£16.00
As revealing as a bikini made of tooth floss, Cycling Proficiency is a 4,482 mile illustrated story of pedal-powered redemption.
It follows the wilfully ridiculous travels of a just-turned 22 year old on a freebie bike who doesn’t yet know how to fix a puncture and point-blank refuses to wear Lycra (or pants). Also, she’s crazy. Not ‘cute’ crazy, not ‘bohemian’ crazy, but where-are-the-sandwiches-at-this-picnic, medically approved, crazy. Off she goes on her wonky way, hoping things will be alright.
Fuelled by reckless enthusiasm, many tinned sprouts and just a dash of naivety, Alice hurricanes through Europe meeting a whole pick ‘n’ mix of whacky characters along the way. She returns an inch and a half taller.
This book is proof to all flavours of people that the weathers of the mind are there to be embraced.
2 in stock
| Weight | 0.4476 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 223 × 145 × 32 mm |
| ISBN | 9781903110928 |
| Cover | Hardback |
| Publication Year | 2022 |
| Publisher | Wrecking Ball Press |
Jamal is a successful psychoanalyst haunted by his first love and a brutal act of violence from which he can never escape. Looking back to their coming of age in the 1970s, he and his friends face an encroaching middle age with the traumas of their youth still unresolved in this colourful and warm novel of London life.
Read by Paul Auster. Complete and unabridged.
‘I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.‘
Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would rather forget – his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder, in Iraq, of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus. Brill, a retired book critic, imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the Twin Towers did not fall on 9/11, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill’s story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts another hidden story, this time of his own marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death.
Passionate and shocking, political and personal: Man in the Dark is a novel that reflects the consequences of 9/11, that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.
A Wedding Story
‘A spry if wintry comedy about a lesbian, a wedding-day bonk, and a mother who contracts Alzheimer’s… It dares to find failure and frivolity (a sure sign of dramatic honesty) in the face of domestic hell. Funny, frank and churning by turns, this struck me as a lyrical new play about the unlyrical business of coping when real life knocks on the door.’ Daily Express
Frozen
Winner of the TMA Best New Play award and Eileen Anderson Central Television Award for Best Play.
‘Bryony Lavery’s big, brave, compassionate play about grief, revenge, forgiveness and bearing the unbearable.’ Guardian
‘A major play… thrilling, humane and timely.’ The Times
‘Consistently surprising and even bravely comic… The almost thriller-like promise of the play’s climactic confrontation is like a time-bomb ticking in the back of your head.’ Independent
Illyria
A young war reporter gets abducted and finds herself in the midst of a cycle of violence, in a land crippled by hate.
More Light
‘Triumphant… A startlingly metaphorical play about the creation of art.’ Independent
Centenary Selected Poems marks the poet’s 100th birthday and is the first book to reveal the full range of his poetry. All his natural and invented voices speak here – animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by famous, imaginary and anonymous people – in all sort of forms and styles – sonnets, science fiction constructions, concrete poetry, sound poems, his own invented stanzas – together with his evocations of place, in particular his inexhaustible home city of Glasgow. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.
At the centre of this novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them to his Islamic faith.
Three plays, ‘all written for live theatre – with the emphasis on live’, and all first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough: The Revengers’ Comedies (1989); Things We Do for Love (1997); and House & Garden (1999).
The Revengers’ Comedies
A hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage – Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets – and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics. New York Times
Things We Do for Love
Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award
One of his best, his most shockingly and uproariously funny: a cruel and hilarious masterpiece of tragic comedy and comic tragedy. Sunday Times
House & Garden
The triumph of his ingenuity lies in the fact that you have to see both plays . . . A second time round, in whichever order you take them, characters will deepen, while those you know become the background. It is a superb Ayckbourn joke that a comedy about non-communication should depend on the sharpest communication skills. Sunday Times
