Showing results by publisher "Manilla Press" in Literature & Fiction

Everybody thinks that Charlotte Lucas has no prospects. She is unmarried, plain and seemingly without ambition. When she stuns the neighbourhood by accepting the proposal of buffoonish clergyman Mr Collins, her best friend, Lizzy Bennet, is angry at her for undervaluing herself. Yet the decision is the only way Charlotte knows to provide for her future, and marriage will propel her into a new world, of duty, marriage, children, grief and ultimately illicit love, and a kind of freedom.

In a quiet house in the countryside outside London, the finishing touches are being made to welcome a group of young women. The house and its location are top secret, its residents unknown to one another, but the girls have one thing in common: they are fallen. Offering refuge for prostitutes, petty thieves and the destitute, Urania Cottage is a second chance at life - but how badly do they want it?

On the peaceful Japanese island of Teshima there is Shinzo¯-on no A¯kaibu, a library of heartbeats, a place where the heartbeats of visitors from all around the world are collected. In this small, isolated building, the heartbeats of people who are still alive or have already passed away continue to echo. Several miles away, in the ancient city of Kamakura, two lonely souls meet: Shuichi, a forty-year-old illustrator, who returns to his home-town to fix up the house of his recently deceased mother, and eight-year-old Kenta, a child who wanders like a shadow around Shuichi's house.

Batter Gray is worried about his future. Even when he was eleven, his classmates seemed to have settled on a goal: doctor, lawyer, broker, engineer. Good jobs that automatically command respect and security. Now Batter is in his early 20s, living in New York City, and he wants something different; something that alienates some people and bores most. Poetry. And yet to him - and exactly thirty-nine editors at a company called Peck & Peck - poetry not only represents the power of humanity but holds the key to its survival.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life on a tiny Greek island: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the island's natural beauty wiped out. In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn't there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

Nisha has crossed oceans to give her child a future. Now she spends her days caring for someone else's daughter while her own waits for her return, half a world away. For Petra, it is only natural to hire a domestic worker to keep her house clean and her family fed. Their lives have nothing in common, except the love they feel for their daughters. Then one day, Nisha vanishes. No one cares about the disappearance of a foreign domestic worker, except Petra and Nisha's secret lover, Yiannis, the only connection to her daughter back in Sri Lanka.

Carl may be 72 years old, but he's young at heart. Every night he goes door-to-door delivering books by hand to his loyal customers. He knows their every desire and preference, carefully selecting the perfect story for each person. One evening as he makes his rounds, nine-year-old Schascha appears. Loud and precocious, she insists on accompanying him - and even tries to teach him a thing or two about books. When Carl's job at the bookstore is threatened, will the old man and the girl in the yellow raincoat be able to restore Carl's way of life, and return the joy of reading to his little town?

Seren Doughty is a forty-two-year-old author who has written nothing in the five years since her daughter's murder. Divorced and alone in her Edinburgh flat, Seren's only relationship has been with Alex, a library research assistant too young and eager for her. So when her former editor approaches her agent with the idea for a ghost story, Seren immediately thinks of the abandoned island of Finish in the Outer Hebrides and seizes the opportunity to commit herself to a new project.

It is 1946 and in the village of Oakbourne the men are home from the war. Their bodies are healing but their psychological wounds run deep. Everyone is scarred - those who fought and those left behind.

October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in Shropshire as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. Meanwhile, when rumours of a 'fallen angel' cause a frenzy across London, a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession, one that will place the women he seeks in the most terrible danger.

West Yorkshire, 1904. When newly graduated nurse Ruby May takes a position looking after the children of Charles and Lilian England, a wealthy couple from a powerful dynasty of mill owners, she hopes it will be the fresh start she needs. But as she adapts to life at the isolated Hardcastle House, it becomes clear there's something not quite right about the beautiful, mysterious Mrs England. Ostracised by the servants and feeling increasingly uneasy, Ruby is forced to confront her own demons in order to prevent history from repeating itself.

In the notorious Conciergerie Prison, Marie Antoinette is having her cards read. What solace can the tarot give her now, in the midst of the Reign of Terror, when outside her cell the mob is baying for her blood? Kate, a young Irishwoman whose fortunes have seen her travel from maid to closest confidant of Mademoiselle Lenormand, the infamous Tarot Reader of Versailles, sees the Queen of France's cards and knows what's in store for her. As the French Revolution is consumed by frenzied violence, Kate must use all her wiles to ensure that Marie Antoinette's fate doesn't become her own.

Iceland, 1910. In the middle of a severe storm two sisters - Freyja and Gudrun - rescue a mysterious, charismatic man from a shipwreck near their remote farm. Sixty-five years later, a young woman - Sigga - is spending time with her grandmother when they learn a body has been discovered on a mountainside near Reykjavik, perfectly preserved in ice.

Spanning the 20th century, Honey in the Wound follows a mysteriously gifted lineage of Korean women as they are displaced across Asia by Japanese imperialism. At this novel's heart is Young-Ja, whose family is killed by Japanese soldiers. Her magical gift - the ability to infuse her cooking with her feelings: love, peace, delight - shifts into something far more powerful as her sorrow and anger seep into her confections. When her talent is noticed by a Korean resistance fighter, she is taken to Manchuria and becomes enmeshed in a network of spies at a teahouse favoured by Japanese officials.

Cleopatra: the beguiling, legendary Pharoah and Queen of Egypt - the arch seducer who used her beauty to grasp for ever more power. But with her character only ever recorded by men who despised her, how can we be sure this was the real story? From the lauded author of Fair Rosaline: a powerful, unmissable untelling, unravelling Shakespeare's Roman plays to draw out the woman behind the myth.

Fulvia is the daughter of a wealthy but unimportant Roman family. Raised in the countryside, she longs for a life of intrigue and influence. When her father dies and her inheritance is threatened, Fulvia makes her way to the city of Rome to secure her future. There she marries a young aristocrat named Clodius, who is more interested in partying with his hedonistic friends than politics. Fulvia is drawn into their world of debauchery, and learns just how precarious the balance of power in the Republic is.

For Niamh Ryan, the Foleys are family. Her childhood flew by on their farm, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate - all the while being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player. Now, following a distressing series of events, the family ties are strained. Niamh receives drunken phone calls and messages from Peter who can't understand what derailed their burgeoning relationship three years ago.

A young woman, Jane O, arrives in a psychiatrist's office. She's been suffering a series of worrying episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations and an inexplicable sense of dread. But as the psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening in Jane's mind, she suddenly goes missing. When she is found a day later, unconscious in a park, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Together for thirty-odd years, Bea and Niklas live a comfortable life in Stockholm. But one evening, following a trivial argument, Niklas disappears. Bea expects him home as soon as he's calmed down, but the hours go by and there's no trace of him. During the days that follow he ghosts her completely as her anger amplifies. Not letting his apparent mid-life crisis wreck their summer holiday, Bea brings their children to stay with Niklas' family at their island summer house. When it emerges that Niklas has met someone else, everything is brought to a head nevertheless

Romeo Montague is handsome and charming and the first time he sees young Rosaline Capulet, who has secretly snuck into his family's masquerade summer ball, he falls instantly in love. At first Rosaline is unsure of Romeo's attentions but with her father determined that she join the nunnery, Romeo offers her the chance of a different life. Gradually he convinces her that only true love could make him feel this way, that he is enraptured by her beauty. Indeed, he cannot live without her!