This is Not Who We Are Sophie Buchaillard
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
Twenty years later Iris, a new mother, is working as a journalist in London. As she prepares to return to work, her thoughts turn to Victoria and what might have happened to her. She pitches a story to her editor which sets her on a journey to find her pen friend. But as she follows the story, things emerge that make her question her own past. Was her father, a French government official, somehow involved in the genocide? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact? Why is she looking for Victoria, really?
For Victoria, the last twenty years have been ones of migration, to Goma, then to Paris and finally to London. There she starts a new life with her youngest brother Paul, and leaves the past behind. Or so she thinks until she is suddenly confronted with the decision to reconnect with her genocide-supporting middle brother Benjamin.
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Kidnap Fury of the Smoking Lovers Peter Benson
Fargo Hawkins dropped out of school. Now he is a gardener. He’s twenty years old, and works for Harry Swaine, an abusive butcher with a chain of shops on the south coast of England. After witnessing a fight between Harry and Anne (his wife) Fargo steals a car and together he, Anne and a dog called Radar go on the run. They have £9,653, a bag of apples, a penknife and three bottles of wine. An incandescent Harry, a firm of private detectives and their emotions chase them across the country. In no time they are a newspaper headline – Kidnap Fury of the Smoking Lovers.
After a series of close calls, near misses and other adventures Anne and Fargo pitch up at a caravan site in North Wales, where they find work and lie low. But a man as possessive as Harry is not to be denied. Their westward journey has become one of revelation for all three of them as their relationships move from pure emotion to something more contemplative. Journey’s end for Fargo and Anne is the Llyn peninsula and the cottage of late poet R.S. Thomas. For Harry, it is somewhere darker.
In a world of uncertainties, how do human beings navigate the increasingly complex interrelations of love, desire, home, community? Each story in Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. From deep country on the Welsh borders to the metropolitan precincts of London or Paris; from the forests of Scandinavia to neatly clapboarded New England; from a Spanish finca to Dulles airport; and from the steamy environs of Mumbai to the cooler spaces of a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia – all these disparate realms intersect with the perennial human need to belong and the impossibility of doing so. The irreducibility of time acts as a continuo throughout the narratives and links loss with longing, hope with love and reveals the tentacular hold the past can have on all present aims and imperatives.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Scar Tissue unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
Sabrina’s Teardrop Leslie Scase
The third volume of the Inspector Chard series takes Chard back to his native Shrewsbury, revealing the circumstances under which he left for South Wales so abruptly. Now under arrest for a horrific double murder, and imprisoned in the notorious Shrewsbury gaol, he must fight to clear his name or face execution.
A missing woman, human trafficking, trade-offs, foul play, scheming and brutal Victorian gentlemen, civic corruption, and a gang of “Peaky Blinders” stand between Chard and proving his innocence. With the help of faithful Constable Idris Morgan and May Roper, Chard must be more resourceful than he has ever been, and he must also find the answer to the riddle of Sabrina’s Teardrop, the fabulous sapphire which sits at the centre of events.
As tensions rise, can Chard and his associates solve the mystery before it’s too late?
Leslie Scase takes us back to a time and place where, despite the pretensions of Victorian society, life is cheap and passions strong. He brings Victorian Shrewsbury vividly to life in this page-turning adventure that keeps you guessing until the final page.
The Confession of Hilary Durwood Euron Griffith
Eager for glory as an explorer in the further reaches of the Empire Hilary Durwood is duped into undertaking a semi-mythical mission, in semi-mythical lands. After many adventures and setbacks he returns to Victorian London destitute, dismayed at having killed someone, and seeking revenge against the Gentleman Explorer who set him up. Meanwhile a serial killer, The Slasher, stalks the streets and inevitably their paths will cross….
Hilary has survived dangerous islanders who are intent on eating human flesh, a huge cat with a wooden leg, a giant centipede, and a man who is determined to taste every animal on the planet. He has been fed by birds bringing hallucinogenic berries and held up the crumbling Tower of Ectha. And now Hilary must write his final confession.
This dark comedy thriller is a page-turning and riotous engagement with the notions and myths of Empire, the nature of reality, the power of narrative and the gullibility of those who wish to believe, even in the face of the truth.