Alison Sinclair

Balthasar Hearne, a Darkborn to whom sunlight is fatal, harbors twins born of a Darkborn fugitive, but when the woman's fiance comes for the sons, Hearne is drawn into political intrigue, while his wife, Telmaine, tries to hide her healing powers.

Darkborn

Condemned to death for sorcery, Lady Telmaine Hearne escapes with the mageborn allies for the Borders and war while her husband, Balthasar learns of a family connection to the Shadowborn in this novel from the author of Lightborn. Original. 30,000 first printing.

Shadowborn

Alisan Sinclair's brilliant new novel of an underwater world inhabited by genetically adapted humans ranks her among today's best hard science fiction writers. Pioneering can be Perilous. Often, the Worst danger is not the unknown challenges that lie ahead, but the fear and ignorance of those who stay behind. Thus it is for the courageous colonists of Blueheart, an ocean planet inhabited by humans genetically engineered to survive long periods underwater. They have built a life on Blueheart and created their own society and lifestyle, but now their peaceful community is under threat. A faction of "real" humans is protesting the DNA engineering that created these water-adapted colonists, and they plan to terraform Blueheart and force the colonists to join mainstream galactic society. Tensions mount, and when the body of a woman is discovered deep beneath the sea, the investigation of her unnatural death unleashes a catastrophe that Blueheart and its inhabitants might not survive. "A splendid combination of world-building touched with emotion...and a crucial measure of hope". -- Locus (reviewing the British edition of Blueheart) "World-building of an intricacy and invention to rival Herbert and Clarke". -- Lucius Shepard

Blueheart

Lady Telmaine Hearne, of the Darkborn aristocracy, has long kept her magical ability secret, but when her husband draws her into a conspiracy to protect the archduke and his brother, she has no choice but to use her powers. Original.

Lightborn

Five generations after their ancestors had accidentally destroyed their home planet and fled to another world, Lian D'Halldt, Daisainia Travassa, and the other outcasts prepare to return to the lost world. Original.

Legacies

For the Darkborn, the touch of sunlight kills, while darkness is lethal for the Lightborn. For centuries, the two have lived in an uneasy peace, sharing the same city but never meeting. Now, with the rise of the Shadowborn, everything is about to change… Condemned to death by the Darkborn for practicing sorcery, Lady Telmaine Hearne escaped her fate and is now bound with her mageborn allies for the Borders—and the war brewing there. Also on the frontlines of the battle between Darkborn and Shadowborn is the assassin Floria White Hand, desperately maneuvering between allies and enemies to bring her Lightborn prince home safe. The fragile alliance between Lightborn and Darkborn, between mage and non-mage, is endangered. The mage Tammorn is forced to become ambassador to the enemy. And a lifetime fighting the Shadowborn has not prepared Ishmael di Studier for what he will find when he follows the Call from the Shadowlands—and meets the woman behind it…

A study of the representation in European literature of adultery, focusing in particular on the figure of the husband. It makes use of Kleinian psychoanalysis to explore notions of masculinity, gender and power in a range of texts such as "The Canterbury Tales" and "Anna Karenina".

A Kleinian Approach to the Literature of Infidelity

The Deceived Husband

This is an ambitious and original study of the representation in European literature of adultery, focusing in particular on the figure of the husband. Detailed discussions of a wide range of texts, including The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, Othello, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina reveal that fundamental anxieties about masculinity are repeatedly articulated in two main characterizations of the deceived husband: the cuckold and the man of honor. Innovative and challenging, The Deceived Husband is an important examination of a previously neglected aspect of European literature and of psychoanalytic literary criticism in general.

Cavalcade

The first of The Plague Confederacy series, Breakpoint: Nereis combines a rousing space opera with a first-rate medical mystery. Struggling to rebuild an empire shattered by plague, the starship, Waiora, recontacts the colony of Nereis, only to find themselves embroiled in war. The mandate of First Contact is to help stabilize devastated colonies while searching for the origins of the plague that brought down the empire. But the new Confederacy has struggles of its owns and it is ill-equipped to play peacemaker. Passions run high as deceit and trickery threaten to destroy them all.

Nereis

Breakpoint

Eyre has survived the collapse of the galactic empire better than most of the lost colonies with a central government, a world trade network, an effective medical system - and a pathological fear of death. When the medical re-contact ship, Waiora, arrives with its dual mission of finding the plague and stabilizing surviving colonies, its crew is quickly immersed in a religious schism that threatens their mission and their lives. As a mysterious contagion threatens lives and incites revolution against the Caducean Order, the Waiorans must choose between the success of their mission and their most deeply held values. This is the second volume of The Plague Confederacy series from Alison Sinclair.

