Mark Haddon

Michael Rosen

Nicholas Carr

Zadie Smith

Tim Parks

Carmen Callil

Blake Morrison

Mirit Barzillai

Dr Maryanne Wolf

Jane Davis

Jeanette Winterson

In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. Why should you stop what you're doing and read a book? People have always needed stories. We need literature - novels, poetry - because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of an overcrowded daily life. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no-one should live without it. In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention - make books one of them. Carmen Callil Tim Parks Nicholas Carr Michael Rosen Jane Davis Zadie Smith Mark Haddon Jeanette Winterson Blake Morrison Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai

Stop What You're Doing And Read This!

"With deceptive casualness, Ian, our narrator, tells the story of a summer weekend - with a frightening twist in the tail. The novel opens with a surprise phone call from an old university friend, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, for a few days by the sea. Their hosts, Ollie and Daisy, are a golden couple whose glamour and happiness drive Ian to distraction, and dangerous tensions quickly emerge. In vivid, careful prose, where flashes of wit collide with moments of troubling uncertainty, Blake Morrison perfectly conveys the stifling atmosphere of a remote cottage in the hottest days of summer. Beneath congenial yet charged conversation over meals and wine, the history of Ian's attachment to Daisy is slowly uncovered. His rivalry with Ollie intensifies as they resurrect an almost forgotten bet made twenty years before. Each day becomes a series of challenges for higher and higher stakes, setting in motion actions that will have irreversible and fatal consequences. The Last Weekend is a beautifully crafted page-turner, where little can be taken for granted and nothing is quite as it seems. It offers a dark, haunting tale of friendship, jealousy, sexual passion and revenge and con

The Last Weekend

This volume seeks to expose the hollowness of condemnation divorced from understanding in relation to the Bulger murder trial.

As If

D. H. Lawrence

Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class.Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English Literature.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

What matters most- marriage or friendship? fidelity or art? the wishes of the living or the talents of the dead? Matt Holmes finds himself considering these questions sooner than he thinks when his friend, the poet Robert Pope, dies unexpectedly. Rob had invited Matt to become his literary executor at their annual boozy lunch, pointing out that, at 60, he was likely to be around for some time yet. And Matt, having played devotee and apprentice to 'the bow-tie poet' for so long, hadn't the heart (or the gumption) to deny him. Now, after a frosty welcome from his widow, Matt sits at Rob's rosewood desk and ponders his friend's motives. He has never understood Rob's conventional life with Jill, who seems to have no interest in her late husband's work. But he soon finds himself in an ethical minefield, making shocking and scabrous discoveries that overturn everything he thought he knew about his friend. As Jill gets to work in the back garden, Matt is forced to weigh up the merits of art and truth. Should he conceal what he has found or share it? After all, it's not just Rob's reputation that could be transformed forevera Bestselling novelist and poet Blake Morrison creates a biting portrait of competitive male friendship, sexual obsession and the fragile transactions of married life. The Executorinnovatively interweaves poetry and prose to form a gripping literary detective story.

The Executor

‘A cul-de-sac, a dead-end track, A sandbanked strand to sink a fleet, A bay, a bar, a strip, a trap, A wrecking ground, that’s Shingle Street.’ Blake Morrison’s first two collections, Dark Glasses (1984) and The Ballad of a Yorkshire Ripper (1987) established him as one of our most inventive and accomplished contemporary poets. In his first full-length collection for nearly thirty years, Shingle Street sees a return to the form with which he started his career. Set along the Suffolk coast, the opening poems address a receding world – an eroding landscape, ‘abashed by the ocean’s passion’. But coastal life gives way to other, more dangerous, vistas: a wave unleashes a flood-tide of terror; a sequence of topical poems lays bare pressing political issues; while elsewhere portraits of the past bring forth the dear and the departed. Ardent and elegiac, and encompassing an impressive range of mood and method, this is a timely offering from a poet of distinct talents.

Shingle Street

South of the river

This is Blake Morrison's memoir of his father, Dr Arthur Morrison. It shows a son asking who his father really was. Was he the man seen through a seven-year-old's eyes, jumping queues, or the sexual charmer seen by a 17-year-old? Or was he the figure, so hard to recognize, on his death-bed?

And when Did You Last See Your Father?

Blake Morrison has woven a stunning novel around the few facts known about the life and work of Johann Gensfleisch (aka Gutenberg), master printer, charmer, con man, and visionary -- the man who invented "artificial writing" and printed the Gutenberg Bible, putting thousands of monks out of work. In this dazzling debut novel, Morrison gives Gutenberg's final testament: a justification and apologia he dictated, ironically, to one of the young scribes made obsolete by his invention of movable metal type. Through the eyes of the aging narrator, we see the Middle Ages in a strange new light and witness a moment of cultural transition as dramatic as the communications revolution of today.

A Novel

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Beneath the bright familiar world of Blair's Britain, there's a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives. This book presents a tale of five people, two rivers, and many Englands, metropolitan and rural, black and white, and is filled with art and life.

South of the River

This selection brings together new and previously unpublished poems by Blake Morrison.

Selected Poems

Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, this is the chilling story of a rivalrous friendship - as told with deceptive casualness by the narrator, Ian. It opens with a surprise phone call from an old university friend, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, for a few days by the sea.

Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, this is the chilling story of a rivalrous friendship - as told with deceptive casualness by the narrator, Ian. It opens with a surprise phone call from an old university friend, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, for a few days by the sea. Their hosts, Ollie and Daisy, are a golden couple, and the scene is set for sunlit relaxation. But dangerous tensions quickly emerge, and in the stifling atmosphere of a remote cottage in the hottest days of summer, Ollie and Ian resurrect a bet made twenty years before. Each day becomes a series of challenges for higher and higher stakes, setting in train actions that will have irreversible consequences.

Lancaster Assizes, 1612 - ten people from Pendle in Lancashire are hanged, guilty of the crime of witchcraft. The poems in this book give voice to characters involved in the trials - from the accused to the accusers, from a child who bore witness against her own mother, to the hangman who carried out the final deed.

A Discoverie of Witches

First published in 1993, Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father? is an extraordinary portrait of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement. It became a best-seller and inspired a whole genre of confessional memoirs, winning the Waterstone's/Volvo/Esquire Award for Non-Fiction and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Poet, playwright and novelist Blake Morrison evokes the lives of the Brontë sisters, with a nod to Chekhov's Three Sisters. Against the backdrop of a windswept northern village, three remarkable young women live their lives brightly. In Haworth in the 1840s, in a gloomy parsonage, where there are neither curtains nor comforts, Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë light up their world with outspoken wit, aspirations, dreams and ideas. And throughout their confined lives intensely lived... they write. With a touch of poetic licence, Morrison shows us the overwhelming humanity, charged emotions and brooding unease which characterise the Brontë household - and that of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Blake Morrison's play We Are Three Sisters was first performed at the Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, in 2011.

We are Three Sisters

Andrew Motion

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

And Other Poems

The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper

Dark Glasses

"In recent years Seamus Heaney has earned the reputation of being 'the most important Irish poet since Yeats'. Blake Morrison, in the first serious study of his career to date, identifies the central characteristics of his achievement, uncovering the sources of his poems, placing his work within both Irish and Anglo-American traditions and explaining his poetry's complex relation to the current political troubles in Northern Ireland. A lively, personal but carefully researched account by a writer who is himself a poet and critic, this book forcefully challenges some of the myths surrounding Heaney's work and places it in proper perspective." --

Rufus Matthew Jones

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