WEATHERGLASS BOOKS – serie

Four friends about to go to college accidently-on-purpose remove the moon from the night sky. Now it's turned up in one of their bedrooms as an angry, sarcastic all-powerful young woman demanding something terrible be done to make amends.

Gloria has a learning disability. She’snineteen, and there’s nothing to do exceptwander the local parks, look for friendshipand keep out of trouble – or go roundJack’s. Jack needs Gloria's company, buthe’s unpredictable and angry at the world.After an act of violence, their friendshiphas to end. Now Gloria's on her own.But when she hears Jack's out of prison,her whole world is turned upside-down.Heartbreaking and beautiful, Gloria Don’tSpeak is a deeply empathetic portrait of awoman dealing with vulnerability, violence– and the desire for connection.

“I ask the internet the difference between something being too close tothe bone and something being too close to home.” This funny andterrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don't, inour latest machine age. In it something unforgiveable has happened.The main character, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharpunderstanding, is only just holding things together and trying to workout how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half ofa fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented?Pink Soap examines the massive everyday pressures we’re all underwith real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief. Isense it becoming as much a classic for now as Plath’s The Bell Jar hasbeen for the decades behind us." Ali Smith

London: the threat of another pandemic looms. And Sebastian, a journalist searching for his colleagues who have disappeared on a mission in West Africa, may hold the secret to it all. After surviving a life-threatening encounter with the new disease, Sebastian's troubles get worse. As he fights to discover what's happened to his friends, he realises that there are powerful forces pursuing him: a posse of fake nurses want his blood - and the police want to find him guilty of murder. And when he travels back to Africa to find out what has happened to his friends, he is forced to confront a presence yet more terrifying: the mythical, malevolent warlord who haunts the imagination of everyone who encounters him -KhaiManni. For fans of Graham Greene and John Le Carre, THE UNDROWNED is a story of courage, mystery and paranoia in a world that may be spinning completely out of control.

She's from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn't work out. Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she's ordered in for other people s meetings. And she still lives in Southend. Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom. Then Gustav appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French. He's her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new. How to be a French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we'll risk to change ourselves.

1951, Singapore. Ten-year-old Josephina kills her abuser. This event becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithara, and her granddaughter Annie. The effects cascade through generations as Annie sets out across the world to discover what happened to fracture her family. Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Amma is a novel about how the past lives with us forever, and wherever we are. Written in sensuous, vivid prose, Amma is a story of the rich history and unknown future of the Sri Lankan diaspora -  and of one family desperately trying to find peace.

Her whole life, Karin has fled from everything and everyone who wants to possess her. She has a daughter she rarely contacts, a job that demands nothing, and she largely socialises with men she meets on the internet. But when her daughter's marriage becomes at risk of falling apart, she is forced to confront why she is like this, and what she might do to prevent her daughter leading the same life. Near Distance is a subtle, poised and devastating account of a mother and daughter's attempt to reconnect.

After her mother sails from the Caribbean to England to find work, Wheeler is left with her two older sisters, three cousins and two aunts. She couldn't feel more alone. She longs for her mother to send for her as promised. Everyone tells her to just wait. But for how long? In the meantime, she has to learn to get along as best she can, exploring the island with Donelle, making kites with Bounce, following the carnival through town. But most of all she must avoid the threat of her cousin Floyd.Set during the mid-1960s on a Caribbean Island, issues of family, migration and abandonment hang over Wheeler and her unknowable future. A story of sisterhood, family secrets, and the sacrifices of love. No novel comes as close to this heart-breaking evocation of what it's like to be a child left behind.

It's the early 19th century and a small sailing ship with a cargo of convict women and their children is crossing the ocean to a penal colony. Among those trying to survive is a 15-year-old girl. After caring for her only friend who has poisoned herself, she discovers a kind of liberation within the confines of the ship, as she moves into her unknowable, distant future.

Magnus lives on Aerth, which is currently moving intoan Ice Age, with a strange virus limiting the population.When the planet Urth is discovered, he vows tobecome an astronaut and travel there, but on arrivinghe finds it hot, crowded, corrupt and violent, despite itbeing initially welcoming. Slowly Magnus realises hewill not find what he's looking for, but there seems noway back.Aerth is a story about migration, climate, conspiracytheories and interplanetary homelessness.

Declan O'Day was one of the world's finest classical pianists. A child prodigy from working class Manchester, by the age of 18 he was touring the world and feted as a great virtuoso. Ten years later, on a walking holiday in the Lake District, his wife dies in a terrible accident, he stops performing, and his life descends into loneliness and obscurity. Now, five years on, he is persuaded to re-start his career and sets out on a short American tour. But the circumstances of wife's death continue to haunt him - and he discovers that even the greatest music cannot save him from his past.

Set in Yorkshire in the 1980s, The Way the Day Breaks is a novel about family, love, memory and mental illness. We follow one family, mostly in car trips across the dales, as they discuss nature, speculate on the future, dream up get-rich schemes, laugh, quarrel and try to hold together. But there is a darker current running beneath this family's shared life. The father, Sinclair, is approaching a manic episode, and life in the family becomes strained. The impact of his breakdown is heartbreaking and felt through the children down the years, especially by the youngest son, Michael.As formally inventive as it is narratively rich, the story unfolds in two modes, through dialogue and through the poetic reflections of Michael, some years later.The Way the Day Breaks is one of the most moving, honest accounts of the way mental illness vibrates through the life of a family.

At thirty-seven, Lydia has been with Tom for over a decade. Now he's nearing sixty, and she's bored. Yet she commits to staying with him, only to find that he s fallen in love with someone else while she s been away. Devastated, she makes contact with Tom's nineteen-year-old son, Caleb. Suffering from the collapse of their expectations, Lydia and Caleb are drawn together in an unsettling mix of desire, care, and revenge.

Liverpool, 1984. The teenagers at Garston Chapel are the same as the rest of us: The Smiths, U2, crushes, football, mates. The politics of the Thatcher era casting deep shadows, but the kids have got other things on their minds... Jesus, for one. Almost normal kids, then. But Robert isn't normal. He's visited by angels and he can't tell a soul. All anyone can see is his strange behaviour as he desperately seeks to understand what they mean. As Robert's two worlds merge, the real and the visionary intersect with increasing intensity and what is being asked of him becomes terrifyingly clear.

There's a myth attached to 'A Hard Day's Night': the Byrds adopted the 12-string guitar and transformed 'Mr Tambourine Man', Dylan went electric as a result, and a pattern of intense competition climaxed with the release in quick succession of Blonde on Blonde, Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper. A closer look tells us something different. Dylan's electric 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' preceded the Byrds' version of 'Mr Tambourine Man', which owed just as much to the Beach Boys - whose epochal Pet Sounds came out a full year before Sgt Pepper. Using timelines derived from release dates, studio sessions and personal encounters, Play It Hard traces the paths of influence during a 3-year period when artists crosspollinated via recordings, rivalry, rumours and drugs - changing music forever.