Fiction

Cows Can’t Jump

Philip Bowne

Billy’s desperate to escape middle England. He’s working the ultimate dead-end job as a grave-digger, his grandad’s engaged to a West Indian woman half his age, his xenophobic dad’s obsessed with boxing; and his mum’s certainly having an affair. Celebrities keep dying and Britain awaits the EU referendum. Meeting Eva, though, changes everything.

Ashjaar lil-Naas al-Ghaa’ibeen

Ahlam Bsharat

Young love, meddling relatives, heart-to-hearts with friends real and imagined – Philistia’s world is that of an ordinary university student, except that in occupied Palestine, and when your father is in indefinite detention, nothing is straightforward.

Philistia is closest to her childhood, and to her late grandmother and her imprisoned father, when she’s at her part-time job washing women’s bodies at the ancient Ottoman hammam in Nablus, the West Bank. A midwife and corpse washer in her time, Grandma Zahia taught Philistia the ritual ablutions and the secrets of the body: the secrets of life and death. On the brink of adulthood, Philistia embarks on a journey through her country’s history – a magical journey, and one of loss and centuries of occupation. As trees are uprooted around her, Philistia searches for a place of refuge, a place where she can plant a memory for the ones she’s lost.

Children of War

Ahmet Yorulmaz

Fifteen generations of Hassanakis’s family have been Cretan. After WW1, amidst rumours that Cretan Muslims will be sent to Turkey, Hassanakis worries he will have to leave behind his great love, the Greek widow Marigo, and his beloved homeland. He can’t believe he will be sent to a country whose language he barely knows and where he knows no-one.

Distant Signs

Anne Richter

Distant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall.

The Umbrella Men

Keith Carter

A witty, fast-paced and acerbic novel set in pristine Oregon and the corporate corridors of New York, London and China. A story for our times where finance, environmentalism, rare-earth mining and human frailties collide in a complex of flawed motives.

Trees for the Absentees

Ahlam Bsharat

Young love, meddling aunts, heart-to-hearts with friends real and imagined, Philistia’s world is that of an ordinary student. Except in Palestine, and with your father in jail, nothing is ordinary. With trees uprooted around her, she seeks a place of refuge, somewhere she can plant a memory for the ones she’s lost, for the people who are vanishing.