David Park

'A rich and deeply thoughtful book' The Times'This a cry from the heart for Ireland: a powerful novel about guilt and absolution' Independent on Sunday'A powerful, beautifully crafted book. Stone Kingdoms will add to Park’s reputation as a magnificent writer' Belfast Telegraph_______________Haunted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and trapped in a land between the mountains and the sea, Naomi dreams of another life far from the rainy shores of Donegal.When she moves from the rain swept shores of Ireland to work in a refugee camp in the burning heat of Africa, Naomi exchanges the city streets of Belfast for the arid desert. Though she leaves behind the land where she was born, escaping her past is not so easy.

From award-winning writer David Park, an absorbing account of the lives of the women most important to three poets: William Blake, Osip Mandlestam and an imagined contemporary Irish poet'An outstanding novel, written in luminous accessible prose, thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its excellent parts' Irish Times'The Poets’ Wives is a marvellous triptych: lyrical, respectful of creativity but also sharply sceptical' Sunday Times__________________Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet’s wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin’s terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband’s death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish.Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another’s creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands’ work, work that has been woven with love’s intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways. Deeply insightful and beautifully wrought, The Poets’ Wives is David Park at his best – a novelist whose work has the power to bring the hidden from the shadows, into a delicate and shimmering light.

'To write well about Ulster while keeping terrorism from monopolising the foreground is infinitely hard. This wise, sincere, troubling novel shows how it should be done' The Times'To pull off this sort of story satisfactorily demands a skill in timing and a clarity in presentation which are beyond most novelists: but Park doesn’t put a foot wrong' Sunday Telegraph________________________Returning to rural Northern Ireland for a fresh start, John Cameron takes on the role of headmaster at his old primary school. But as dark memories are disturbed and his marriage falters, Cameron is left feeling powerless in this fractured community.Driven by unresolved grief and tormented by his waking dreams, he is forced to confront his past as he struggles to prevent history from repeating itself.

'Subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous ... An important book' Irish Times'Marvellously compelling ... Park takes that most difficult of subjects - recent history - and with graceful integrity explores the difficulties involved in coming to terms with the legacies of the past ... beautifully described in Park's crystalline prose' Daily MailIt is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam.Alan, a university art teacher, goes on a pilgrimage to the city of his youth with troubled teenage son Jack; middle-aged couple Marion and Richard take a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday; and Karen, a single mother struggling to make ends meet, joins her daughter's hen party.As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before.

The short Heroic Age of physics that started in 1925 was one of the rare occasions when a deep consideration of the question: What does physics really say? was necessary in carrying out numerical calculations. In many parts of microphysics the calculations have now become relatively straightforward if not easy, but most physicists seem to agree that some questions of principle remain to be resolved, even if they do not think it is very important to do so. This situation has affected the way people think and write about quantum mechanics, a gingerly approach to fundamentals and a tendency to emphasize what fifty years ago was new in the new theory at the expense of continuity with what came before it. Nowadays those who look into the subject are more likely to be struck by unexpected similarities between quantum and classical mechanics than by dramatic contrasts they had been led to expect. It is often said that the hardest part of understanding quantum mechanics is to understand that there is nothing to understand; all the same, to think quantum­ mechanically it helps to have firm mental connections with classical physics and to know exactly what these connections do and do not imply. This book originated more than a decade ago as informal lecture notes [OP, prepared for use in a course taught from time to time to advanced undergraduates at Williams College.