Catherine Chidgey

I hope you believe this Swan Story as it is rather fantastic. Gene & I arrived at the Greenpark Paddock at 7 a.m...It was good to be alive on a morning like this & having my son with me. Once again the dark shapes of the swans could be seen against the mountains. Closer, closer, 100yds, 80yds, 60yds, 40yds hell let loose, range zero. Bang - swan, bang - swan, bang bang - swans more swans, our stockpile grew high... When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard - but Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina - they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood. In a fishbone church spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan present, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeeply affecting and exhilarating novel.

There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother's paintings and a drop of Jam's blood, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption's house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question*--How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? Acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi makes their riveting and timely young adult debut with a book that asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.

The lives of a French wig maker, a young American widow, and a cuban cigar maker intersect in Tampa, Florida, 1898: a hazy frontier where the Old World meets the New and where miracles of transformation are possible.

Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Sieglinde lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words ("promise", "love", "mercy") from books. Erich is an only child living a lush rural life near Leipzig, tending beehives, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions. Drawn together as Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives. Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the ruins of a nation's dream.

"Moving away from their lovely apartment in Munich isn't nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all - right on their doorstep - are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe. Frau Hahn and the other officers' wives living in this small community can order anything they desire, whether new curtains made from the finest French fabrics, or furniture designed to the most exacting specifications. Life here in Buchenwald would appear to be idyllic. Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them - so close, and yet so remote - is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn's husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietritch Hahn, is to take up a powerful new position as the camp's administrator. As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald's prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naÏve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr Weber had invented a machine: the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the time he believed that it's subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might yet save a life" -- inside front flap.