Patricia Duncker

"Elizabeth Webster is a cantankerous spinster pushing seventy. Forced out of her school-teaching job, she unleashes her sharp tongue and dogmatic opinions on everyone in the English village of Little Blessington." "Then one cold spring night, sitting on the sofa alone, she grinds to a dead halt. To recover from this mysterious, near-fatal illness, her doctor sends her on a journey to a North African country where she ventures into the desert and has a brush with terrorism. Miss Webster, however, no longer cares about anything, least of all Islamic politics and suicide bombers." "Three weeks after her return there is a ring on her doorbell. Standing there in the gusty darkness is a young Arab man of astonishing beauty. Worryingly, he is carrying a large suitcase. But who is Cherif? Why is he there and what does he want?" "Patricia Duncker's new novel is a comedy of errors set in the aftermath of 9/11, in a darkening world moving towards war. This tale about friendship, trust and liberation is full of reversals and surprises, tenderness and humour."--Jacket.

An intricate and self-reflective novel about that most delicate of relationships--meaning the one between writers and readers. The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum. Engineering his hero's release, the narrator finds himself enmeshed in bizarre love triangle, of which the three vertices are himself, the novelist, and the late Michel Foucault. Sex, it seems, can be made safe, but the oddball intimacy of reading cannot.

Toby Hawk is a solitary boy in a family of Amazons. His mother, only fifteen years older than him, is a painter on the brink of commercial success. His great-aunt is a wealthy textile designer; her partner, Liberty, a barrister. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old Toby's world remains a small, closed round of school, domesticity and surfing the Net at night. But everything changes when his mother takes up with a fascinating but enigmatic scientist, Roehm. Patricia Duncker's gripping novel is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passion. It is also an eerie psychological ghost story in the European tradition, whose sources - Freud, Faust and Frankenstein - haunt the pages.

Since 1970 the women's movement has produced a rich and varied harvest of feminist fiction. This book introduces the reader to these writers and to the politics and polemic that inform their work.

The Doctor" is a sequel to author's novel "K" and is one of her few Non-Mysteries. It is the story of a young surgeon, Noel Arden.

Includes works by participants in UEA's Creative Writing MA course, 2004: Sally Alexander, Joshua Bigley, Ben Borek, APS Brar, Emily Bullock, Sarah Butler, Jane Camens, Alice Cassell, Tim Clare, Jo Zajicek Coleman, Andrew Duck, Louise East, Caroline Fitzgerald, Sarah Flax, Tom Green, Edmund Hardy, Oliver Harris, Melanie Harrison, Edward Hogan, Claire Hynes, Daniel Jeffreys, Leonora Klein, Annie Kirby, Katherine Kreke, Lucinda Labes, Hannah Lee, Christina Lisinska, Tom Loudon, Royce Mahawatte, Ian Marriott, Mark McNay, Wayne Milstead, Ann Morgan, Antoinette Moses, Robin Müller, Carol Oprey, Anna Orridge, Janette Parris, Jessie Pay, Jude Piesse, Devika Ponnambalam, Sally Roe, Kim Rooney, James Scudamore, Elizabeth Silver, Asheem Singh, John Steel, Joel Stickley, Emma Sweeney, Conny Templeman, Carol Topolski, Jennifer Tuckett, Wendy Vaizey, Sarah Walker, Hayley Webster and Jamie Wilkes.

"In this important new book, Mel Greaves explains why the old paradigms of infectious diseases or genetic disorders have proved fruitless when trying to account for the complex and elusive puzzle that is cancer. Rather, he suggests that by looking at cancer in its evolutionary context, we can begin to answer some of the big questions in cancer that concern us all" -- from cover.

Berlin, September 1872. The Duncker brothers, Max and Wolfgang, own a thriving publishing business in the city. Clever, irresponsible Max is as fond of gambling and brothels as the older, wiser, Wolfgang is of making a profit. When Max's bad habits get out of hand, Wolfgang sends him to Homburg, to attend to a celebrity author--the enigmatic Sibyl, also known as George Eliot. Enthralling and intelligent, she soon has Max bewitched. Yet Wolfgang has an ulterior motive: he wants his brother to consider Countess Sophie von Hahn, daughter of a wealthy family friend, as a potential wife. At first, Max is lured by Sophie's beauty and his affectionate memories of their shared childhood, but she is nothing like the vision of angelic domesticity Max was expecting. Mischievous, willful, and daring, Sophie gambles recklessly and rides horses like a man. Both women have Max in thrall-- one with her youth and passion, the other with her wisdom and fierce intelligence. Out of his depth, Max finds himself precariously balanced between Sophie and the Sibyl. What's more, Sophie worships the great novelist of questionable morals and is determined to meet her. Combining a tale of courtship and seduction with a lively imagining of George Eliot at the end of her boldly conventional life and height of her fame, [this] is both a compelling Victorian novel and a playful meditation on the creation of literature"--Front jacket flap.