Books
Our first titles are by four of our founders:
Disapproval
By Candida Crewe
Can a grown up daughter sleep with an ex-lover of her mother’s? Can a woman fall in love with her oldest friend who reveals himself to be unhappily married to his wife whom she has never much liked?
Edie is divorced with an adult son and daughter. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush and runs an independent cinema in the East End of London. A brief fling with a well-known French film director has extraordinary repercussions within her family and gives rise to a circle of disapproval, which comes in all different guises depending on the gender and generational points of view of those who are doing the disapproving. Her ex-husband, Will, and her daughter, Caitlin, fall out with her - and with each other.
For those who love the fiction of Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, Disapproval is a study of loneliness but also an examination of the grey areas of morality not written down in any religious or legal texts.
These scenarios give rise to wildly differing opinions and reactions in social and familial groups. The novel asserts that disapproval is the more bourgeois, poor relation of jealousy, but that it is just as corrosive a force between friends and family, and results in conflict every bit as toxic and destructive.
Say You Love Me
By Conrad Williams
Carla’s distinguished father Frank is dying and she’s running out of time. She needs him to understand what it has cost her to be the good daughter through his many difficult marriages; and she needs him to show her some love. Frank’s will is a travesty. But what can you say to a man who is dying?
Old flame Phillip has meanwhile left his wife and wants Carla badly. On the edge of bereavement Carla knows she cannot afford to make herself vulnerable again. She is afraid of asking too much of Phillip and having her heart broken.
But Carla has a flair for passionate complication and suddenly the pain of leave-taking and the precarious excitement of new romance blend in alarming ways. Can she find the grace to love through the hurt and grief, or does she fight for the truth in both these relationships – whatever the price?
Say You Love Me is a gripping novel about the cost of filial and romantic love.
Gone For A Soldier
By Melissa Jones
Maddie used to be a writer. Maddie used to be married, too. Now she is an English teacher at a smart sixth-form college, the mother of Pip, a troubled fourteen-year-old boy, and – by her own admission – the killer of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Benedict Fordham. Except the police can’t find any trace of a body, the army doesn’t have a record of ‘Robert Benedict Fordham’, and Maddie thinks he’s lied about everything he’s ever told her.
In a terrifying descent into darkness and death Gone for a Soldier examines truth in a postmodern world, explores the very extremes of deception, and dives deep into the vulnerability of handing over trust to someone you don’t – can’t – really know.
Gone for a Soldier is a subtle psychological mystery examining truth in a postmodern world. In her characteristically gripping, elegant prose, Melissa Jones interrogates extremes of deception, and the inescapable vulnerability of losing your mind to the grasp of another, in a secret and terrifying descent into darkness and death.
The Big Little War
By James Dunford Wood
The incredible story of how an RAF flying school in ancient biplanes beat overwhelming odds to keep Hitler out of Iraq - and save British forces in the Mediterranean.
There are very few World War Two epics still to be uncovered. This is one: based on newly discovered war diaries, The Big Little War tells the story of how an RAF training school in ancient biplanes defeated the Iraqi army and the Luftwaffe - and why they were overlooked by history.
In early 1941, RAF Habbaniya in Iraq was a quiet flying school far from the front line. This all changed when, following a German-supported Iraqi coup, 9,000 Iraqi troops marched on the camp to demand its surrender. Habbaniya was virtually defenceless, with reinforcements weeks away across the desert. Left to fend for themselves and faced with the imminent arrival of the Luftwaffe, the camp commandant ordered a pre-emptive strike in their antiquated machines…
Of all the battles of World War Two, there has never been a more underreported campaign with such strategic significance. Had the RAF school failed, Britain’s power in the Middle East would be crippled, the oil fields lost to the Germans, and the course of World War Two very different.
This new extended edition is published in hardback to mark the 85th anniversary of the ‘Big Little War.’
Our first four books will be published in March 2026
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Our first four books will be published in March 2026
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Our first four books will be published in March 2026 • Our first four books will be published in March 2026 •
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Borges