Story Machine – förlag

The debut novella by Stella Bech.Madeleine is everything Angela is not: charismatic, lovable, certain. A story of two people who find and lose each other, and the ways love, loss and memory shape a life.

Born in New York City on the night of John Lennon’s assassination Ros is now a celebrated photographer who claims to have killed reclusive writer J. D. Salinger with the help of her alter ego Marta. In the psychiatric hospital where she resides Ros talks with her therapist about art and pop culture and the psychological and moral motives behind her actions. But rebellious and outspoken Marta has other ideas: she mistrusts the therapist and is determined to escape from the hospital during the building refurbishment.Flowing as a torrent of stream-of-consciousness prose The Day I Killed J. D. Salinger explores the vital function of art and the responsibility that ensues when art is not simply what we do but who we are.

Kate and her teenage daughter return to Ireland to sort through what is left of the family farm. Source is a book about beginnings and homeland and the words that accompany us on our journey.

A hurricane is about to hit New York City and Edward has (probably) just been dumped by his boyfriend. He could use a break. Bradington Bay is a journey into the heart of America. Stopping at roadside bars, diners, and even the grave of the Kentucky Colonel, he will find that – thankfully - journeys home rarely go as planned.Alaric Mark Lewis’s debut is an unforgettable epic. Bradington Bay is Homeric in scope, suffused with the adventurous energy of Jack Kerouac, and the heart of James Baldwin.

Welcome to Deception Island, a tiny Volcanic caldera in the Antarctic Ocean. Here the rusting remains of industrial whaling and a seabed littered with whalebones testify to mankind’s greed and brutality. But the island is also an outpost of scientific exploration, witness to human attentiveness and fortitude.As the ship carrying the author’s father edges through the basalt cliffs into the calmer waters of Deception Island, the island’s many voices, human and non-human, begin to speak.

In 1958, geophysicist A. G. Lewis travelled to the Antarctic to investigate the landscapes and skies of that vast and icy continent.Now Elizabeth Lewis Williams traces her father’s journeys, from the Peninsula to Mt Erebus. They are real, imagined, and artistic journeys, exploring communication across time and space, and experiments in scientific and poetic measure.Erebus transports us to an Antarctic of paradox. A land where perpetual daylight balances months of austral darkness. A land of encounters with the unknown, and with mortality – but where camaraderie and faith are the only defence against catastrophe.At its heart, Erebus is a visit to the frozen underworld, and an exploration of how we find a place for ourselves in this vast and often unforgiving world we call home.

1960. The height of the Cold War. Maths prodigy Ginny Matlock is appointed to be the first woman computer at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the East Anglian coast. She quickly finds, in this landscape of endless skies and shifting shorelines, that nothing is what it seems. What is the terrible secret of Briar Cottage? What dark tale haunts the local pub? And who is the mysterious Artist with whom Ginny’s fate becomes entangled? As the Berlin Wall rises and nuclear Armageddon threatens in Cuba, can Ginny build a life for herself among so many mysteries or will the terrors of the age suck her under?Sarah Bower’s brilliant novella blows the spy thriller genre to pieces and creates a feminist masterpiece from what is left of the rubble. A swirling mystery in which mathematical proof is always just out of reach. Lines and Shadows is the strange lovechild between Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent and John Le Carre.

‘Every family has shadow people, the ones who slipped out of the story too soon, leaving a blank space where they should have been. In my father’s family that person was his sister Kathleen.’So begins Heather Richardson’s astonishing fragmentary celebration of her aunt, Kathleen Hutchinson, whose life was cut tragically short aged just 14. It is the early days of WW2 and Kathleen has just left school to start her first job at a linen mill. But this dark and cold December night she doesn’t make it home.Originally stitched into the fabric of a dress, Kathleen’s life is presented here as a book for the first time. In the process, Heather Richardson also tells the stories of Kathleen’s parents and their lives together in rural Northern Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century.A Dress For Kathleen is a labour of love from niece to the aunt she never met. Every sentence sparkles. Heather Richardson’s masterpiece is a poetic portrait in prose and one of the finest books you will read this year.

When fifteen year-old Pen Flowers climbs out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night to dance in the empty streets, she ignites a flame in herself that will change everything.

‘Who’s this I hear, ringing like the tiny bell in a nut?’Strange Shape, the debut collection of Cat Woodward, is a love letter to Norwich, haunted by the spectral hellhound Black Shuck across fens and fields of history, following the rivers towards the waves of the rising tides returning to claim the land. Imaginative, lyrical and full of dark magic, Strange Shape takes an East Anglian city and shifts it into unexpected forms.

Asked to open an exhibition of photographs by the American photographer Lee Miller, Christopher Bigsby was struck by images which stared into a particular darkness, war and the cruelties it unleashed, this from a woman who had once been a fashion model and then a lover and student of the surrealist Man Ray. The war, though, changed everything, ultimately taking her across Europe and into the concentration camps. But can some truths never be captured either in images or words? The poems in this book are in part prompted by Lee Miller’s work, but also include the personal, the fanciful, and a response to the natural world.

Debut Novel of the Year - East Anglian Book AwardsSilver Harvest is a sweeping family saga charting the dramatic history of an East Anglian port and resort across two turbulent centuries.1826 - Jacob Chapman stands on the shoreline, preparing to put to sea and hunt the herring shoals, just as his ancestors have done for centuries. He is unaware that his small community is about to be engulfed by a far-reaching expansion that will see the town rise to become one of the premier ports and resorts on the East Coast.Successive generations of the Chapman family navigate Victorian ambition, Edwardian elegance, and the challenges of post-war Britain as their fortunes rise and fall alongside that of the town.

