Fern's choices in life and in love are an echo of her mother's, as Iris' are an echo of her own mother's. Three women, three generations: one dark secret. Iris keeps a scrapbook of Lawrence, the lover who went missing years earlier. Fern's father. She defines herself by his loss and soothes herself with gin and the fairytale of this one perfect relationship...Fern, once a 'strange and difficult child' who believed that her dead grandmother's soul lived inside her stomach, reluctantly returns home to the island to take care of Iris. She is tasked with finding Lawrence and in the process she has to confront her own past and memories...Ivy, Iris' mother, had her own cache of secrets; spells she took to the grave. Spells that Fern unearths. The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.

'Elusive, enigmatic and poetic' -Margaret Drabble about the story 'La Scala Inflammata"Full of mysterious and unnerving images' -Deborah Moggach about the sameIn these stories, antique coats retain the personality and power of previous owners; women fantasise about murdering their ex-husbands over tea and cake; mental breakdown sparks a quest mission that incorporates glimpses of both Heaven and Hell. Animistic, lyrical, and poignant; these narratives reverberate as much with the unseen and unsaid as with their opposites.Including the award-winning 'La Scala Inflammata', this collection brings together published and unpublished stories: each a delicate tribute to the minutiae of life and love, and each a profound meditation on the true, often unsettling, desires people hide beneath the veneer of social convention.

A dying woman lies in a hospital bed and appropriates another patient's identity to acquire her coveted blackcurrant cordial...and her visitor. A man adopts the role of detective to satisfy - with disastrous consequences - his curiosity about his wife's friend. A monkey is given a computer and uses it to update a Shakespearian Tragedy. People begin journeys and never end them, or live through lifetimes in the space of a single dream.This collection brings together prize-winning and critically acclaimed stories: encompassing both the poignant realism of bereavement or childhood night terrors, and the fantastical realms of an alternative Garden of Eden. Ranging across the globe, from the Welsh coast to Genoa, and from Kansas to Khartoum, the thread that binds these stories is one of dislocation and deception, the insidious power of memory, and of those seemingly un-momentous decisions that, once made, can change the course of a life.

Ranging from flash fiction to novelette, these stories are in turn chilling, playful, and melancholy. The bonds of family and of community, both in their fracturing and their healing states, the uneasy relationship between living in the present and yearning for the past, are themes that thread their way through Figurehead. Every tale is rich with landscapes haunted by loss and longing. In this debut collection of stories Carly Holmes peers into every corner of the strange fiction genre: from rural gothic through to traditional ghost stories and the uncanny. Mothers turn into trees when the sun goes down; Russian Dolls mourn their missing sisters in rotting houses; men offer sacrifices to the monsters who embody their inner wildness; and murderous demons protect young girls' virginity.

Ranging across the globe from sheep-strewn Welsh hills to an edgy Belgrade, and encompassing themes as diverse as doppelgangers and jellyfish, this anthology is an exploration of human essentials, containing all the humour, poignancy, and awe that being human evokes. Bringing together the twelve winning short stories and the twenty-one winning poems from this year's Penfro Festival competition as selected by Niall Griffiths and Rhiannon Hooson, Heartland is a celebration of writing and writers.

Fern's choices in life and in love are an echo of her mother's, as Iris' are an echo of her own mother's. Three women, three generations: one dark secret. Iris keeps a scrapbook of Lawrence, the lover who went missing years earlier. Fern's father. She defines herself by his loss and soothes herself with gin and the fairytale of this one perfect relationship...Fern, once a 'strange and difficult child' who believed that her dead grandmother's soul lived inside her stomach, reluctantly returns home to the island to take care of Iris. She is tasked with finding Lawrence and in the process she has to confront her own past and memories...Ivy, Iris' mother, had her own cache of secrets; spells she took to the grave. Spells that Fern unearths. The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.