Sarah Tolmie

A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island. Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader on the Silk Road and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more. All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland's unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller.

All the Horses of Iceland

Dark, mournful, and beautiful, Sarah Tolmie's The Fourth Island is a moving and unforgettable story of life and death on the hidden Irish island of Inis Caillte. Huddled in the sea off the coast of Ireland is a fourth Aran Island, a secret island peopled by the lost, findable only in moments of despair. Whether drowned at sea, trampled by Cromwell's soldiers, or exiled for clinging to the dead, no outsiders reach the island without giving in to dark emotion. Time and again, The Fourth Island weaves a hypnotic pattern with its prose, presaging doom before walking back through the sweet and sour moments of lives not yet lost. It beautifully melds the certainty of loss with the joys of living, drawing readers under like the tide.

The Fourth Island

A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island. Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more. All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland's unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A satirical look at the euphemistic practices of dying today

The Art of Dying

Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, a quiet linen draper in Delft, has discovered a new world: the world of the little animals, or animalcules, that he sees through his simple microscopes. These tiny creatures are everywhere, even inside us. But who will believe him? Not his wife, not his neighbors, not his fellow merchants-- only his friend Reinier De Graaf, a medical doctor. Then he meets an itinerant goose girl at the market who lives surrounded by tiny, invisible voices. Are these the animalcules also? Leeuwenhoek and the girl form a curious alliance, and gradually the lives of the little animals infiltrate everything around them: Leeuwenhoek's cloth business, the art of his friend Johannes Vermeer, the nascent sex trade, and people's religious certainties. But Leeuwenhoek also needs to cement his reputation as a natural philosopher, and for that he needs the Royal Society of London-- a daunting challenge, indeed, for a Dutch draper who can't communicate in Latin.

The Little Animals

Hairless apes, while they're alive / Need a community to thrive. / Bald fact. Hard-won freedoms of choice and association lead us to flock together in groups of the like-minded. Check is a book of contemporary poetic satire about the groups that we inevitably form and their consequences: in-groups and out-groups and mutual suspicion. When we look around at others, and talk about them amongst ourselves, we agree. Sarah Tolmie writes about parents and teenagers, social media users, different kinds of writers, university professors, feminists, celebrities, pundits -- each one in possession of a different truth and determined to defend it. Hatred and intolerance are always the province of other people, never ourselves. Check begins and ends with the premise that toleration is exceedingly difficult and exasperating; it should not be casually assumed, and failures in it are universal. There has never been a tolerant society before, certainly not a global one.

Check

A suite of short fictions by Sarah Tolmie, author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Stone Boatmen, in August 2014. In Tolmie's vision of the messy near future, food is the language of love. Harwicke Arar, a relentless perfectionist, is the chef at NoFood, the most famous restaurant in the world. He serves imaginary food to diners who cannot digest it because they have all acquired the fashionable Total Gastric Bypass. His wife Seychelles loves him so much that she can actually taste what he creates. Gringo hunts the world for mushrooms and other illegal delicacies in a world of embargo, providing what people desire in an endless act of expiation for his daughter. Fats Bester, an artist among donut-makers, is saved by Carl, NoFood's zen headwater. Dononvan Donovan, hard-headed embargo lawyer for Hardy and Seychelles, is transformed by Cena, Hardy's posthumous daughter.

NoFood

"Tolmie tells a tale of three cities, separated by oceans, lost to one another long ago: the first, the city of rituals, of ceremonies; the second, the city of words, of poetry; and the third, the city of the golden birds, of dreams. In their harbors stand the stone boatmen, pointing outward toward the unknown. Now the birds are fostering a newfound relationship of the three cities of the ancestors, and the voyages of the ship Aphelion and its crew are beginning to rebuild the links."

Sarah Tolmie

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