Kirjahaku

The story of The Apparition alternates between two time periods, 2010 and 1910-20. In 2010, the main character is ANNA. In 1910-20, the main character is CHRISTINA. The two narrative strands are linked by the village of Staithes, on the beautiful, rugged North Yorkshire coast.Anna has inherited a small 'fisherman's cottage in Staithes. In the middle of a divorce from a controlling husband, she visits occasionally at weekend to get away from things, to help maintain her sanity and to think. Her peaceful weekends are disturbed, however, by the increasing sense that there is a 'presence' in the cottage. Christina Tasse is a young artist. Her potential has been recognised, and she now has the opportunity to work with her mentor, Charles Penner, some years older, as an apprentice, at Staithes. On the verge of womanhood, in Edwardian England, she is both excited and apprehensive about what lies ahead. The two narratives finally merge when the apparition materialises and silently leads Anna to a special place along the cliffs near Staithes. As Christina paints, Anna looks at the scene, and the two share a kind of epiphany of self-realisation.

When Matthew Locke survives a shipwreck on the coast of Anglesey, he is cared for by the family of Llyws Llewellyn in the fishing village of Rhosneigr. During his recovery from the ordeal, he finds himself slipping through boundaries of time, becoming involved in events from Anglesey s mysterious past. In these episodes, he meets, in different guises, Bryony, Llwys Llewellyn s elder daughter, and it is here that their strange love affair begins.Set in Anglesey in the 1880s, and beginning with the loss of The Norman Court , a clipper in the Java sugar trade, John Wheatley s novel explores the shadowy territory between history, myth and fantasy.

Set in the industrial town of Middleton, to the north of Manchester, MARCIA tells the story of a first-love that continues to haunt two people long after their lives have gone in different directions. Recording the rituals and intimacies of courtship and marriage, the novel evokes the changing faces of Middleton through four decades as it moves towards its post-industrial present.

John Wheatley s second Middleton novel takes us back to the second world war and its impact on two Middleton families. Evelyn and Maureen, sisters-in-law, are drawn together when their husbands go away to serve. For Evelyn, the idyllic pre-war early years of her marriage are replaced the darkness and loneliness of separation. Both young women face conflicts and temptations, and in the aftermath of the war, both have hard decisions to make as they try to rebuild their lives.

Canky s Trade is set in the south Lancashire township of Middleton in 1811. Lord Byron, pursuing a legal entitlement which he had in nearby Rochdale, stayed at Hopwood Hall, close to Middleton in September of 1811, and the novel deals partly with Byron s impact on the people he meets there. 1811 was also a year when the infamous Luddites were at large, and whose destructive resistance to new machinery prompted the Frame-breaking Bill, which Byron was to oppose in the House of Lords. And it was in the middle of the period when Oliver Canky, sexton of the parish churchyard, plied his trade . Throw in a young local weaver and poet, Sam Bamford, a murdered prostitute and some strange goings on in the cellar of the isolated house of Canky s friend, Owd Scrat , and there you have the basic ingredients of the story....

The Weeping Sands is a captivating historical saga interweaving four tales of love and loss spanning four centuries, with a ruined mansion providing the links between past and present, whilst the weeping sands of the title, the Lavan Sands provide a melancholy background to the novel s events. Jenna Shaw, 32, children s TV presenter, is invited to take par t in a TV show exploring her ancestry, a quest which will take her, ultimately, to the ruined mansion of Baron Hill, in Beaumaris, Anglesey. Four centuries earlier, Thomas Cheadle, despised for his affair with Lady Anne Bulkeley, and blamed for the death of her husband, prepares to play his part as the Civil War reaches Wales. Isobel Harcourt, recovering from a breakdown following a failed love affair with artist, James Pennington, and in the protection of her sister, is taken to Beaumaris, Anglesey, to convalesce. The year is 1831. How do Isobel s strange delusions link the past and the present? What will be the outcome of Jenna s quest?

The Exile s Daughter. A Tale of Anglesey and the Great War. Moving from Church Bay, on the lonely west coast of Anglesey, to the battles of the Somme and Flanders, the novel follows the fortunes of Polish refugee Lauren Bucievski, and Jimmy Jilkes, circus runaway, door-to-door salesman, and soldier, through the earth shattering years of the early twentieth century. When Lauren and her father take flight from Poland during the 1905 revolution, the ten year old girl has little understanding of who her father s enemies are. Seven years later, when she befriends the likeable and happy-go-lucky Jimmy, and when the charismatic Stefan turns up from Poland, her life is thrown into conflict, vulnerable as she is, in her isolation, to the dangers of her own dawning sexuality. The outbreak of war in 1914 becomes the defining factor in how each of their destinies will turn out

Archetypal victim - or manipulator exraordinaire? The love-match between Prince Lemyr of Va meria and the beautiful Linsl, 14 years younger, is seen as a means of restoring the fortunes of an unpopular monarchy in times of political instability at home and unrest in foreign affairs. The new princess, eager to please, is keen to learn all the duties and protocols of her position. She has to learn its contraints, too, however and the road ahead is not always to be strewn with roses. At the same time, Corporal Jakkr of the Border Guard is courting Saryl, daughter of the landlord of the Inn at the Top of the World, a romance which has its own troubles to overcome. The trials and conflicts of these two different relationships are set against the impending war with Karagia, which will shape the destiny of all four protagonists.The island of Vastameria, comprising the two nation states, Va'meria and Karagia, lies in the Western Ocean, eighty miles from its nearest continental neighbour. The island is approximately twelve hundred miles in length, lying on a slight SW to NE axis, and spans two hundred miles at its broadest point. A belt of high moorland and mountain terrain divides the two countries in roughly equal proportions, and forms a natural border between them running from the western to the eastern seaboards. The countries are presently at peace with each other and have been so for 65 years, though tensions often run high, particularly over the so-called Disputed Territories, land annexed by Va meria after the war of 1744-61. From "A Journey in Vastameria" by Alens Brinst, 1816