From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom. 'One of our best novelists' Daily Mail 'A superb achievement' Guardian 'Moving...and beautiful' Irish Times Anita is a talented sous-chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds, Anita must make a decision: should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick used to be? It's a decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past - and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life.

With an introduction by Ross Raisin. A modern classic of Irish fiction, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker prize. When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent. Francie Brady is a small-town rascal who spends his days turning a blind eye to the troubles at home and getting up to mischief with his best friend Joe - hiding in the chicken-house, shouting abuse at fish in the local stream. But after a disagreement with his neighbour Mrs Nugent over her son's missing comic books, Francie's reckless streak spirals out of control and gives rise to a monstrous obsession . . . Fearless, shocking and blackly funny, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy won the 1992 Irish Times Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. It is a modern classic of Irish fiction, a portrait of the insidious violence latent in small town life and of a frenzied young man lashing out at everyone, even himself.

This book demystifies the writing process, empowering you to write your own novel or short story. Acclaimed author Ross Raisin explains expert technique in a clear and jargon-free way, with examples from twenty-five masters of prose. For aspiring writers of all ages and abilities, Read This If You Want to Be a Great Writer will motivate and strengthen your writing talent. Read This if You Want to Be A Great Writer is part of the internationally-bestselling 'Read This' series, which has sold over half-a-million books worldwide and has been translated into over 20 languages. Coming soon: Read This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing People by Selwyn Leamy (September 2019) More titles in the 'Read This' series: Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs by Henry Carroll (9781780673356) Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People by Henry Carroll (9781780676241) Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of Places by Henry Carroll (9781780679051) Use This if You Want to Take Great Photographs: A Photo Journal by Henry Carroll (9781780678887) Read This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing by Selwyn Leamy (9781786270542) Use This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing by Selwyn Leamy (9781786274052) Read This if You Want to Be Instagram Famous edited by Henry Carroll (9781780679679)

From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom. A Hunger is the story of Anita: a talented sous chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds - the exciting bustle of her kitchen and her exhausting new role as a carer - Anita must make a decision: about her husband's future, as well as her own. Should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick once used to be? A decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past - and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life. A Hunger is a novel about love and sacrifice; how illness and duty affect ordinary lives. With tenderness and precision, Ross Raisin explores what it means to look after somebody at the end of a life; what we owe to our loved ones, and to ourselves. 'The poignancy of Ross Raisin's characters is equalled only by the brilliance of his writing' - John Boyne, on A Natural

Mick Little used to be a shipbuilder on the Glasgow yards. But as they closed one after another down the river, the search for work took him and his beloved wife, Cathy, to Australia, and back again, struggling for a living, longing for home. Thirty years later the yards are nearly all gone and Cathy is dead. And now Mick will have to find a new way to live: to get away, start again, and try to deal with the guilt he feels over her death.

With devastating vision, Ross Raisin brings to life the story of an ordinary man caught in the outer reaches of modern existence, suffering the loss of a great love. Waterline paints a captivating portrait of the alienation of lives lived quietly all around us, and of one man's existence dissolved through grief, and the long journey home.

Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened. The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success. Leah, the captain's wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her. A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be. 'The pantheon of top-class soccer novelists has never been large, but with A Natural Ross Raisin can immediately be ushered into the Premier League executive box' TLS

Sam Marsdyke is a lonely young man, dogged by an incident in his past and forced to work his family farm instead of attending school in his Yorkshire village. He methodically fills his life with daily routines and adheres to strict boundaries that keep him at a remove from the townspeople. But one day he spies Josephine, his new neighbor from London. From that moment on, Sam's carefully constructed protections begin to crumble--and what starts off as a harmless friendship between an isolated loner and a defiant teenage girl takes a most disturbing turn.

Granta Best Young British Novelist and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, Shortlisted for NINE literary awards 'Ross Raisin's story of how a disturbed but basically well-intentioned rural youngster turns into a malevolent sociopath is both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution' J. M. Coetzee 'Utterly frightening and electrifying' Joshua Ferris 'Astonishing, funny, unsettling ... An unforgettable creation [whose] literary forebears include Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield and Alex from A Clockwork Orange' The Times 'Remarkable, compelling, very funny and very disturbing . . . like no other character in contemporary fiction' Sunday Times In God's Own Country, one of the most celebrated debut novels of recent years, Ross Raisin tells the story of solitary young farmer, Sam Marsdyke, and his extraordinary battle with the world. Expelled from school and cut off from the town, mistrusted by his parents and avoided by city incomers, Marsdyke is a loner until he meets rebellious new neighbour Josephine. But what begins as a friendship and leads to thoughts of escape across the moors turns to something much, much darker with every step. 'Powerful, engrossing, extraordinary, sinister, comic. A masterful debut' Observer