Bookshop Deals

David Lean: An Intimate Portrait

£8.00

David Lean’s films were nominated for an astonishing 57 Academy Awards, of which 27 won Oscars. He made unique movies on a grand scale, with huge stories on vast canvases. He was aided by hundreds of technicians, thousands of extras and the most talented actors in the world. Yet he singularly controlled this vast army giving pleasure and inspiration to millions.

 

His films reflected his own life – the single brooding perfectionist force to a great endeavour – whether they be Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago or Brief Encounter. Collated by his widow, Lady Sandra Lean, this is a highly personal account in text and images by the people that came into contact with David through his work and his private life.

 

Thousands of words have been written about David Lean the film director and the work he created. Yet until now, very little has been said about the man who sacrificed his private life for his art. Six marriages are proof of a man whose preferred family was the film crew and whose personal life was always subservient to making films. Yet, without a strong understanding of human emotion, how could a man make so many productions that touched the hearts of millions?

 

In this fascinating book, the answers are presented in both text and pictures. David always said that a good book should contain “Really good pictures…That’s all. Just bloody good pictures.” Illustrated throughout with over 300 well-known and previously unpublished photographs, which are complemented by David’s inspiration: letters, quotations, memorabilia or an anecdote relating to his travels or his films David Lean – An Intimate Portrait is a unique study, containing a wealth of fascinating photography, of a man who continues to entertain millions.

Deep Lane

£5.00

Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Deep Water

£4.50

Autumn has come to StregaSchloss, and as the days grow dark, an even darker depression has come over the Strega-Borgia family. Ever since the disappearance of their beloved nanny, Mrs. McLachlan, nothing has been the same. To make matters worse, Luciano has been wrongfully charged with her murder and thrown into prison. Never has the family needed Mrs. McLachlan so badly! But with the help of a magical camera and a mysterious silver thread, there may still be hope…

Drysalter

£6.00

Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize

 

Michael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.

 

Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.

 

From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.

 

This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.

Edward Bond: Plays 9

£5.00

Edward Bond Plays:9 brings together recent work by the writer of the classic stage plays Saved, Lear, The Pope’s Wedding, and Early Morning. The volume comprises five new plays and a comprehensive introduction by the author exploring theories of writing and theatre.

 

Innocence is the final play in The Paris Pentad, a dramatic epic stretching from the 1940s to the end of the twenty-first century. The conflicts at the heart of civilisation have erupted into violence, and the characters in Innocence must seek refuge in each other to escape the cruelty of war.

 

Window, Tune, Balancing Act and The Edge are plays commissioned by The Big Brum Theatre. With themes of drug use, violence, suicide, and mother-son relations, the plays focus on problems directly aimed at modern youth culture. Ideally suited to students, performers and particularly university showcases, they are short, interesting and powerful pieces.

 

This edition also includes some of Bond’s previously unpublished Theatre Poems.

Favourite Poems

£1.90

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular American poet of his time, and one of the most famous American poets of all time. It has been said that certain of his poems — the long narratives Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha most notably — were once read in every literate home in America. A former teacher who fulfilled his dream to make a living as a poet, Longfellow taught at Bowdoin and Harvard, was eventually honored for his poetry with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and is one of the few Americans to have a monument dedicated to his memory in Westminster Abbey. This choice collection of his works, which reflects his mastery of a rich variety of poetic forms and meters, includes one of his best narrative poems, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Here, too, are such famous poems as “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and other poems on subjects ranging from lost youth and Giotto’s Tower to slavery and the building of a ship. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

From a Persian Kitchen

£10.00

The food of Iran is a riot of tastes and aroma, and is one of the great – but least known – cuisines of the world. With an emphasis on the use of seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs and fragrant spices, Jila Dana-Haeri here presents a unique guide to quintessential Persian cooking. The varieties of beautiful jewelled rice dishes, hearty winter dishes and crisp summer salads, showcase the diversity of Iranian regional cooking, from the sweet and sour flavours of the Northern Caspian Coast to the spicy and aromatic tastes of the South and the Persian Gulf. The complimentary mix of flavours – the fresh tartness of pomegranate seeds and the subtle perfume of saffron, tarragon, dill and fenugreek – create an array of mouth-watering recipes that are now, thanks to Dana-Haeri’s contribution, accessible to cooks of all levels. This lavishly-illustrated cookbook offers an enticing selection of recipes for any occasion. It will be essential for all interested in expanding their cultural and culinary horizons.

From the Virgil Caverns

£4.90

This collection marks a fascinating point in the poetic career of the late Peter Redgrove, when – at the age of seventy – he decided to strike out in a thrilling new direction.

