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Cows Can’t Jump

From debut novelist Philip Bowne, winner of the Spotlight First Novel prize, comes this explosive coming-of-age odyssey that catapults 18-year-old Billy Reed across Europe. Billy has just left school and is desperate to escape middle England. It’s 2016, and as a grave-digger, he’s working the ultimate dead-end job. To make matters worse, he’s a virgin, and there’s no hope of him meeting a girl any time soon. The only women at work are in coffins.

Billy’s home life isn’t any better. In the evenings, he observes his dysfunctional family: his grandad s engaged to a woman half his age, his dad s become obsessed with boxing, and he suspects his mum is having an affair. All the while, celebrities are dropping like flies and Britain is waiting for the EU referendum. Everything is changing, and Billy hates it.

Billy’s life gets a jump start when he falls in love with Eva, an older girl from Switzerland, that s passionate about Russian literature, Gary Numan, windfarms and chai tea. To Billy’s despair, Eva travels back to her home in Switzerland at the end of summer. But he won’t give up on her that easily. He gambles everything for a chance to be with Eva again.

When things start to go wrong, Billy’s journey across Europe involves hitch-hiking with truckers, walking with refugees, and an encounter with suicidal cows. But the further he goes, the harder it is to be sure what he’s chasing – and what he’s running from.

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Children of War

Hassanakis is a young Muslim boy of Turkish descent growing up on Crete during WWI. Fifteen generations of his family have lived on the island and until now he has never had any reason not to think he is a Cretan. But with the Great Powers tussling over the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the island’s Christians in rebellion, an outbreak of ethnic violence forces his family to flee to the Cretan City of Chania. He begins to lay down roots and his snappy dress earns him the nickname of Hassan ‘the mirror’. As WWI draws to a close and the Turkish War of Independence rages, he begins a heady romance with the elegant Hüsniye. There are rumours that the Cretan Muslims will be sent to Turkey but Hassanakis can’t believe he will be sent to a country whose language he barely knows and where he knows no-one.

This powerful novel drawn from the diary of a refugee family evokes the beauty, complexity and trauma of Crete’s past and weaves it into a moving tale of an ordinary man living through extraordinary times.

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