Kirjahaku

A collection of poetry and readings suitable for funerals, to comfort, console, but also to celebrate.

A selection of prose and poetry to celebrate marriage, love and relationships - tender, funny, cynical, some well known, some unexpected.

New Life, An Anthology for Parenthood takes the reader through the big dipper emotions of parenthood - the joy, the puzzlement, the wonder, the comedy. It captures the love and the moments of despair. Contemporary voices mix with the great names of literature - from Dickens to Sylvia Plath - to record their sense of wonder. But also the nameless women who have sung to their children night after night in countries far and near contribute ravishing lullabies. It contains love songs to sing to the baby and games to play. Baby love, post-natal depression, the joy, the bad and good advice, and the sadness, it is all here. This is the book you will need in the still watches of the night to help you understand and appreciate this period of your life that will never return. It is a perfect collection for all new parents.

In these stories of the impossible, master of the domestic thriller Sally Emerson introduces the eerie and supernatural into her keen-eyed portraits of everyday life. A clerk working in a public register office begins to receive death certificates dated in the future, but can she alter fate and save their victims? A woman unable to have children discovers a way of cloning her husband, but is their cloned son destined to repeat the mistakes of his father? A suburban mother is prescribed a health supplement with rather amorous side-effects; can she resist its sway and keep her hands off her neighbours? Emerson's tales of quotidian life invaded by forces beyond our control are both beguiling and uncanny as she celebrates reality and unreality in its many forms. Magical, humorous, written with headlong pace and brio, 'Perfect' will stay with the reader long after they leave the suspense of its pages. Sally Emerson's bestselling novels include the dark love stories 'Fire Child' and 'Heat' and 'Separation'.

An intense and addictive novel about lost love and the compulsive pull of the past. Passionate, tense and menacing, Sally Emerson’s classic tale of obsession in a claustrophobic city is an emotional thriller from start to finish. Susan Stewart thought her relationship with journalist Phillip Jordan was long over. But when she glimpses him again in a bookshop on the outskirts of Washington DC, the memories return. Is Phillip deliberately haunting her, or are her own disturbed emotions turning a long, hot, oppressive Washington summer into a nightmare that threatens to unravel her whole life? This is a gripping story of obsession and love – and the difference between the two – by a formidable novelist. Newly re-issued as part of a series of six titles. ?

Fire Child's dark heroine is the young Tessa, who from the age of 12 uses the power of her smile to seduce men, with damaging and dramatic consequences. The novel interplays her chilling and funny diaries with those of Martin Sherman, a dangerous young man who likes to play with fire. We know that when they meet, all hell (possibly literally) will break loose. Meanwhile he stacks shelves at a supermarket, she works at a nearby estate agent's. Both are hiding, leading deliberately dull lives in north London, afraid of what they have already done and what they are capable of. But when they meet, everything changes. Their union is devastating. Hypnotic, vivid and unputdownable, Sally Emerson's blazing love story throbs with lust and black humour.

A compelling and moving novel set in London about the pain of being separated from the children you love. Amanda is a high-flying management consultant with a loving and eccentric husband. Kate is her new baby and Sarah her mysterious nanny. And Alice is the child who lives by the river on the other side of London and who has recently developed a taste for fairy tales because everyone, in the end, gets exactly what they deserve. As the novel moves towards its unexpected and shocking finale, the story wittily explores the dilemmas and sexual temptations of new parenthood and the zestful power of apparently vulnerable babies and children.

Smart, savvy and original, Sally Emerson’s story about a young woman growing up with an amoral mother deftly portrays youth and its careful obsessions. For fifteen-year-old Jennifer Hamilton, the transition from adolescence to adulthood is painful and bewildering. Too mature to return to the securities of childhood, yet unwilling to join a world of adults, Jennifer creates a psychic world in which her companions are Shelley and the Restoration playwright Aphra Behn. Adding to Jennifer’s self-doubt is her exuberant and capricious mother. When her mother brings home the young, attractive architect Paul, Jennifer becomes aware of new and unusual feelings, and before long mother and daughter are competing for Paul’s attention.

A tense, romantic thriller about stolen art treasures and precarious passion, this gripping story confirms Sally Emerson’s status as a preeminent novelist of the mysterious, erotic and dramatic. Patrick Browning first sees Anne Fitzgerald in the British Museum in front of the Elgin Marbles; both young historians are fighting to uncover the secrets of Mary Nisbet, the notorious wife of Lord Elgin. Anne thinks the present is frightening, but finds the past compelling, while Patrick lives life at one remove, preferring the women in books to those in real life. Before long, their research spills over into an all-too-real rivalry, a rivalry charged with tension and attraction – a rivalry which twists their own scarred love affairs to breaking point...

Sally Emerson’s compelling novel takes the reader into a dark labyrinth of physical danger and spiritual terror. Jennifer Hamilton has been left in the big house she and her husband bought together, alone after six years of marriage. Overwhelmed and appalled by her own feelings about to her husband’s desertion, she turns to a spiritualist who seems ready to listen. But as she is drawn out of her painful reality into the disturbing fringes of the occult, Jennifer starts to wonder if she has made a big mistake...This is the last of six titles re-issued by Quadrant in 2021to bring Sally Emerson’s gripping novels to a new generation.