A highly original and beguiling YA debut, Compass and Blade is a sweeping coming-of-age romantic fantasy, filled with magic and betrayal, and a powerful heroine Mira is one of the seven, chosen to swim out to the wrecked ships beyond the Isle of Rosevear to plunder whatever the sea will give them. Mira’s blood ignites when she is in the ocean; the song of the sea beckoning her into deeper waters. But Rosevear needs her, and she could never abandon her home. Until one evening when lightning splits the sky and the Watch descend, taking Mira’s father away. With the help of handsome stranger Seth, Mira will have to travel across the Fortunate Isles in search of a way to buy her father’s freedom. But to survive the journey she will need to learn who to trust – as securing her own future, and that of her island, will come at a high price.

A highly original and beguiling YA fantasy debut, Compass and Blade is a coming-of-age romantic fantasy, filled with shipwrecks, magic and betrayal Mira is one of the seven, chosen to swim out to the wrecked ships beyond the Isle of Rosevear to plunder whatever the sea will give them. Mira’s blood ignites when she is in the ocean; the song of the sea beckoning her into deeper waters. But Rosevear needs her, and she could never abandon her home. Until one evening when lightning splits the sky and the Watch descend, taking Mira’s father away. With the help of handsome stranger Seth, Mira will have to travel across the Fortunate Isles in search of a way to buy her father’s freedom. But to survive the journey she will need to learn who to trust – as securing her own future, and that of her island, will come at a high price.

Don’t miss this spellbindingly heartwearming and emotional romance – coming soon! ‘Wonderfully heart-warming, it made me cry, filled my heart with hope, and cast a magical spell on me until I’d turned the very last page’ M.A. Kuzniar, Midnight in Everwood ‘Haunting, magical and sparkling with Christmas spirit, One Christmas Morning is a festive love story with a difference . . . A warm and powerful debut’ Holly Miller, The Sight of You 'The book I didn't know I needed to read – gorgeous, Christmassy and compelling’ Ella Allbright, The Last Charm ‘An intelligent, romantic story of star-crossed lovers, I was completely absorbed . . . Greenlaw’s debut is a shimmering success’ Laura Shepperson, The Heroines –- They say you know when you meet the one. The moment Eva locked eyes with James over a library bookshelf, she knew she’d found her soulmate. Over ten years, they fell in love, got married and made plans to start a family. Until everything changed one Christmas three years ago, and they’ve been drifting apart ever since. Eva hopes a friend’s Christmas party at an old manor house in Cornwall will give them the chance to reconnect… but the last thing she expects is to wake up on Christmas morning in the body of a different guest. As Eva’s forced to keep reliving Christmas Day from the perspectives of those closest to her, she realises just how much her life has fallen off track. But can Eva break the cycle and save her future with James, before it’s too late?

The Vast Extent is a series of short texts on the subject of vision - pieces that cast light on one another. They encompass themes surrounding important (and often misunderstood) artworks, history and myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and Lavinia Greenlaw's own reminiscences on a life richly and thoughtfully lived. These essays also feature historical figures who have had bearing on Greenlaw's thinking about seeing and perspective, including John Locke, Virginia Woolf, William Morris, Emily Dickinson and Francis Bacon, among others less familiar and more contemporary. Via conversations with scientists, philosophical thinkers and artists, Greenlaw gives us an entire 'exploded essay' of sorts, and opens up new possibilities for how we might perceive our worlds.

Features writing that is, in one sense or another, a reflection or lingering effect of poets and artists who have gone before.

'A pointed, svelte but diverse work.' Irish Times Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter-and not being asked the ones that do. 'A delight: approachable, rigorous and omnivorous in its frame of reference. . . a timely, lyrical investigation into what it means to create.' Observer

'Signs and Humours' brings together 100 poems to show how one of the most basic human concerns - the body - has continued to preoccupy, fascinate and agitate poets.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep. In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For fans of The Midnight Library and One Day in December who love a dash of Dickensian magic, One Christmas Morning is a heartwarming debut novel about a woman's self-discovery, the strength found in friendship, and the promise of second chances. Eva has spent the past three years burying herself in her work, trying to forget the heartbreaking events of the Christmas that ripped her world apart. This year, the last thing she wants is to attend her friend's weekend-long Christmas party. But at her husband James' insistence, here they are. When Eva--overwhelmed by bittersweet memories--tries to sneak back to London in the middle of the night, she is visited by the ghost of her beloved grandmother. Gran tells Eva that if she doesn't face her fears head-on and stop shutting out her loved ones, she risks losing them all forever. When Eva wakes on Christmas morning, she finds herself living not her own life, but that of her hardworking assistant, Diana, whose overflowing inbox isn't the only secret she's been keeping. The next day, she wakes on Christmas morning again, this time in the body of her best friend's little sister. As Eva lives the same day again and again through the perspectives of her friends, she is offered a glimpse into the lives of those she has been pushing away. With each Christmas Day comes a new lesson--and an insight into the secrets and struggles her loved ones have been hiding. To move forward, Eva must let go of the past. But is it too late to fix her future?

First Published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Prepared over a period of 20 years, this book explores the previously unrecorded houses and mosques of the now abandoned island town of Suakin in the Red Sea, off the coast of Sudan. Drawings illustrate in detail the traditional architecture of Suakin.

Galileo's wife, a young woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed concert pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery, and a Russian boy whose adventures are sadly limited by the immature powers of the child who has conjured him up are just some of the figures encompassed by Lavinia Greenlaw's imagination. The poet's level gaze as she contemplates the more bizarre aspects of science and of human behaviour lends further distinction to this, her first collection.

Lavinia Greenlaw's first collection, Night Photograph, made an immediately favourable impact. Her second collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly explores more local and personal matters. Its central theme is the unpredictable act of communication, from the mechanical to the miraculous. There are also poems that are concerned with attempts at preservation - plundered relics, the stately home, an iron lung. This volume serves to confirm the gifts Lavinia Greenlaw showed in her first book.

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Minsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw's restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation.

The UEA Creative Writing MA presents its annual selection of new young poets. Founded in 1992, students and tutors on the course have included Owen Sheers, Kathy Simmonds, Hugo Williams and Anthony Thwaite.

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light and the borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky. Questions of travel hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be 'travelled fully' rather than answered -- and which involve the overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.

A powerful, involving new novel, following on from the author's much-praised debut novel 'Mary George of Allnorthover'. 'An Irresponsible Age', Lavinia Greenlaw's extraordinary new novel, is set in London in 1990, with Thatcher still in power but the country unwilling to 'abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one'. In these hesitant times we follow the life of Juliet Clough and her three siblings, all of them interdependent in a not-quite enviable way, clinging together after the death of a brother and the retreat of their grieving parents. When Juliet, the focus of them all, is drawn into a complex love affair with the enigmatic Jacob, the others, too, find themselves falling in love, and then evading the consequences. None will admit what they are doing, or why.

Lavinia Greenlaw's mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-'70s Essex. Lavinia Greenlaw puts before us the monochrome, immemorial middle England of the 1970s in all its dowdy glory, and has us see through the mercurial, bewitching Mary George's eyes how a seemingly static landscape is suddenly illuminated by the most vivid bursts of energy, colour and drama. Punk's torch flares into life and singes the fringes of England. Mary George bears witness and burns brighter still: she is more memorable than even the extraordinary events around her, and the reader will find it devastatingly hard to leave her company at the end of this exceptional debut about growing up under the shadow of an unknowable, inescapable small-town mystery.