Showing results by publisher "Headline Digital" in Literary Fiction

This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. As with her novels, these stories are at once moving and honest, deft and humane, filled with insight, anger at injustice, and her trademark lightness of touch.

Dunlough: a rambling, idyllic estate in the Irish countryside, one that has cast a potent spell on its inhabitants for generations. But with the cost of upkeep mounting and money running thin, family patriarch John Campbell makes a bold decision: to avoid selling, he will open Dunlough's doors to tourists, and move his wife, and their son and daughter, to a dank, small cottage behind the main house. The upheaval strains the already tenuous threads that bind the insular family. Then a tragic accident befalls them, and long-simmering resentments and unanswered yearnings come dangerously to the surface.

May Day 1646: The Civil War is raging and what should be a rare moment of blessing for the town of Ely takes a brutal turn. Ruth Flowers is left with little choice but to flee the household of Oliver Cromwell, the only home she has ever known. On the road to London, Ruth sparks an uneasy alliance with a soldier, the battle-scarred and troubled Joseph. But when she reaches the city, it's in the Poole household that she finds refuge.

Sun. Desire. Obsession. An explosive, intelligent novel from the prize-winning author of Brass. One hot summer. One week in a villa on the outskirts of Deia, a village nestling in the rugged, mountainous west coast of the island of Mallorca. One family where the carefully laid jigsaw of life is about to be broken. Jenn and her husband Greg holiday each year in Deia, enjoying languorous afternoons by the pool. But this year the equilibrium is upset by the arrival of Emma, Jenn's stepdaughter, and her boyfriend Nathan.

The most subversive and gloriously unexpected novel you'll ever read about the end of a marriage and its aftermath. Meet Lizzie Prain. Ordinary housewife. Fifty-something. Lives in a cottage in the woods, with her dog, Rita. Likes cooking; avoids the neighbours. Runs a little business making cakes. No one has seen Lizzie's husband, Jacob, for a few days. That's because last Monday, on impulse, Lizzie caved in the back of his head with a spade. And if she's going to embark on the new life she feels she deserves after 30 years in Jacob's shadow, she needs to dispose of his body....

A mesmerising novel about obsessive love. Persephone Triebold has grown up in the strange desolation of the Scottish Highlands, raised by her anxious father and memories of her dead mother. Inexperienced in the rules of friendship, sex and love, Persephone takes the opportunity to replace uninhabited mountain ranges with city life and leaves to study for a degree in London.Parties, new friends and the polluted splendour of the capital intoxicate Persephone at first, but fail to supply her with the grand passion she wants.

Not everyone wants to be saved. Amity & Sorrow is a story about God, sex, and farming. It's The Lovely Bones meets Witness: an unforgettable journey into the horrors a true believer can inflict upon his family, and what it is like to live when the end of the world doesn't come.

Set in a brilliantly observed rural Indiana, 'the bastard son of the Midwest', Snapper is a book about birdwatching, a woman who won't stay true, and a pickup truck that won't start. Here turtles eat alligators for breakfast, Klansmen skulk in the undergrowth, and truckers drop into the diner of a town named Santa Claus to ensure that no child's Christmas letter goes unanswered, while Nathan grapples with the eternal question: Should I stay, or should I go? Kimberling's vision of small-town life is as characterful as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, but bristling with the tensions of race, class, poverty, and prejudice.

This is not a book about death. It's a book about life. We first meet Michel 11 days after the death of his son Lion. Lion was lost, suddenly, to a virulent strain of meningitis and it's left his father and entire family reeling. We join Michel on his personal journey through grief, but the twist that makes the journey truly remarkable, and tips this true story into fiction, is the fact that we see it all through Lion's eyes. In a stunningly original blurring of memoir and fiction, The Son tackles the very hardest of subjects in the most readable of ways.