Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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William Corlett

Jo can't bear the attitude of peole around her: the teacher who wants to help but can't face the truth that Jo's half black (not just half-white); Straker, the bully who torments and follows her; and most of all, her mum, who refuses to talk about the past and allow Jo to find out about her real dad. That's why she needs Mit - he takes her to a secret world beyond reality, a place where Jo can decide who she really is.

The Secret Line

Trevor Colgan

Luke Farrell, the talented young football star of the Stretford Enders team, starts the new season with high hopes after the disappointment of not being selected to play for Everton (Stretford Enders Away). There are scouts in the crowd for three other big teams and one has a contract in his pocket for Luke to sign after the match. Luke plays a blinder until the moment he is brought down by a wild tackle, breaking his leg. The break takes Luke out of play for several months. The contract stays in the scout's pocket and all Luke can do is sit and contemplate what might have been. Deeply disappointed, Luke sinks rapidly into depression. His best mate, David, commits suicide and his girlfriend, Ella, leaves for London. With his leg in plaster Luke loses fitness, pays no attention to exercise or diet and puts on weight. He alienates his friends, his coach, his mother - and worst of all, Ella. It's only a chance encounter with the hated Peter, which jolts Luke out of his black mood. Surprisingly, the two former enemies form a strange alliance which starts Luke back on the road to fitness. After all, there's still everything in the world to play for...

Stretford Enders - Square One

Chloe Rayban

Justine only goes to the Virtual Reality Exhibition in the hope she might get lucky with fit hunk Alex. Instead she gets unlucky with an Alternative Reality machine and leaves the exhibition as Jake! 
 
Once she's got over the shock, Justine starts to see the potential of her new situation. As Jake she has the opportunity to hang out with the lads and find out what really makes them tick. But when her real self develops a major crush on her virtual self, things start to get just a bit too complicated . . .

Virtual Sexual Reality

Keith Gray

Brook High is a great grey concrete ants' nest of a school. John Malarkey is the new kid, thrown in at the deep end of Year 11. He's the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. 
 
Through what at first appears to be a random meeting, he helps a girl called Mary Chase out of a tricky situation, but is subsequently accused of stealing report cards to sell to students so they can write their own bogus reports. He quickly realises it was all a set-up, and that he's been used to take the fall. The teacher who accuses him of the crime gives him one day to prove his innocence. Malarkey tries to track down Mary Chase, but it's difficult in such a huge place. He does, however, discover strange goings-on beneath the surface of the normal school day. The more questions he asks the deeper he becomes involved in the corrupt under-belly of the school. He's also noticed the peculiar fact that so many kids at Brook wear Adidas trainers - black with the three white stripes. He realises that these are the badge of membership worn by those involved in the school's 'mafia'. He discovers that the name of the organisation's leader is Freddie Cloth, and Mary Chase turns out to be Cloth's girlfriend. Malarkey is soon noticed for asking so many questions, and receives warnings and then threats to back down. But, with time quickly running out for him, he still has to prove his innocence. And the only way to do this is to get to Freddie Cloth.

Malarkey

Adèle Geras

Megan, Bella and Alice inhabit the isolated world of a girl's boarding school, Egerton Hall, buried deep in the English countryside. The Tower Room which they share is remote and high, and from it the three survey the everyday drama of school life. With only months to go until their final exams they are already sensing the dangerous delights awaiting them in the grown-up world. Megan feels a special poignancy about leaving school; orphaned soon after she came to Egerton Hall, she has virtually been brought up there as the ward of the science mistress.But it is Megan who looks down from the Tower Room that unforgettable morning, to meet Simon's inquisitive gaze. As Megan rushes to embrace her fate, her safe, cocooned world is transformed forever . . . 
 
Loosely based on the Rapunzel fairytale, this highly original novel is the story of a sudden, unexpected, passionate relationship and the unforseen yet inevitable results of defying convention.

The Tower Room : Egerton Hall Trilogy 1

There's only one thing that could induce techno-phobe Justine to dabble on the Information Super-Highway - and it's male. Yes the chance to share love-bytes with a cool boy-babe is all it takes to get Justine surfing in Cyberspace. But when the black-clad lad, Los reveals his website wanderlust for time-travel, Justine finds herself in a datspace dilemma... Just how far should she go?

Love In Cyberia

Mark Haddon

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-time

Andrew Matthews

Suzanne is pretty ordinary, apart from Love Street. She has the equivalent of a TV inside her brain, the only thing is that the same programme is playing day in and day out and she's lost the remote control. Whenever she is stressed out, furious or just plain bored, the TV flashes to life and shows a sequence from the soap called Love Street - the problem is, things get weird when the soap itself begins to imitate the life of her friends, and herself.

Love Street

Annie Dalton

Maria Dalton

At the age of sixteen, shy introverted Naomi makes a harrowing adult decision about the future of her baby daughter. Sixteen years later, Carrie faces painful challenges of her own. These two very different girls from two different generations, are linked only by the invisible threads of DNA, but as their stories unfold, moving parallels as well as differences between their experiences emerge, lending unusual honesty and force to this compelling novel.

