The Star in the Branches, James Peake's second collection, is an intense and heartfelt examination of memory, how it pains and consoles, deepens and shrinks, is both equal to, and less than, the objects and people who come to reside there. At either end of the book are the disappearances of loved ones: a parent succumbing to dementia, and a school friend lost to more voluntary forms of forgetting. Elsewhere are poems of erotic love, big city loneliness, and the boon and burden of family, poems of praise in which the spiritual and the tangible are not remote but intimate. From the ancient quarries of Naxos to the electronica of Aphex Twin, these highly distinctive poems celebrate the unique wherever they find it.

ADVENTURE, DANGER, INTRIGUE, ESPIONAGE, VIOLENCE & SEX... JUST ANOTHER DAY AT SCOUNDRELS CLUB. Spanning much of the 20th Century and revolving around the infamous gentlemen's club of London, Scoundrels is the jaw-dropping memoirs of disreputable spies Majors Cornwall and Trevelyan. The Majors recount scandalous tales of murder on Everest, panda hunting with the last Chinese Emperor and the theft of a uniquely sordid item from the Nazi fortress Klunghammer. But why have they been under house arrest for over thirty years? Historically accurate, morally questionable and absolutely true, Scoundrels is one part Flashman to two parts Mordecai Trilogy, stirred vigorously and dashed in the face of Ian Fleming. It will leave you with a nasty taste in your mouth and horribly hungover

Have there always been places where the inner life and the outer world can't be told apart? Do the cities we've so skilfully shaped reciprocate in any way? If the meaning of a building or symbol is lost can it be restored or only reinvented? In his carefully meditated debut collection of poetry, James Peake explores the imagination's material legacy - how our ideas have entered wood and stone, celluloid and skin, metal and glass, and become restless in the process. Reaction Time of Glass is a work of unusual clarity and coherence. Like the cityscapes it relishes, it is home to interiors - eerie or homely, dark as well as light, imaginative as much as factual - akin to those we've inherited and inside of which we perform our lives.

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