Kirjahaku

Award-winning writer Alice Thompson’s compelling new novel is a story of transformation; an exploration of the shifting borderlands between imagination and reality. It is 1936. Iris Tennant has applied, under a pseudonym, to become personal assistant to Lord Melfort, the Under-Secretary of War, at his estate in the Scottish Highlands. Her plan is to find out why her younger sister Daphne committed suicide there a year previously. As Iris gradually falls under the spell of Glen Almain, she starts to see the apparition of Daphne haunting its glades and begins to wonder about the manner of her death. Is there really a beast that inhabits the woods? Who is the mysterious falconer? What actually happened to Daphne, and is Iris destined for the same fate? A backdrop of impending war and the spectre of Nazi Germany loom over this strange, dark tale. What ensues is a battle between instinct and reason, fantasy and history.

William Blake is a private detective. When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, Will finds himself entangled in layers of deceptions and disappearances that lead him inexorably back to an unsolved mystery in his own past: the loss of his young daughter Emily. The case takes Will to brothels, night clubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello. Identities become confused as his sexual obsession with a night club singer becomes entwined with sightings of Louise, his own torturous memories, and new visions of the lost Emily. The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Justine is a painting, a doppelgänger and a woman of beguiling beauty. Set in contemporary London, Justine is a story of a man’s obsession with a woman – or is it two women? For Justine has a twin sister Juliette, and as the story unfolds, the opium-dazed narrator becomes increasingly unsure as to the identity of the woman he desires.

In Edwardian England, Violet has a fairy tale existence: loving husband, beautiful baby son and luxurious home. She wants for nothing. But soon after the birth of her baby the idyll begins to disintegrate. Violet becomes obsessed by a book of fairy tales her husband has locked away in a safe. Paranoid hallucinations begin to haunt her and she starts to question her sanity. Meanwhile, vulnerable young women are starting to disappear from the nearby asylum. Soon Violet herself is interned in the asylum for treatment only to discover, on coming out, that her husband has hired a nanny while she has been away, the beautiful, enigmatic Clara. The brutality of the asylum is nothing compared to the horrors that now lie in wait.

Alice Thompson’s gripping, deep space novel sees scientist and dream investigator Artemis travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros. Her ship, the Chimera has been sent to look for organisms that will help assuage Earth’s global warming, but it becomes clear on the journey that there are other disturbing reasons for the mission. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire. This is a story of transfiguration, dreams and identity. Are we just a template of memories and experiences, or is there something that makes us uniquely human?

How could someone without memory be real at all? Without a memory what kind of a person was she? She was living in a limbo land. She was like a ghost.'A young woman is washed up onto the shores of a remote lighthouse island. She does not know who she is or how she got there. She has no memory. The keeper of the lighthouse and his assistant take her in and feed and clothe her. In classic ghost-story manner, she is not all what she seems and neither is the calm and peaceful island.Set at the time when the slave trade was at its height in the 1860s, Pharos is a vivid, expressionistic ghost story, a wonderful and haunting tale.

A collection of poems created in reflection of the issues faced by girls and women and anyone who identifies as female in a modern day society. Written from the heart and experience hoping they will resonate, help or touch at least one person's heart.