Margaret Wilmot writes like a true citizen of the world. She is as at home in the nine-part sequence: Quanta US: 'Wide-screen America.../ prelude to a Western, ' as in a sailor's hostel in Buenos Aires: (Your Holiness, Your Grace, Dear Sir, Dear Pope). She writes with a gleaming, persistent sense of wonder. Small, yet vital details are spotted, pondered and brought into the spotlight of her keen gaze, becoming poignant, whimsical and deeply significant in turn. Horse riding in Santa Catalina (Santa Catalina), she is halted by a migration of frogs: 'Each step will be a killing', and who knew that the bullying magpie can recognise itself in mirrors? Just like humans! (The Thriving Magpie) This collection breathes with her dazzling use of language, and what I can only define as a sort of heightened energy underpinned by an indefinable sense of spirituality. It is a unique and welcome addition to a sometimes rather tired contemporary poetry scene

A welcome full first collection from Alison Mace. Poems about family relationships, and by implication love and loss, are delicately and minutely observed and felt. She writes fearlessly on ageing and death, but these are not mournful poems - rather they are truthful and moving. Mace is skilled in sustained verse form and also subtle in her use of it, as, for example, rhymes and half-rhymes which make their impact within lines as surely as they do when they appear as line endings. Included is a long novelistic sequence set in New England - an absorbing tour de force commemorating the long life of her American aunt. Joy Howard, Editor, Grey Hen Press

'Alice Allen spent her formative years in Jersey, and her poems are imbued with its landscape, language and people. The particular focus of Daylight of Seagulls is the occupation of the island during WWII and the bravery of its citizens in the face of invasion. But Allen's poems offer more than a history retold - they are compassionate, lyrical, inventive, often taking on voices of ordinary men and women who've remained unheard. She unearths the island's secrets and sets them in front of us - treasures from a bygone world. This is a beautiful debut from a poet who understands how to evoke the potency of place.' Tamar Yoseloff 'Like the granite of the islands, this collection glitters with facets, sharp-edged glints of many lives. Good writing of place is also about time; addressing a difficult history, these poems show how the past, especially the unspoken, lives in the present tense.' Philip Gross

With passion and immense technical control, Wendy Klein's Out of the Blue takes us from the Cuba of Hemingway and Viva la revolución, to Jackson Pollock and Disney's Cinderella, Ho Chi Minh and the Laugharne of Dylan Thomas. Blue is indeed the colour of wisdom in these inspiring poems of twentieth century history, and nowhere more powerfully than in the stories of the poet's own family. William Bedford

'James W. Wood is a talent to be reckoned with: both lyrical and humane, he has a technical ability with language that shines through every poem. Jane McKie, founding editor, Knucker Press James W Wood cares about the precision and possibilities of language and about honesty when dissecting the subtleties of human emotion, neither one to the exclusion of the other. His work is a pleasure to read and, when questioning or provocative, none the less pleasurable for that. -

True poetry has the intellectual and formal rigour to tell us stories of the way we live. In Tim O'Leary's Manganese Tears, there are wonderful elegies for the village community og the poet's childhood, and most powerfully the slow dying of his mother whose 'life has moved downstairs / with the vase of shrivelling daffodils' and the limited horizons where 'Each kiss is a kiss goodbye'. The grieving is genuine, but what makes it especially moving is the intellectual honesty, for the poet his mother's 'thankyous' meaning 'as much as / amens muttered during mass- / religiously bare'. Even for friends in the village, refusing o admit they were ever ill 'the steel is in their gazes, / and the gaze at the abyss'. Love is what holds personal and communal life together, as the chemical element Manganese holds together the health of both body and brain. But with tears. William Bedford

Mark Dolan earned millions as a major-league baseball pitcher until his arm gave out. He succeeded again in his second career as a freelance detective, guiding clients through tight spots with a combination of luck, guile, and stubborn resolve. Then he got careless during a case and a woman he cared about died, savagely beaten and left to bleed out on the side of a California highway. A year later, Dolan, still grieving, finds himself once more immersed in a world populated by dangerous people. He’s been hired by Hank Callahan, a Chicago tycoon who built a profitable international airline despite a weakness for Kentucky bourbon and long nights in dark saloons. Callahan wants to retire and hand the airline over to his employees. But powerful industry rivals have other ideas, and they are willing to play very dirty to get their way. Dolan takes them on, battling the bad guys, defying the long odds against him—and changing the course of his life along the way.

A magician, a widower from the Sudan, and an automat travel the world… It is 1868 and three close friends, the immortal magician Celwyn, the automat Professor Xiau Kang, and Bartholomew, a scientist and widower from Sudan, set out on another adventure. After their airship is destroyed, they travel to Findbar Island to regroup and rebuild. Meanwhile, Celwyn receives word from his love, the vampire Tara McFein. She is being kept prisoner in the Tower of London, and it is up to Celywn and company to save her.The Pirate Danced and the Automat Died is a steampunk fantasy filled with murder, magic, and adventure.

Blood in the Water by Jack Flynn is a thriller set in Boston in the gritty world of mob bosses, con artists and gangs, where allegiances are formed with law enforcement and criminals just as easily as they are broken. 'Fantastic' - David Baldacci Homeland Security agent, Kit Steel, is committed to avenge terrorism. And she’s after the blood of her nemesis, one of the world’s most ruthless and dangerous criminals, Vincente Carpio. He has the blood of her husband and young son on his hands, and Kit is unwavering in her determination to see him kept behind bars forever. Clever, calculating, and manipulative, Carpio has aid and influence on the outside, and he’s waiting for the perfect moment when the final pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. Harbour Union chief, Cormack McConnell, has lived his life close to the wire above and below the law, and he controls everything that happens on Boston’s waterfront. Someone wants him out of the way, fast. After he narrowly survives a brutal attack on his bar, The Mariner, complications arise when Cormack believes he’s been betrayed by one of his crew – a young man, Buddy Cavanaugh, who he’s shocked to discover is the love of his precious nineteen-year-old daughter, Diamond. Everyone has a game to play until it becomes apparent that there are much darker, far-reaching forces of evil at work which look to be preparing for the international stage. What follows is a gripping race against time, a rollercoaster action-packed story with international terrorism at its core and family at its heart.

Here together for the first time in a fabulous eBook bundle are three of Haines's popular Sarah Booth novels: Wishbones, Greedy Bones, and Bones Appetit Carolyn Haines consistently charms readers with her award-winning series starring Sarah Booth Delaney, a southern belle and private investigator from Zinnia, Louisiana, who can be as down home or as high-class as she needs to be to catch a killer. Here together for the first time in a fabulous eBook bundle are three of Haines's popular Sarah Booth novels: WISHBONES Southern gal Sarah Booth Delaney packs up her hound dog and her P.I. business and sets off for Hollywood to take a shot at stardom. But it's not long before rivalries flare, mysterious accidents occur, and the leading lady finds herself in some steamy tabloids without turning up in a single frame of film. GREEDY BONES Sarah Booth is in Hollywood when she hears that her best friend's husband is on his deathbed back home in Mississippi-and he's not the only one. With the whole town in crisis, Sarah Booth drops everything to stop the outbreak and save the only place she's ever called home. BONE APPETIT Sarah Booth is recovering from a personal tragedy at a posh spa, where there's a beauty contest/cook-off occurring. Sarah Booth finds watching the backbiting great fun-until the heated competition boils over, the top contender is poisoned, and the prime suspect hires Sarah Booth to clear her name.