Since childhood, Sandra Peters has been fascinated by the small, private island of Lieloh, home to the reclusive silent-film star Valerie Swanson. Having dreamed of going to art college, Sandra is now in her forties and working as a receptionist, but she still harbours artistic ambitions. When she sees an advert for a two-week artists' retreat on Lieloh, Sandra sets out on what might be a life-changing journey.

On the hottest day of the year, Ana Sharma and her mum check in to the Hotel Splendid, a place where bells seem to ring all by themselves, jam pots and milk jugs appear on the breakfast table as if by magic, and things go bump in the night. The Hotel Splendid has a problem. When Ana and Sunny meet, they come up with a solution, but one problem leads to another. Meanwhile, the hotel is harbouring an unexpected guest ...

Sometimes, when you open a door or lift a lid, you find exactly what you expected to find: coats in the coat cupboard, bread in the bread bin, toys in the toy box. And sometimes you don't. When Sunny's parents buy an antique shop, they get more than they bargained for: in some of the old furniture, Sunny finds ghosts. Each of the ghosts has an unfulfilled desire, something they never did in their lifetime: Walter wants to learn to read, Violet wants to write a novel, Mary and Elsie want to go to the seaside. While Sunny is trying to help them all, it seems someone else is out to cause trouble...

This book provides a twenty-first century perspective on Roman Britain, combining current approaches with the wealth of archaeological material from the province. This volume introduces the history of research into the province and the cultural changes at the beginning and end of the Roman period. The majority of the chapters are thematic, dealing with issues relating to the people of the province, their identities and ways of life. Further chapters consider the characteristics of the province they lived in, such as the economy, and settlement patterns. This handbook reflects the new approaches being developed in Roman archaeology, and demonstrates why the study of Roman Britain has become one of the most dynamic areas of archaeology.The book will be useful for academics and students interested in Roman Britain.

With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents' home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together - to the seaside, perhaps. The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

This book provides a twenty-first century perspective on Roman Britain, combining current approaches with the wealth of archaeological material from the province. This volume introduces the history of research into the province and the cultural changes at the beginning and end of the Roman period. The majority of the chapters are thematic, dealing with issues relating to the people of the province, their identities and ways of life. Further chapters consider the characteristics of the province they lived in, such as the economy, and settlement patterns. This Handbook reflects the new approaches being developed in Roman archaeology, and demonstrates why the study of Roman Britain has become one of the most dynamic areas of archaeology. The book will be useful for academics and students interested in Roman Britain.

Brilliantly funny, terrifying, tender and sharp: the best short stories to come out of lockdown. A vibrant collection of established and emerging authors, including A L Kennedy, Helen Simpson, Alison Moore whose novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Amanda Huggins (winner of the Colm Toibin short story award), Richard Lambert shortlisted for The Sunday Times EFG award, Stephen S. Thomson author of Toy Soldiers and Sitting in Limbo for BBC 1 . Introduction by Amanda Craig, long listed for the Women's prize for Fiction 2021. '18 well-chosen stories, loosely based on the idea of solitude, explore loss, loneliness and love, and head from the wilds of the Northern Rockies with an ailing father and an intrepid grieving daughter (Leadfall by D. W. Wilson) to the cable-tangled, neon-jagged streets of Bangkok where, in Stephen Thomas's titular story, a traveller watches the world and thinks the setting is strange to her, but her thoughts are inescapably familiar.'DAILY MAIL

Lewis Sullivan lives less than a mile from his childhood home. His grown-up daughter visits every day, bringing soup, and he spends his evenings at his second favorite pub for half a shandy and sausage. But when an old friend appears, Lewis finds his comfortable life shaken up, and he longs for more excitement. A modern-day Death in Venice by the author of Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, He Wants is charged and unpredictable. Alison Moore is the author of one previous novel, The Lighthouse, and a short story collection The Pre-War House. She lives in Nottingham, England.