You have something to say. This book aims to help you find ways to say it. It will help you find creative strategies to write about the working class experiences you don’t often read in literature. Using approaches including oppositional writing, second person narration, and storyworlds, this book will help you be the writer you want to be and shape the stories of the future.

A book for anyone whose ill-health, life-limiting condition, or life situation has left them wondering if they can call themselves a writer. The answer is yes: we can write well no matter what constraints life imposes upon us or how little energy we have.Award-winning author Sandra Jensen has lived with chronic health conditions for decades. Here she offers a tried-and-tested, bitesize approach to developing the confidence, tools and encouragement to write and keep writing no matter what else is happening in your life or body. This book invites you to meet the blank page with a sense of play, without judgement, and let the muse do the rest. You will find here the exhilaration and freedom of writing without expectation: a sometimes life-changing experience. So go ahead: write for joy; write for wellbeing; write for art. Your voice, and your experience, matter.

We feel a story or a poem in our bodies. We laugh and weep onto the page. We write with our hearts, with our guts, with our muddy boots and arthritic knees, with our skin and bones. Bringing together movement and writing opens the doors to play. Getting off our backsides and away from the screen raises the heartbeat, stretches muscles, creates good vibrations and deeper breathing. It is better for our well-being and better for our art.Through activities you will explore how breath, posture, gesture, and movement can stimulate your writing. Simple physical and written exercises will help you access the subconscious, develop compelling characters, and create vivid descriptions.

Have you ever watched a movie or a play and wished you could see your imagination come alive like that?This is a book for aspiring playwrights, Hollywood hopefuls, and anyone with a story to tell. Whether you're a seasoned writer or a complete novice, James McDermott will demystify the secrets of crafting compelling dialogue, building unforgettable characters, and constructing scenes that leave audiences on the edge of their seats. From brainstorming ideas to polishing the final draft, you will find practical tips, inspiring anecdotes, and step-by-step guidance to see how you can make your stories come to life. James also shares insight into everything from securing an agent to self-promotion, freelancing to handling failure.Unleash your creativity, conquer the blank page, and join the ranks of storytellers who dared to dream. This is the go-to guide for everyone with a tale to tell.

There are no bars on your imagination, no limits on the freedom you can find in getting you words and stories onto paper.Stuck in a cell, cut off from everything they know and love, people have created some of the best loved words of all time. You can too.With the help of simple exercises and ideas to encourage good writing habits, you can use the limits of your cell to stimulate the imagination and break down walls.This is a handbook for you who already write creatively, and for you who would like to give it a try. It is for you who don’t think your story is worth telling, and for you who need activities to get your pen started.

On a summer’s day, a tiny baby vanishes. The mystery is never solved, leaving a young mother lost in grief. Twenty-one years later, ex-police detective Dan Hennessy is struggling with his own tragic loss. When a neighbour disappears and a body turns up at the solar farm, Dan becomes desperate for answers. The haunted landscape is keeping secrets, and there are dangers lurking in the Brecks. Will he find hope for the grieving mother, and can he save himself?

Rockall: an island some 230 miles off the west coast of Scotland, just 60 feet above sea level. The highest peak of a submerged continent, thrashed by a stormy ocean. An isolated and dangerous place, a sea rock of roaring /smoke and mirrors. In Rockall, Anne Osbourn takes us on a poetic journey, guiding us through historical encounters from the first recorded British landing in 1811, through shipwrecks which eventually led to the establishment of a light on Rockall in 1971, to its occupation in 2014 by the adventurer Nick Hancock. It is a polyphonic collection in which the voice of the Rock is joined by a range of vibrant characters – bustling guillemots, flashy gannets, a talking buoy, not to mention puffins, barnacles, scientists, and government officials. Begun during Covid Lockdown in 2020, these poems shift between moods, forms and perspectives. Poignant, lyrical, factual and often very funny, Anne Osbourn’s Rockall is a guide unlike any other, a living history which explores human curiosity and resilience, isolation and survival.

‘There have been many amazing projects to help people during the pandemic and Paperchains is one of the very best.’ Queen CamillaAn anthology of 30 stories of lockdown, from people with experience of prison, homelessness, addiction, and families of people in the armed forces.When the history of the Covid-19 lockdowns is written, who will be the storytellers and of whose lives will they tell? Will they tell of the prisoners spending 23+ hours each day locked in a cell, inhaling and exhaling, over and over again, the same recycled air? For months on end. With no visitors? Will they tell of those addicts who were just starting to recover and rebuild, only to find themselves back on the edge? Or the people down your street who had nowhere to live, or those whose house was never really a home? What about the families of service personnel, or young people stuck at home?These are experiences from inside the storm. From people whose stories are rarely heard. This anthology includes works of prose, poetry, drama, and art. Powerful, often irreverent, heartfelt: voices that history cannot forget. A chain of words, poetry and art that binds us all together. A chain that will survive beyond this turbulent time and stand as a testament of who we were during it.

‘I do not have a future, and I do not want dreams. My dreams are stories, written by a machine.And I will not think of her.’Luke Kierley has visited the writer and asked it to exorcise from him all memory of her. Now he has no idea who she was and he must try to find a way to live with a bleeding hole in his memory.Told in a unique voice that recalls southern gothic, classic horror, and frontier literature, Writer is like nothing you have read before. JM Burgoyne’s debut brings her virtuosic voice alive in a striking and unforgettable meditation on free-will, love, and the lengths we’ll go to avoid pain.