As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?"

W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

Jane Alison Sherwin's honest and uplifting account provides insight into the challenges of bringing up a child with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). After years of misdiagnosis, Jane's daughter, Mollie, was diagnosed with PDA at the age of seven, and we follow her experiences pre and post diagnosis to age 10 as she attends school, interacts with the outside world and approaches adolescence. Throughout, Jane provides commentary on her daughter's behaviour and the impact it has on her family, explaining the 'why' of PDA traits, including the need for control, meltdowns, obsessive behaviour and sensory issues. She reveals the strategies that have worked for Mollie and provides essential advice and information on obtaining a diagnosis and raising awareness of PDA. The book also includes an interview with Mollie. Full of advice and support, and with a focus on understanding the child and how he or she sees the world, this book will be of immeasurable value to the parents and families of children with PDA as well as the professionals working with them, particularly teachers and teaching assistants, SEN co-ordinators, psychologists, outreach workers and social workers.

Two brilliant architects clash over the fate of a luxurious villa in this riveting tale of artistic obsession.

Along the glittering coast of southern France, among a jungle of olive trees and aloes, a white villa rose from an earthen terrace. Eileen, a new architect previously known for her elegant chairs and furniture, built it as a haven for her and her lover; she realized each detail, designing the villa around their movements and habits. When the outspoken Le G, a founder of Modernist architecture, first laid eyes on the house, he could see his influence in the sleek lines. Affronted and impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the villa’s clean, white walls . . .

Now, Le G is in the final week of his life. He has spent the last thirty years infiltrating Eileen’s house, erasing her presence and forgetting her name. But finally, the tide has come in, and Eileen is called back to her beloved coastline, where both artists will contend with the transformative power of memory.

Inspired by the real-life collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and the extraordinary place that bound them, Jane Alison boldly reimagines a now-infamous feud into a lushly poetic and mesmerizing novel of power, predation, and obsession.

When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls. The youngest girls from each family--one of them Jane--even shared a birthday.
With so much in common, the two families became almost instantly inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners--divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a "silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, silently fissuring." And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of silent combat for the affections of their absent fathers--a contest that, for one of them at least, would prove tragic.
Readers drawn to "The Glass Castle" will be moved by Alison's stunning emotional insight as she recounts the intimate devastations of family betrayal.

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.
Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there.
The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

In a damp Venetian palace, Oswaldo contemplates the ravages of time to his body and his beloved city. In New York, Lach savors his freedom, having just dropped Vera to join his new love, Francesca, in Venice. In rainy London, Max packs for New Orleans, in pursuit of Lucinde, a woman he barely knows. From New Orleans, Lucinde flies to the aid and comfort of Vera, who has accepted a grant to paint in Venice. While elsewhere in the Crescent City, Anton, leaving for Venice, sketches a good-bye upon the slumbering body of his wife, Josephine. With wit, sympathy, and surpassing deftness, Jane Alison choreographs an intricate dance among these characters, whom love and loneliness, aspiration and desperation, have drawn to two famously romantic, venal, and elusive cities of water.