When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed, counter-factual literary adventure, complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from David Bowie and Tom Waits to Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realises her wife's deceptions were far crueller than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art and love, and that introduces an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

'I consumed it. It is the electric charge we need' Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under One Sunday morning, a mysterious silent figure is found sleeping in a church in an unnamed American town. The congregants call this amnesiac 'Pew' and seek to uncover who they are: their age; their gender, their race, their intentions. Are they an orphan, or something worse? What terrible trouble is Pew running from? And why won't they speak? Unable to agree on how to treat a person they cannot categorize - whether to adopt or imprison, help or harm them - this small town is quickly undone by Pew's terrifying silence. What remains is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: our borders and our boundaries, our fears and our woes.

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable life in Manhattan, her home, her career and her loving husband. As the people she has left behind scramble to figure out what has happened to her, Elyria embarks on a hitchhiker's odyssey, testing fate by travelling in the cars of overly kind women and deeply strange men, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks. As she journeys from Wellington to Picton, Takaka, Kaikoura and onwards she asks herself, what is it that I am missing? How can a person be missing? Full of mordant humour and uncanny insights, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a startling tale of love, loss, and the dangers encountered in the search for self-knowledge. It is a novel which goes far beyond the story of a physical journey and asks what it means to be human, to be a woman, and to be at the mercy of forces beyond one's own control.

WELCOME TO THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIMENT

Mary is out of options.

Estranged from her family and beset by phantom pain, she signs up for 'The Girlfriend Experiment' - a mysterious project masterminded by a famous Hollywood actor who hires a collection of women to fulfil the different roles of a relationship. Mary is to play the Emotional Girlfriend, alongside a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane Girlfriend, an Angry Girlfriend and, of course, an Intimacy Team. Each woman has her debts and her difficulties, her past loves and her secrets.

As Mary and the actor are drawn ever closer together, the nature of the experiment changes, and the Girlfriends find themselves exposed to new perils, foremost among them love.

You can run all the way to New Zealand, but eventually you'll catch up with yourself

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.
Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?
The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self. In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, "Nobody Is Ever Missing" is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.

Certain states are hard to shake, or so Catherine Lacey's characters find in these twelve tales of love, loss and longing. A grieving wife gives away the shirts her husband has left behind. A flirtatious widow takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband's grave. A businessman working for a shadowy organization known as 'The Company', checks-in to a room in a strange and remarkable hotel.

Six classic movies starring Margaret Lockwood. 'The Wicked Lady' (1945) is set during the reign of King Charles II. Lockwood stars as Lady Skelton, an aristocrat who attempts to relieve the tedium of her day-to-day life by secretly acting as a highway robber. Lady Skelton soon finds herself caught up in a tangled web of romance, danger, and jealousy. In 'Love Story' (1944), Lissa (Lockwood) discovers she only has a short time to live, so travels to Cornwall for a final fling. While there, she falls in love with young mineral prospector, Kit (Stewart Granger). However, the course of true love does not run smoothly. In 'Bank Holiday' (1938), a group of people set off on an August bank holiday, including a raucous Cockney family, a would-be beauty queen, and two young lovers - whose relationship starts to come apart when one has to deal with a bereavement at the hospital where she works. In 'Give Us the Moon' (1944), a young man, Sascha (Vic Oliver), joins a group called 'The Elephants' whose principle is to abide by a complete disregard for work. However chaos ensues when the group decides to help run the hotel owned by Sascha's father. In 'Highly Dangerous' (1950), when British Intelligence discovers that an Iron Curtain country is developing insects as weapons, they dispatch entomologist Frances Gray (Lockwood) to get into the country and collect specimens. However her cover is almost immediately blown on her arrival and her contact is murdered. Finally, in 'The Lady Vanishes' (1938), when the elderly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) goes missing on a train bound for England, her friend Iris Henderson (Lockwood) sets out to find her. However, Iris' attempts are immediately frustrated by her fellow passengers, who question whether Miss Froy ever even existed. Only music scholar Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave) is prepared to believe Iris, and together they set about getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Classic Ealing comedy. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of a small Hebridean island are wilting under a chronic shortage of whisky. When a ship is wrecked on the shore, it is discovered to contain 50,000 cases of malt, which are promptly appropriated by the menfolk of the island. All is well until an English Home Guard commander - determined to see the whisky restored to its rightful owners - calls in Her Majesty's Customs, and the islanders make frantic attempts to hide their treasured alcoholic booty!

Classic Ealing comedy. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of a small Hebridean island are wilting under a chronic shortage of whisky. When a ship is wrecked on the shore, it is discovered to contain 50,000 cases of malt, which are promptly appropriated by the menfolk of the island. All is well until an English Home Guard commander - determined to see the whisky restored to its rightful owners - calls in Her Majesty's Customs, and the islanders make frantic attempts to hide their treasured alcoholic booty!