Eyre

Contagion

The book traces how Hildegart’s conception, life and early death can be mapped in uncanny manner onto the rise, organization and decline of the Sexual Reform movement in Spain. Conceived deliberately in 1914 as a ‘eugenic’ child (at a date when writing on eugenics was well under way in both England and Spain), Hildegart received her early education from her mother who in her turn had received her own from her father’s library, rich in works of utopian socialism. Subsequently and formally, Hildegart’s education through the 1920s coincided with a period in Spain when writing on eugenics and sex reform became particularly intense. It encompassed both law and medicine (favoured disciplines for those involved in the sex reform movement), and her teens provided a social education within the meetings and publications of the Campaña Sanitaria of Navarro Fernández in the 1920s. Hildegart’s own rise to a position of prominence in the world of eugenics and sex reform undoubtedly relates to her concentrated and impressive publishing activity from 1930 onwards, at a time when writings of others involved in sex reform equally reached heightened activity. The coming of the Second Republic in 1931 further facilitated this publishing activity, and made possible the organization of the Spanish chapter of the WLSR in Spain (the Liga Mundial Para la Reforma Sexual) in March 1932 with Gregorio Marañón as its President, and the youthful Hildegart (age 17) as its Secretary. The Liga gathered together the groupings of hygienists, eugenicists, lawyers and educational reformers who were already part of a wider international scene, and who had been promoting ideas of eugenics and sexual reform in Spain for some time, and particularly through the 1920s. Little more than a year after the Liga was founded Hildegart was killed by her mother, Aurora Rodríguez. It is hard to assert that this shocking event caused the death of the Liga. Nonetheless the movement in Spain seems not to have survived in coherent manner beyond 1933, although individual members continued to be active in various ways. More widely through Europe the WLSR lasted through the 1930s, although its continuity through other organizations until a later date is still insufficiently researched. In the background to the activity leading up to the founding of the Liga there is Hildegart’s correspondence with Havelock Ellis. She wrote to him to seek his advice on setting it up. The correspondence was far more than a simple request for advice, and it lasted until Hildegart’s death. It includes her record of the foundation meeting of the Liga with details of discussion of the ten planks of belief of the WLSR, and reveals the inbuilt power-struggles between professional factions in the organisation. Both the foundation document and the letters require careful interpretation. The foundation document reveals dissension within the Liga at the same time as it shows Hildegart’s energetic efforts to assert her own position within it. The letters themselves tell us much about Spanish sexual politics. But at the same time, and even more strikingly, they are full of Hildegart’s character: her style moves between business-like discussion, an endearing and ingenuous flirtatious manner, distress, and even paranoia. Above all the letters reveal a side of this youthful sexual reformer never documented elsewhere, and their extraordinary discursive nature encapsulates the paradoxes and conflicts in Spain at the time relating to thoughts on sexuality and reform. The correspondence with Ellis is moreover a text with a dramatic subtext, in that it allows us to glimpse in poignant and dramatic detail the personal tensions and anxieties in the life of this young woman who was to be murdered by her mother. The letters also testify to Hildegart’s strong and touching attachment to Ellis as mentor in the setting up of the Liga and, more personally, as a father-figure. The correspondence thus provides a unique window onto a movement and an individual both full of complexity and provide pointers the links between ideas and sexuality in England and the way such ideas were explored in Spain.

Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform

Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

University Lecturer in Spanish and Fellow Alison Sinclair

This study of La Regenta by Alas draws both on psychoanalytic theory and on an understanding of the social, sexual and medical norms of the period in which the novel was written. It proposes that the novel be understood as a coded summary of desire fantasied, dislocated, repudiated and thwarted.

Gender, Identity, and Strategy in La Regenta

Dislocations of Desire

Spain's cultural and intellectual exchanges with Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries

Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-century Spain

Andre Sinclair

A Popular View of Revolution

Valle-Inclán's Ruedo Ibérico

Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher, writer, and academic, has a central position in early 20th century Peninsular Spanish letters, yet his importance in a wider intellectual and literary context has remained largely unrecognized. This study re-contextualizes Unamuno, by revising the concept of his intellectual parameters, and by including analytical essays on seven of Unamuno's major literary texts.

Alison Sinclair

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