Original Fiction – serie

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, an incident takes place in a North London park. Chris is accidentally bitten by an excited dog, and aims a defensive kick at it. The owner, well-known polemicist Ivan Grubb, takes to his blog to express his outrage, spinning the story to sit happily within his own narrative. When Ivan and Chris relate the event to their children, they are surprised and confused by the strength of feeling their reactions have provoked. The Park is a delicate examination of how anger, repression and powerlessness can overwhelm even the most logical and well-intentioned person in a confusing modern world.

On the run from the mob, a trio of 1920’s Chicago Jazz musicians take a job from an elderly reverend, playing for what they think is his wife’s funeral in the backwoods of Illinois. Unfortunately, the funeral is actually an elaborate cult ritual to raise the spirit of an evil sorcerer who swiftly begins raising the dead and terrorizing the innocent townsfolk. With monsters, moonshiners and mobsters on their trail, the friends must draw upon their various talents to stop this evil, save the townspeople and escape with their lives.

The doctor's verdict is final: David has cancer. There is still a possibility of remission, but it is very small. And if the tumour kills him, David won't have a chance to see his baby granddaughter Louise grow up. We see his wife become progressively consumed by the looming shadow of death, in Vanistendael's sensitive portrayal of a family battling cancer.

Patricia Green is a middle-class, middle-aged romance novelist with writer’s block. William Crowney, aka “Cougar”, is a teenage runaway who has been surviving life on London's streets as a rent boy. Their lives couldn’t be more different. But when, under extraordinary circumstances, William is invited into Patricia’s suburban home, they realise they have more in common than loneliness and desperation: both have a desire for love. Through a twisted hell of home truths, William and Patricia slowly begin to understand, even respect, each other. An unlikely friendship forms – one that gives both the strength to carry on.

The highly anticipated new standalone full-color graphic novel from Bryan Lee O’Malley, author and artist of the hugely bestselling Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. Katie’s got it pretty good. She’s a talented young chef, she runs a successful restaurant, and she has big plans to open an even better one. Then, all at once, progress on the new location bogs down, her charming ex-boyfriend pops up, her fling with another chef goes sour, and her best waitress gets badly hurt. And just like that, Katie’s life goes from pretty good to not so much. What she needs is a second chance. Everybody deserves one, after all—but they don’t come easy. Luckily for Katie, a mysterious girl appears in the middle of the night with simple instructions for a do-it-yourself do-over: Write your mistake Ingest one mushroom. Go to sleep. Wake anew And just like that, all the bad stuff never happened, and Katie is given another chance to get things right. She’s also got a dresser drawer full of magical mushrooms—and an irresistible urge to make her life not just good, but perfect. Too bad it’s against the rules. But Katie doesn’t care about the rules—and she’s about to discover the unintended consequences of the best intentions. From the mind and pen behind the acclaimed Scott Pilgrim series comes a madcap new tale of existential angst, everyday obstacles, young love, and ancient spirits that’s sharp-witted and tenderhearted, whimsical and wise.

A sci-fi tale which has all the echoes of a David Lynch film. Almost cinematic in style, in the breathless opening to this graphic novel we get a traffic jam due to a wounded elephant; a blind pigkeeper; an alien-looking grey baby; a cavalier and alcoholic skirt-chasing surgeon; and a beanpole of a Swiss secret policeman. Our heroine, Carice, walks from her car through the woods, as if in a trance, to a hospital to visit her diplomat husband, indisposed from a car accident. Her goodbye note, which she intends to deliver in person, is in her purse. The hospital is vast, remote, and foreboding, filled with suitable loonies. The book’s first third ends with Carice waking an apparently dead body in the morgue with her whistling. Chopin? the body asks. Carice nods. We learn of her too-early marriage, her dashed dreams as a concert pianist, and in the course of conversation realize that the aged cadaver she’s talking to is her future self.