WEATHERGLASS BOOKS – serie

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

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.

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.

Following a famous classical pianist and former child prodigy on an American tour after a personal tragedy, THE GHOST VARIATIONS is a beautiful, exquisitely crafted and funny novel exploring the possibilities and limitations of music, how we come to terms with grief, and asks whether we can ever really start our lives afresh.

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.