Isis Hardcover

Isabella of Spain was a great woman, a great Queen. 'Crown of Aloes' is presented as a personal chronicle. Within the framework of known fact and detail drawn from hitherto unexploited contemporary Spanish sources, a novelist's imagination and understanding have provided motives, thoughts, and private conversations, helping to build up the fascinating character Isabella must have been. Her fortunes were varied indeed: she knew acute poverty, faced anxiety and danger with high courage, gave much, suffered much, lived to the full. At the end she was mainly aware of her failures. It was left to others to realise how spectacular her successes had been.

In 1938 Allan Ahlberg was picked up in London by his new adoptive mother and taken back to Oldbury in the Black Country. Now one of the most successful children's book writers in the world, here Allan writes of an oddly enchanted childhood lived out in an industrial town; of a tough and fiercely protective mother; of fearsome bacon slicers; of 'fugitive memories, the ones that shimmer on the edges of things: trapdoors in the grass, Dad's dancing overalls'. Of 'two mothers, two fathers and me like a parcel or a baton (or a hot potato!) passed between them'. Using a mix of prose and poetry, supported by new drawings by his daughter Jessica and old photographs, THE BUCKET brings to life the childhood that inspired Allan's classic picture books.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur. Like Gawain, the poem survives in a unique manuscript (held in the library of Lincoln Cathedral) by an anonymous author, and written in alliterating lines which harked back to Anglo-Saxon poetic composition. Unlike Gawain, whose plot hinges around one moment of jaw-dropping magic, The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas. The outcome is announced in the poem's title, and from their stronghold in Carlisle, Arthur and his army embark on a campaign which takes them almost to the gates of Rome, before he is forced to turn back to deal with matters closer to home. But along the way there are as many challenges for the translator of this poetic romance as are faced by its protagonist - not least how to manage the alliterative line while doing justice to the mass of riotous life which courses through the narrative's veins: channel crossings, battle formations, naval engagements, rearguard actions and forays; but also courtly protocols, partings, swoonings, and dream sequences remarkable for their private glimpses into the mind of the once and future king. A new kind of actuality is present in The Death of King Arthur, whose chivalric code cannot gloss over the carnage and horror of war, or the flaws of a King who is as much a human being as a figurehead. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so craftily showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, bringing to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.

Lydia, Dean and Robyn don't know each other. Yet. And they are all facing difficult changes. Lydia is still wearing the scars from her traumatic childhood and, although she is wealthy and successful, her life is lonely and disjointed. Dean is a young man, burdened with unexpected responsibility, whose life is going nowhere. And Robyn wants to be a doctor, just like her father - a man she's never met. But is her whole life built on an illusion? Three people leading three very different lives. All lost. All looking for something. But when they slowly find their way into each other's lives, everything starts to change ...

Alentejo Blue is the story of a Portuguese village told through the lives of those who live there and those who are passing through - children and old men, expatriates of all ages, tourists and locals. In this beautiful and seemingly traquil setting the villagers await the anticipated return of a prodigal son. Amid jealousies, passions and disappointments his arrival triggers an inevitably collision.

These are dark days for England; the Tudor succession hangs precariously in the balance, along with the lives of its people. The wrong religion can all too easily mean a brutal death in a time when the difference between 'faithful' and 'heretic' rests on the monarch alone. With the shadow of the dreaded Inquisition looming across the continent from Spain, one family, lead by two brave men - daring and adventurous Felipe and his cousin, reserved and thoughtful Richard - struggles to survive against the overwhelming odds.