 

Using a liberating stepped verse form, he opens up new paths in fresh territory, while consolidating his position as one of the finest poets of the natural world. The questing eye of his imagination is in constant motion: the book is full of doors and stairs and wheels, the movement of light and water, the world’s daily transformations. Even his characters are shape-changers – the doctors, dentists, chemists and undertakers are all, in their way, magicians. And, evident throughout the collection, is an undertow of mortality – notably in the extraordinarily moving poems about Redgrove’s late father: ‘his knowledge went, and mine followed,/ Catch it before/ It leaves like a ghost,/ on these stepped verses’.

Grimalkin & Other Poems

£7.50

The poems in Grimalkin – Thomas Lynch’s first publication in Britain are all concerned, in one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. In each poem, Lynch is looking for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces: the gravities of sex and death, love and grief – all the things that make us breathless and horizontal, mortal and memorable.

By means of a wry, mordant wit, telling observation and glorious poise, we are shown the strong tensions that make us human: the forces in our nature that create, replicate, restore, renew us; and those that kill us, constrict our lives, silence us. From spirited invective to meditations on morality, from lyrics of love and desire to a corrosive flyting to his ex-wife, these poems explore an extraordinary emotional range and technical facility but, more importantly, they reveal a compassionate, wise, and genial humanity.

Harris’s Requiem

£6.50

From Booker-Prize winning novelist Stanley Middleton.

 

Thomas Harris is on the cusp of success as a classical composer with a growing reputation.

 

When his father, a coal miner, dies Thomas decides to write a requiem for him which is also a thinly veiled attack on the powerful elite. In spite of opposition he finally succeeds in getting his work performed but how will the critics react?

Hull Speedway: Craven Park – The First Ten Years

£12.00

The ten years since 1995, when speedway returned to Hull after a fourteen-year absence, have been a rollercoaster ride for the Vikings. A string of new owners oversaw successive periods of on-track success and failure, and closure often seemed imminent until the club finally succumbed in 2003. Bouncing back under Paul Hodder, the Vikings enjoyed their best ever season in 2004, winning the league title to herald in an exciting new era for the club and the city.

 

Charmed life, luck, tenacity, refusal to die – whatever – the first ten years at Craven Park have been anything but dull, and all this is brought to life in the second volume of Roger Hulbert’s history of the club, which like the first volume contains many quality photographs and all the relevant statistics to complement the narrative of Hull Speedway’s most recent era. It is an essential read for all fans of the club.

I & I: The Natural Mystics

£9.50

The history of the original Wailers — Tosh, Livingstone and Marley — as never before told.
 

Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers — one of the most influential groups in popular music.
 

One of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines for the first time the story of the Wailers. It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, illuminating why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer.

I Just Stepped Out

£5.50

In October 2013 Felix Dennis was told he had terminal cancer. He was in the midst of a 30-day poetry reading tour, and characteristically he chose to continue, performing to sell-out audiences with his legendary verve and enthusiasm. He also began compiling this, his tenth, book of verse. Divided into two parts: the first, ‘Premonitions’, is a selection of poems written over the years when, in Dennis’s words, ‘the heart knew what the mind dared not perceive’. Having always lived on the edge, he intuited an early death. The second part, ‘A Verse Diary’, consists of poems slected by Dennis from the many he wrote between the date of his terminal diagnosis and his death. Poems which, he felt, were possibly the best he had ever written. Topped and tailed with the Author’s Notes, this book takes readers on a physical, emotional and psychological journey. Sadly, Felix Dennis did not live to see its publication.

Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems

£8.00
Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative Collected Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.

James Kelman (Writers and their Work)

£4.99

One of the most powerful and provocative writers to have emerged in Britain in recent years, James Kelman has engendered a good deal of controversy over his widely reported, but often misconceived use of `bad’ language words. This introduction to the whole range of his works, from the early short stories through the plays and essays to the Booker Prize winning novel How Late it Was, How Late and the latest experimental fiction, examines the embattled Kelman’s literary politics. H. Gustav Klaus pays close attention to the Scottish culture in which Kelman’s writing was nurtured, to the uncompromising treatment of the `underclass’, the intricacies of the narrative voice and the existentialist anguish behind it. A writer of international reputation now, Kelman’s principled anti-authoritarianism raises uncomfortable questions about the continuing reality of class, dominant social and literary values and the role of writers in our time.

