Amy Sackville

While honeymooning on the Orkney Islands, a barren place of extraordinary beauty, with his new wife, a woman 40 years his junior, a literature professor becomes consumed by his mysterious bride who distracts him from his life's work - a book about enchantment-narratives in literature.

Orkney

This is a portrait of Diego Velazquez, from his arrival at the court of King Philip IV of Spain, to his death 38 years and scores of paintings later. It is a portrait of a relationship that is not quite a friendship, between an artist and his subject. It is a portrait of a ruler, always on duty, and increasingly burdened by a life of public expectation and repeated private grief. And it is a portrait of a court collapsing under the weight of its own excess. 0.

Painter to the King

An exquisitely crafted, strikingly original literary debut that is both a doomed Arctic adventure and a haunting love story.

The Still Point

Philippe Sands

Christy Lefteri

Robert Macfarlane

Dina Nayeri

Shami Chakrabarti

Simon Smith

Kyon Ferril

Pincus HERD

Seventy years after the 1951 Refugee Convention 'endeavoured to assure refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and Freedoms', the fourth volume of Refugee Tales again shares the tales of people who have sought refuge and welcome, and instead have found themselves detained. As the coronavirus death toll rises across the world, more than ever the detention of migrants and people forced to move is a defining issue of our moment. In these new tales, poets, novelists and writers have collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their stories appearing alongside first-hand accounts of people who themselves have been detained. Here we are told what it means to experience the ongoing reality of the UK's 'hostile environment', as well as detention in Canada, Greece, Italy, and the USA. Each new story communicates the human costs of a system which fundamentally breaches human rights, and each story conveys the need for urgent political change.

Refugee Tales Volume 4

Rachel Seiffert

Maurizio Veglio

Natalia Sierra

Khodadad Mohammadi

Bidisha

Seventy years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UK is guilty of undermining the very principles of asylum, inhumanely detaining those seeking protection and ushering in sweeping changes that threaten to punish refugees at every turn. But the UK’s immigration system is not alone in committing such breaches of human rights. The fourth volume of Refugee Tales explores our present international environment, combining author re-tellings with first-hand accounts of individuals who have been detained across the world. As the coronavirus pandemic defies borders – leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable – this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a future without detention. Edited by Anna Pincus & David Herd. ‘Heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Every page is filled with quiet dignity.’ – Shobu Kapoor ‘A courageous book’ – Jackie Kay Part of the Refugee Tales series.

Volume IV

Refugee Tales

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily's romance, and her husband Simon faces a precipitous choice that will decide the future of their relationship. Sharply observed and deeply engaging, The Still Point is a powerful literary debut and a moving meditation on the distances - geographical and emotional - that can exist between two people.

On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his pale, enigmatic star pupil. Alone beneath the shifting skies of this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that constantly draws her to the sea?

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily's romance, and her husband Simon faces a precipitous choice that will decide the future of their relationship. Sharply observed and deeply engaging, The Still Point is a powerful literary debut, and a moving meditation on the distances - geographical and emotional - that can exist between two people.

Amy Sackville

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