Winner of the 2013 McKitterick Prize Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book Award Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 Shortlisted for New Writer of the Year in the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards Observer Book of the Year 2012 The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman. In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents' broken marriage and his own. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find. He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around. At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.

Alison Moore's debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, gathered together stories written prior to the publication of her first novel. 'The tales collected in The Pre-War House... pick at psychological scabs in a register both wistful and brutal.' -Anthony Cummins, The Times Literary Supplement 'Moore's writing is surprising and exact and culminates in the title story, the novella which brings the collection to a powerful crescendo' -The Arkansas International 'just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse... Moore's distinctive voice commands exceptional power' -Dinah Birch, The Guardian Eastmouth and Other Stories is her second collection, featuring stories published in the subsequent decade, including stories that have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror, as well as new, unpublished work.

Observer Book of the Year 2014 Lewis Sullivan, an RE teacher at a secondary school, was approaching retirement when he wondered for the first time whether he ought to have chosen a more dramatic career. He lives in a village in the Midlands, less than a mile from the house in which he grew up. He always imagined living by the sea. His grown-up daughter visits every day, bringing soup. He does not want soup. He frequents his second-favourite pub, where he can get half a shandy, a speciality sausage and a bit of company. But when a childhood friend appears on the scene, Lewis finds his life and comfortable routine shaken up. In Moore's inimitable, haunting style, this seemingly simple but in fact multi-layered narrative unfolds with compelling assurance. Moving between Lewis's current life of cosy habit, his memories of childhood, and his aged father agitating away in a nursing home, plot twists thicken and weave with stealthily increasing tension. Always unexpected, sparely written and beautifully crafted, He Wants deftly dissects the themes of loneliness, anxiety, the weight of recollection and the complex nature of friendship and family ties. A surprising, lingering and intensely moving tale which reflects the prodigious talent of one of our most exciting novelists.

Updated papers presented at the infancy and childhood conference at the University of Kent in 2005. From this conference the new Society - the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP) emerged. Contents: 1) The Osteology of Infancy and Childhood: Misconceptions and potential (Mary Lewis); 2) Subadult or Subaltern? Children as serial categories (Frederik Fahlander); 3) Etruscan Infants: Children's cemeteries at Tarquinia, Italy, as indicators of an age of transition (Marshall J. Becker); 4) Thrown Out with the Bathwater or Properly Buried? Neonate and infant skeletons in a settlement context on the Durrnberg bei Hallein, Austria (Raimund Karl and Klaus Locker); 5) The Children in the Bog (Grete Lillehammer); 6) Parenting, Childloss and the Cillini of post-Medieval Ireland (Eileen Murphy); 7) The Disposal of Dead Infants in Anglo-Saxon England from c.500-1066: An overview (Sally Crawford); 8) Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Bronze Age children's burials in south-east England: Initial thoughts (Dawn McClaren); 9) Ble Mae'r Babanod? Infant burial in early Medieval Wales (Marion R. Page); 10) Childhood in Roman Egypt: Bioarchaeology of the Kellis 2 cemetery, Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt (Sandra M. Wheeler et al); 11) Constituting Childhood"

Having moved from the Fens to the Midlands to the Scottish Borders, Jessie Noon finds herself struggling to leave the past behind. Following a family tragedy, Jessie Noon moved from the Fens to the Midlands and now lives in the Scottish Borders with a cat, a dog and - she is convinced - a ghost in the spare room. Her husband walked out almost a year ago, leaving a note written in steam on the bathroom mirror, and Jessie hasn't seen her son for years. When Jessie meets Robert, a local outreach worker, they are drawn to one another and begin a relationship; meanwhile, Jessie has begun receiving messages telling her I'm on my way home. As a translator, Jessie worries over what seems like the terrible responsibility of choosing the right words. It isn't exactly a matter of life and death, said her husband, but Jessie knows otherwise. This is a novel about communication and miscommunication and lives hanging in the balance (a child going missing, a boy in a coma, an unborn baby), occupying the fine line between life and death, between existing and not existing.