Jew Suss: His Life and Afterlife

£6.00

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), better known as Jew Suss, was a court Jew, who advised the Duke of Wurttemberg. Clever and handsome, even ostentatious, he fitted easily into court life, despite his humble origins. However, his unpopular economic policies made him enemies and when the Duke died suddenly Suss was arrested, convicted of ‘destestable abuses’ and exectued in Stuttgart in an iron cage. His spectacular rise and fall inspired a media outpouring in the eighteenth century and he has been much written about subsequently. In the twentieth century two films were made about him, one British in 1934, the other German in 1940. Goebbels took an active interest in the latter. After the war its director, Veit Harlan, was tried for Crimes against Humanity for having made the film. Despite his acquittal, the film’s association with the Holocaust remains controversial to this day.

John Beard

£30.00

As the first major documentation of John Beard’s work, this definitive monograph provides a visual chronology of Beard’s work from 1978-2011. Featuring a highly original design presentation and exacting production standards, this beautifully created book contains essays by Stephen Bann and Anthony Bond, two of the art world’s leading cognoscenti. Their sympathetic and comprehensive appraisal of Beard’s art will be of great interest to art students and academics, curators and all thosewho are interested in the visual arts.

 

Designed by multi-award winning designer John Warwicker, a founding member of the influential design-group ‘tomato’, the book also contains a 180-page plate section of Beard’s work. A thing of beauty in its own right, this book will be highly sought after by admirers of Beard’s distinctive work and by design-conscious book buyers and art collectors the world over.

John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star

£9.90

In his lifetime Gielgud was acclaimed as the finest classical actor of the twentieth century and Jonathan Croall’s biography from 2000 was instantly recognised by critics as a masterful achievement, one that was ‘unlikely to be surpassed’ (Sunday Telegraph). Since that time however a considerable amount of new material has come to light and the passing of time has allowed a new candour. John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star sees this peerless biographer return to his subject to offer the definitive life of Gielgud.

 

For this new biography Croall’s exhaustive research has included over a hundred new interviews with key people from his life and career, several hundred letters from Gielgud that have never been published, scores of letters written to him and archived versions of his film and television work. As Gielgud worked increasingly in this medium during the last third of his life much greater attention is given to this than in the earlier work.

 

Fresh light is thrown on his professional relationships with figures such as Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans, and on turbulent episodes of his private life. The overall result is a a much more rounded, candid and richly textured portrait of this celebrated and complex actor.

Jubilee Lines: 60 Poets for 60 Years

£6.50

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy brings together a dazzling array of contemporary poets (sixty in fact) to write about each of the sixty years of Her Majesty’s reign. An all star line up – which includes such celebrated writers as Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Wendy Cope, Geoffrey Hill, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott, alongside some of the newest young talent around – address a moment or event from their chosen year, be it of personal or political significance or both. Through a series of specially commissioned poems, Jubilee Lines offers a unique portrayal of the country and times in which we have lived since 1953, culminating in an essential portrait of today: the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, the way we honour and remember. Brilliantly introduced by Carol Ann Duffy, Jubilee Lines is an unforgettable commemoration: not only a monarch’s reign but of a way of life.

Lark & Termite

£8.50

Set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, Lark and Termite is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.

 

At its centre are: Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance; their mother, Lola; their aunt, Nonie, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the early chaotic months of the Korean War.

 

Told with enormous imagination and deep feeling, the novel invites us into the hearts and thoughts of each of the leading characters; even into Termite’s intricate, shuttered consciousness. We are with Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire. We see Lark’s hopes for herself and Termite, and how she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed for ever. This is the first novel for nine years by one of America’s greatest writers, Lark and Termite is rich, rewarding and unforgettable.

Literary Lives

£4.99

Literary Lives is a book of decidedly unauthorised biographies by the acclaimed caricaturist Edward Sorel, who has long believed, that next to composers, writers are the craziest people in the world. The ten writers he has used to prove this thesis are Norman Mailer, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lillian Hellman, Leo Tolstoy, Bertolt Brecht, William Butler Yeats, Carl Jung and Ayn Rand. Although these comic strips are clearly meant to amuse, and the facts uncovered are sometimes hard to believe, each and every statement is absolutely true.

Love Lessons (Audiobook CDs)

£4.00

A superb novel for older readers about forbidden love, from the bestselling, award-winning Jacqueline Wilson.

 

Fourteen-year-old Prue and her sister Grace have been educated at home by their controlling, super-strict father all their lives. Forced to wear Mum’s odd hand-made garments and forbidden from reading teenage magazines, they know they’re very different to ‘normal’ girls — but when Dad has a stroke and ends up in hospital, unable to move or speak, Prue suddenly discovers what it’s like to have a little freedom.

 

Sent to a real school for the first time, Prue struggles to fit in. The only person she can talk to is her kindly, young — and handsome — art teacher, Rax. They quickly bond, and Prue feels more and more drawn to him. As her feelings grow stronger, she begins to realise that he might feel the same way about her. But nothing could ever happen between them — could it?

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