Scarlett Thomas

"In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth is a unique collection of real-life accounts that describe and express the hardships and triumphs of 15 lesbian, gay, and bisexual teens. This book explores the views of teens from a variety of societal contexts and experiences. The contributors' ages, backgrounds, hometowns, childhood experiences, and plans for the future are discussed to give you a deeper understanding of the challenges they face."--BOOK JACKET.

When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the eccentric Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed. With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself swept into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel.

When a mysterious incident nearly costs her magic-avoiding grandfather his life, Effie Truelove receives an unusual silver ring and responsibility over her grandfather's magical library before being confronted by a shady scholar who would use the books for his own dark purpose.

'I was reading about the end of the universe when I got a text message from my friend Libby . . .' If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But for Meg – locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline long-gone for a book that she can't write – this thought fills her with dread. Meg is lost in a labyrinth of her own devising. But could there be an important connection between a wild beast living on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time, a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe and the Cottingley Fairies? Or is her life just one long chain of coincidences? Smart, entrancing and buzzing with big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, and how a story might just save your life.

Alice Butler has been receiving some odd messages - all anonymous, all written in code. Are they from someone at PopCo, the profit-hungry corporation she works for? Or from Alice's long-lost father? Is someone else on her trail? The solution, she is sure, will involve the code-breaking skills she learned from her grandparents and the key she's been wearing around her neck since she was ten. PopCo is a grown-up adventure of family secrets, puzzles and the power of numbers.

"Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love. A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human. "--

A manual for reading and writing better that explores the great plots from Plato to The Matrix and Tolstoy to Toy Story. Broken into two sections: Part 1: Theory; and Part 2: Practice. Part 1 discusses Plato and Aristotle, Tragedy and Plot, Fairy Stories, and the Eight Basic Plots. Part 2 covers getting ideas for your fiction, styles of narration, characterisation, how to write a good sentence and beginning to write your novel.