Tag Archives: Backlist beauty
We’re all really excited that Stef Penney’s new novel, The Invisible Ones, will be publised in September.
But September is an awfully long time to wait for one of our very favourite Quercus authors to do their thing!
In the meantime, we’ll be heading right back to Stef’s 2006 Costa ‘Book of the Year’ prize-winning The Tenderness of Wolves:
1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond.
In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township – journalists, Hudson’s Bay Company men, trappers, traders – but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it?
One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for 17 years, a Native American culture, and a fortune in stolen furs before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.
Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into a panoramic historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, and a keen murder mystery.
Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment – the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground. Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to know that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula.
Measuring the World is a novel of rare charm and readability, distinguished by its sly humour and unforgettable characterization. It brings the two eccentric geniuses to life, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.
Great Irish Speeches contains 50 of the most stirring and memorable speeches in Irish history.
From the political oratories of Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera to emotive addresses by the nation’s celebrated poets, writers and musicians, all of the included speeches have had a remarkable impact on the course of Irish and world history.
Each speech is preceded by an introduction, which places the address in context and underlines its historical significance, as well as an iconic photograph of the speaker. Presented chronologically, the collection provides tremendous insight into Irish history.
The book includes the following speeches: Éamon de Valera’s ‘That Ireland which we dreamed of’ and ‘The abuse of a people who have done him no wrong’, John F. Kennedy ‘Ireland’s hour has come’, Jack Lynch ‘The Irish government can no longer stand by’, Liam Cosgrave ‘Mongrel foxes’, Charles J. Haughey ‘We are living away beyond our means’, Joe Connolly ‘People of Galway – we love you’, John Hume ‘Sit down and negotiate our future with us’, Mary Robinson ‘Come dance with me in Ireland’, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn ‘A necessary development of human rights’, Séamus Heaney ‘The achievement of Irish poets’, David Trimble ‘A cold house for Catholics’, Joe Higgins ‘Ansbacher Man’, Gerry Adams ‘Now there is an alternative’, Ian Paisley ‘A Northern Ireland in which all can live together in peace’ and Bertie Ahern’s ‘This is what Ireland can give to the world’.
Exactly ten days after I’d come back to care for my dad, it occurred to me that I had turned into a housewife. Not just any housewife. My mother. Kill me now…
Meredith does things for other people. She irons clothes for her boyfriend, she attends her ex-best friend’s horrendous hen party for her brother (who’s about to marry the girl) and she moves back to her parents’ house to look after her dad when his leg is broken.
She’s a good girl and that matters. But when she gets back home, all is not as Meredith remembered. Especially Scott, that geeky teenager from her old class at school. He’s definitely different now. And so, it seems, is she.
One by one, her family and old friends start to tell her some home truths and Meredith begins to realise she’s not so perfect after all. Maybe it is time she stopped being everyone else’s girl and started living for herself…
Megan Crane is a full-time writer and she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and various pets.
Quercus published Everyone Else’s Girl back in Februrary of last year. Her latest novel, I {Heart} The 80s is out now.
Now, I’m not a huge cricket fan, but even I know that losing to Irelend is an embarrassingly bad thing! Perhaps, then, we should turn to past glories?
But are they really ‘glories’?
Duncan Hamilton’s superb biography of 30s hero Harold Larwood (the Independent said “Hamilton has produced a tour de force of research, social history and lucid prose which rehabilitates a wronged working-class hero”) suggests that cricket and controversy go together like leather and willow…
Harold Larwood is an England cricketing legend. During the MCC’s notorious 1932-3 Ashes tour of Australia, his ‘Bodyline’ bowling left Australia’s batsmen bruised and battered, halved the batting average of the great Don Bradman – and gave England a 4-1 series victory. But the diplomatic row that followed brought Anglo-Australian relations to the brink of collapse. Larwood was used as a scapegoat by the MCC, which demanded he apologise for bowling Bodyline. Arguing that he had simply obeyed the instructions of his captain, Douglas Jardine, Larwood refused. He never played for England again.
The Bodyline saga has been told before, but Larwood’s story has not. Using materials provided by the fast bowler’s family, Duncan Hamilton has created an intimate and compelling portrait of Larwood’s life: from his mining village upbringing, through the trauma of 1932-3 and its bitter aftermath, to his emigration to Australia, where he and his family found happiness. A moving recreation of the triumph, betrayal and redemption of a working-class hero, Harold Larwood will enthral not only cricket fans, but all those who relish biographical writing of the highest quality.
