship and kindness, is one to be read at your own pace. A coffee table cancer book.

Tony Moscardini has exchanged life in a rain-lashed Scottish city packed with incident for the sun-baked predictability of a small medieval hilltop town in rural Italy. He has given up onerous full-time employment in daily journalism and found fulfilment in photography and guerrilla film-making. More importantly, he has found what feels a lot like true love.And yet, if he's being honest with himself, life in Castel di Colonia has also begun to feel a little bit dull.So what will he find on his return to Glasgow for a weekend? Old foes? Long-forgotten disappointments? Fresh excitements? Overwhelming temptation? Will the happier new Tony yield to his pessimistic former self?

Katy's story is first and foremost, a musical, family memoir. Both parents come with their own lives immersed in the Scottish music scene of the 1980s - Katy enmeshed in everything that was Edinburgh-based C86 indie pop, while her bandmate and future husband, Douglas MacIntyre, embraced the Scottish post-punk era.At the turn of the century, just as the the couple's musical projects are in the midst of a creative overload, children start to appear at an alarming rate. Six years and five children later, SandFest was born - raising thousands of pounds over the next decade for Down's Syndrome charities.A family. Functioning. JUST - music is always there to save the day. At the centre of this family saga is the indomitable spirit of middle child, Matilda, whose Down Syndrome is, in equal parts, challenging and an amazing gift within the family dynamic!In part, with the raw and unflinching honesty Katy tells of her encounters with the medical profession and educational authorities, which can be described as alternating between difficult and wonderful.At heart, this is the story of a family's love of music and how it has provided purpose, forged relationships and created harmony in every aspect of their lives ... with Matilda in the middle.

The River is a life-spanning epic novel about death and new beginnings. There's a saying, beloved of Scottish grannies: "Whit's fur ye will no' go by ye". Seemingly embracing this maxim, Lachlan McCormack lives his life as aimless as a piece of driftwood, but somehow gets to where he always wanted to be - where the river meets the sea. The novel is a love story, both to his childhood sweetheart, and to Scotland, and follows Lachlan's journey through seven decades of the nation's political, sporting and cultural history (and disappointments). Along the way, it appears that only death has the power to propel him onward, and the novel revisits the seven significant deaths that have shaped him and mapped his journey. It explores the cyclical nature of life, love, happiness, and Scotland's ongoing struggle with its place in the world.

This is a collection of short stories. Some of them are very short, some of them are even shorter than that, and a few are quite long. What they all have in common is that they are a bit odd. There's science fiction, there's horror, there's at least one fairy tale, and there are some Christmas stories, not all of which are heart-warming. None of them are entirely conventional.David wrote all of these stories for his own entertainment, He wrote them to see if he could write them, or because he had an interesting idea, or because he wanted to see what would happen if the dead could talk to us through car stereos, if gerbils were cell phones, or if if time was an ocean.Now you can see what he sees, too. We hope you like it.You better. David knows people, and not all of them are very nice.

Water has always been a constant theme in Gordon Meade’s poetry, from his earliest memories of the West Sands at St Andrews, through the Northumberland coastline, via County Cork and the canals of Venice, to the beaches and harbours of the East Neuk of Fife. Another prevalent theme in his work is the experience of a variety of non-human animals, whether encountered in the wild or in captivity, either free or abused.A more recent theme has been the poet’s own experience of Stage Three and Stage Four Cancer; its diagnosis, its treatment, and life with a terminal illness. All of the above areas are represented in Beyond the Ninth Wave which closes with over a dozen new poems published here, in book form, for the first time.

When a troubled woman discovers her birth father was a serial killer, she's forced to confront a terrible question. What if the darkness in her own soul is a direct inheritance from him?Despite having made a promise never to do so, Joanne Marshall sets out to trace her birth parents when her adoptive mother dies. She's always felt unable to connect with other people, even her family, and her lack of history is a black hole that only the truth can fill. Her search unearths increasingly shattering information, however, and when she discovers her birth father was imprisoned for murder - and that he's still alive - she decides she has to contact him to lay her fears about her own nature to rest.But she finds, instead, a strange connection to him. And, as their relationship deepens, she doesn't realise that she's making herself vulnerable to a potentially still very dangerous man. Will she finds the strength to stop another tragedy taking place?

It's 1965 and provocative author Henry Miller is taken incognito to an infamous title fight. In the turbulent aftermath of the bout, Miller is forced to battle his way through the ensuing melee in order to make a vital connection with the keeper of a tightly guarded secret. 'Is it safe?' Twenty years later, a young Maine waitress receives an unusual bequest. From the estate of an elderly patron, May Morgenstern takes ownership of a bound collection of letters, hitherto unseen correspondence between her late friend and the aforementioned writer in which he not only recounts the story of how he came to be accused of the slaying of the man who fathered her but how his fate came to be linked with that of future heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston. George Paterson's epistolary tale of murder and chicanery is a study of chaos in instalments. 'The Girl, The Crow, The Writer And The Fighter' is an incendiary, exciting, 'what if?' page turner which spans continents and lifetimes.

Magic is afoot…When the country’s most wanted man inexplicably hands himself into the police, decades after absconding from the state mental institute, a young, but damaged lawyer is called back from his recuperation to interview him. As Thomas Leven is drawn into the complex, preternatural mind of Westerwick born serial killer Angus John MacMillan, what appeared a perfunctory task quickly proves to be anything but.Delving deeper into the malign elements of MacMillan’s story, Thomas Leven starts to unravel, not only questioning his own faith but his sanity as he comes to the chilling realisation that true evil is all around. Set in Glasgow’s West End, and on the fictitious island of the title, Westerwick is a claustrophobic tale of the macabre,the mischievous and the malevolent, serving as both an urban gothic satire and a record of modern devilry.

On a spring day in 1988, Sandra Galbraith runs her long, curious fingers over a bookshelf tightly packed with the titles of her favourite writer, Muriel Spark. She's on a quest to find the perfect birthday gift for her niece, Violet, and plucks Brodie, a pristine, new copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, from a neat cluster of identikit books. Brodie adores Violet and, over the next two years, hidden in plain sight, learns family secrets of betrayal and a double life. When Violet leaves for university, her brother kidnaps Brodie to give to his disinterested love interest. On the thirty-year journey that follows, Brodie passes through hands and lives and is witness to death, sex, and a wicked stepmother.Throughout it all, Brodie's longing to return to Violet never fades.