Invisible Threads

Catherine Fisher

Cal has struggled to cope with his mother's drinking and her psychotic episodes since he was six; cooped up in their dirty council flat he dreams of a new life. So when he leaves to live with his uncle Trevor in Chepstow he is ruthless about breaking with the past, despite his mother's despair. But getting off the train at the wrong station he finds himself at the castle of the Fisher King, and from then on moves in a nightmare spiral of predetermined descent into a wasteland of desolation and adventure, always seeking the way back to the Grail he has betrayed. Catherine Fisher has created a gripping and highly moving novel that moves between myth and a contemporary journey of self-knowledge until one becomes indistinguishable from the other. Drawing in Arthurian themes, historical re-enactments and the Four Hallows, Cal's quest for a return to peace of mind is an elaborate and ambitious Grail novel for our time. An important new work from the author of the Book of the Crow

Corbenic

Louise Lawrence

A powerful post-nuclear holocaust novel described by the author as, 'my cry against the monstrous weapons men have made'. 
 
Everyone thought, when the alarm bell rang, that it was just another fire practice. But the first bombs had fallen on Hamburg and Leningrad, the headmaster said, and a full-scale nuclear attack was imminent . . . 
It's a real-life nightmare. Sarah and her family have to stay cooped up in the tightly-sealed kitchen for days on end, dreading the inevitable radioactive fall-out and the subsequent slow, torturous death, which seems almost preferable to surviving in a grey, dead world, choked by dust. 
But then, from out of the dust and the ruins and the desolation, comes new life, a new future, and a whole brave new world...

Children Of The Dust

I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had gone mad. The plague? Nobody's had the plague for centuries . . . 
 
Nathan Field, a talented young actor, arrives at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As rehearsals begin, eerie echoes of the past begin to haunt Nat, and he falls sick with a mysterious sickness. 
 
When he wakes, Nat finds himself in 1599, an actor at the original Globe - and his co-star is none other than the King of Shadows himself: William Shakespeare. 
 
Nat's new life is full of excitement, danger and the passionate friendship that he has longed for since the tragic death of his parents. But why has he been sent to the past - and is he trapped there forever?

King Of Shadows

Christine Purkis

Life is sweet for seventeen-year-old Alison. A long, hot summer nannying in the South of France is bound to brush-up her French, top-up her tan and - who knows? - maybe even pep-up her love life too! But when Alison arrives in the sleepy village of St Secrets her dreams come crashing down around her. . . it's just so dull! And then she discovers the secret diary, and Alison finds herself swept away with its emotional, passionate and intriguing revelations. . .

The Shuttered Room

These days falling in love can happen at the touch of a button and when it happens to Justine, it happens in a BIG WAY! A few e-mails and she's head over Gucci heels in love with Los, but there's just one snag: He's from the year 3001. Justine is going to have to time travel to be with the one she loves but will she adjust to the technically advance society Los lives in? And will Los be able to adjust to Justine's way of seeing things? All's fair in love and cyberspace. A fun and stimulating look at life in the future. Will future scientists really prove that love is just a hormone imbalance curable with medication? What will be the role of men as cloning and genetics advance? And as technology and medicine improve - where will we put all our great-great-great-great-great grandparents?

Terminal Chic

Once Megan, Bella and Alice shared a room. The Tower Room was theirs alone, remote from the rest of Egerton Hall School and here they formed a deep friendship which would continue long after they left their enchanted world. 
 
But now something is very wrong with Alice - poisoned by dark memories and unable to speak to a single soul it seems the ill-wishing placed on her has come true. Even her closest friends don't seem able to save her from the nightmare . . . 
 
Based loosely on the fairytale Sleeping Beauty, this is a haunting tale of treachery and betrayal.

Watching The Roses : Egerton Hall Trilogy 2

A motiveless kidnapping and a solo flight to the dark side of the moon are juxtaposed in William Corlett's extraordinary novel. At first the narratives seem unrelated until the reader sees the dramatic parallels in the two situations, which give the book its force and relevance. The story begins with the kidnapping. A boy is taken from his Scottish boarding school but there seems to be no reason behind the kidnapping: no ransom, no threats, just a note saying WE HAVE GOT YOUR BOY. MAY SOCIETY ROT AND THIS MESS OF A WORLD PERISH. While the police sift through the evidence, a lonely astronaut faces his private terrors during a critical moon flight.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Once, when Megan, Bella and Alice shared a room, the Tower Room was theirs alone, remote from the rest of Egerton Hall School. Here they formed a deep friendship, which would continue long after they left their enchanted world. But now Bella thinks her life is in danger. Is her stepmother really as wicked as she believes, or can imagination sometimes be more sinister than reality?

Pictures Of The Night : Egerton Hall Trilogy 3

'Football matches can change in a matter of seconds. So too can lives.' 
 
Luke stands at the stern of the Stena Seacat, and stares down at Dun Laoghaire harbour below. His whole universe is about to alter. Ella is behind him, trials for Everton are ahead of him. He has no idea where the journey will take him but he can't wait to begin.This tremendous follow up to a powerful debut novel, The Stretford Enders, charts Luke's first love, football as he sets out to play for Everton and leave behind his home, and perhaps his heart.

The Stretford Enders Away

Jonathan Stroud

Everyone says that Max is drowned, but Charlie thinks differently: she was in the mill-pool with him, and knows exactly what she saw. When she begins to see him in her dreams, her hopes are raised. It seems the reunion she craves is possible. But where exactly is Max leading her? And will she be able to return?

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