Showing results by publisher "Manilla Press" in All Categories

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?

I love stories. I have mostly told other people's, but now, in telling my own, I realise how all our stories are connected by that great leveller of acclaim, loss, fortitude and fortune: being human. When I look at my life from the alleged halfway point, some patterns are revealed: one, that the story does not necessarily begin or end where it should; two, happy endings are overrated. And three, happy endings are almost never the end. This book is memoir-ish. A tell-most. Largely because there's a lot I don't remember, and a lot that's not worth talking about.

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.

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.

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.

As the Second World War raged across Europe, and the Nazi regime tightened its reign of horror and oppression, nine women, some still in their teens, joined the French and Dutch Resistance. Caught out in heroic acts against the brutal occupiers, they were each tortured and sent east into Greater Germany to a concentration camp, where they formed a powerful friendship. In 1945, as the war turned against Hitler, they were forced on a Death March, facing starvation and almost certain death.

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!

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.

On 28th March 1944, Italian sisters Tati (six) and Andra (four) were roused from their sleep and taken to Auschwitz, to the infamous Kinder Block, presided over by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death. By the time Auschwitz was liberated, 230,000 children had been murdered, and Andra and Tati were among 70 child survivors. They were sent to Lingfield House in Britain, a home for children orphaned or lost at the end of the war.

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.

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.

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.

Bexy was born into the Children of God, one of the world's most notorious cults. She was nine years old when she experienced her first exorcism, held in a secret commune deep in the British countryside. At 10, she was placed on Silence Restriction, forced to be silent for a whole year. Even from an early age, she knew what was happening was not right. At the age of 15, she escaped, leaving behind her parents and 11 siblings.

London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate daughter Clara at London's Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the child she has never known. Dreading the worst, that Clara has died in care, she is astonished when she is told she has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl - and why.

Norway, 1662. A dangerous time to be a woman, when even dancing can lead to accusations of witchcraft. When Zigri, desperate and grieving after the loss of her husband and son, embarks on an affair with the local merchant, it's not long before she is sent to the fortress at Vardø, to be tried and condemned as a witch. Zigri's daughter Ingeborg sets off into the wilderness to try to bring her mother back home.

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.

Eighteen-year-old Debbie White lives on a dairy farm with her mother, Maeve, and her uncle, Billy. Billy sleeps out in a caravan in the garden with a bottle of whiskey and the stars overhead for company. Maeve spends her days recording her dreams, which she believes to be prophecies. This world is Debbie's normal, but she is about to step into life as a student at Trinity College in Dublin. As she navigates between sophisticated new friends and the family bubble, things begin to unravel. Maeve's eccentricity tilts into something darker, while Billy's drinking gets worse.

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.

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them from London to Sheffield, and with his success hinged on a hunt, an old tradition looms over the home; the hunt is a time to settle old scores. If a bullet finds a human home, then it is only that they were foolish to become prey. In the weeks leading up to the hunt, a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life.

Hidden away, the Morisaki Bookshop is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building, the shop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books. Here is where Takako comes to nurse a broken heart, finding within its crowded shelves books to soothe and uplift her flagging spirits. Over the course of two novels, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Takako and her uncle Satoru discover their similarities and differences, and learn all about life, love and the healing power of books.