Recommended Reads
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Fairies at Number 55
“Nobody in the world will admit to having seen a fairy, but it doesn’t mean they are not there.”
“Fairies are kind and they always, always do the sweetest, gentlest things for you and for all that you love, but rarely will they be visible. But you just never know…”
Fairy mum, Starlight, is beautiful. Sheer gossamer wings with a duck-egg blue hue, her tinkling voice always sounds like tiny cymbals chinking as she laughs, forever checking her fairy family, imploring them to keep kindness and gentleness to the fore of every endeavour.
From their garden at number 55, the family of fairies, Starlight and Nimbus, their fairy children, Mimosa, Chicory and Chirrup, Lychen and Moss, weave in and out of the lives of various woodland and water creatures, “giants” and their pets, all along the leafy green and cool bridleway.
Calling, along the way, upon such firm friends as doves, Darcy and Dill and magpies, Mick and Maggie, Spinner the friendly spider, and Skeet the generous dog, the fairies cheerfully carry out rescues, avert danger, make gifts, and even bring love to two lonely foxes.
£8.99 -
Fairies Fashion Show
In this second book of a series, it follows The Amazing Cooking School. The same country boys Billy and Lionel together with an elf Alfred get involved in the village fashion show. Billy’s sister Megan gets involved with the material shop owner Apple to design and make some clothes. Along the way the village has a team in the Dragon Boat races on the nearby pond. Madam Erle is up to her tricks and causes chaos as usual and a mystery is solved.
£6.99 -
Fairy Among the Ants
Get ready to plunge into the exciting world of Kaia, a fairy who lives inside a giant Kapok tree in a lively and vibrant forest.
This is a story of self-discovery and adventure as an unsuspecting creature sets her life in a completely new direction…
£7.99 -
Fairy Tale World
A powerful wizard finds himself taken for granted…
A fancy hat goes on a strange journey – or does it?
A new broom takes on a life of its own…
A bullying billy goat gets a taste of his own medicine…
Never outstaying their welcome, Mary Richards’ enchanting stories are full of charm, simplicity and a touch of whimsical humour, aptly accompanied by the author’s characterful illustrations.£7.99 -
Fairy Tales of the Mind
Every story has a beginning, but what happens if you don’t remember that beginning? What if you realise that the few memories you have, are only of violence and neglect?
Anxiety rises, fear of abandonment is constant on your mind, fear of being unloved is eating you up, and the world you envisioned to be a fairy tale is destroyed. So, you comfort yourself by letting your mind wander, and you wait for someone to save you even after the abuse, despite knowing full well that it’s unhealthy. Knowing that those daydreams you have of dying are unhealthy.
You survived the physical abuse and the neglect by escaping reality and continually dreaming of fairy tales, but you became too engrossed in those dreams. Those dreams resulted in you creating an alternative world in your mind in which you craved to stay in – like an addict, forgetting entirely that there existed a world outside of those dreams.
This is a collection of poetry about mental illness and the impact of child abuse in adulthood.
£6.99 -
Fake Love
Moving through the complexities of dating, Stella and her friends quickly realised that the online world was simply a revolving door of people coming and going.
It had become a collection of hopeful souls and artificial feelings, all competing for attention. Conversing with many, yet rarely sealing the deal; because in the blink of an eye it was all yesterday’s news, and there were fresh, new people to talk to instead.
Craving love, and being burnt by the fire, losing hope, losing themselves, and getting lost within the deep, dark caverns of this online world of desire.
The fickle nature of being just a number and waiting your turn; of broken promises and stretching the truth. The short-lived swipe-right, swipe-left world around them was no easy game to play. The virtual world was certainly not a place to become emotionally invested in.
As Stella takes a reminiscent walk down memory lane, the stories of her and her friends are discovered, each with their own complicated tales of love, hope, heartbreak, and regret.
Was there really such a thing as finding the one? Or was that all just a fantasy?£19.99 -
Fallen Through The Cracks
Press your chin hard against your throat. Now turn your head to the left and lift your left shoulder until it touches your ear. Keep your chin against your throat, your left ear against your left shoulder, contract your neck and shoulder muscles as tightly as you can and hold it like that for the rest of your life. That’s right. Eat like that, brush your teeth like that, drive like that and keep your head like that when you go to sleep at night.
This is what psychiatrists in South Africa did to me and they expect me to live like that for the rest of my life.
£11.99 -
Falling Behind
Do you really know the person you have committed the rest of your life to? Are they the same person you married, once knew, or have you ignored those subtle changes and made compromises just for the sake of happily ever after? Perhaps it is you who has changed, and now everything you once cherished, once hoped for, does not bind you in the way that it once did.
Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, Beth, and her husband Jake, travel to Samoa to reset and mend a broken marriage. But the suspicion of an affair, an addiction, a crime, or the thought that he just does not want to be around her anymore, travel with her to this island paradise.
How does it feel to lose a child? Your children are not supposed to leave you before you leave them. How do you live in a vacuum, unable to breathe, when sleep and inevitable death are the only reprieve? And then, what happens when you are responsible for their death? An old man and women, isolated from the rest of the world, abandoned by their families and neighbours, grapple with grief.
Falling Behind is a collection of six short stories that explores the character of grief and its manifestation in people and how these very same people attempt to ride it out and hope, at the same time, for it to end. As with Leaving Behind, each story bears an unexpected twist.
£7.99 -
Family Business
Ben, 15, was difficult, withdrawn and liable to sulk and with the years had become ever more unhappy. His sister Jessica, 18, had become mother to him after their mother died of cancer, and Dad was most of his time in London running his import export business. Tom, 25, their brother has been a forever student and wants a last fling, skiing the winter in Canada, but as a fresh tragedy strikes all plans go awry. It seems someone wants them all dead, but who?
Ben’s psychological problem comes to the fore and Jessica, old beyond her years deals with that and the threats to both their lives as they hide out in the less populated areas of Scotland. At last Ben feels able to confide in his sister. The COVID-19 pandemic interferes with life just as Ben has found himself and new friends but Jessica manages him and manages to keep them safe to find new lives.
£10.99 -
Fast Fashion and Flaneurs
Bill Wonder, the tyrannical billionaire fashion tycoon is found splattered on the pavement outside his fashion school in the West End of London.
Was he pushed from the balcony, did he jump, or it could have happened because of his high heel shoes?
The mystery of his death is stitched together by Sadie Silver, a hapless fashion history teacher, who needs to understand the incident to uncover her family’s sartorial secrets.
But wait, could she have killed Bill?
After all, she was the last person to see Bill alive, and he really seemed to hate her new look.
£9.99 -
Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead
Imagine that Isaac Babel’s Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir – no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella – no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction – no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski.
And who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the book’s frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski’s not telling and anyway, who cares.
This is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I haven’t had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson’s motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.
Piers Plowright
August 2008£9.99 -
Fate and The Lady
Fate and the Lady follows the modern day story of district nurse Christina Wise and her chance meeting with enigmatic ex-quarryman Mercy Slaughter and his friend FJ.
Christina will be tested in her feelings for this man and his obsessive need to right a wrong committed against himself and his friends during a medieval battle re-enactment only a couple of years previously. His compulsion risks putting them all in mortal danger and even result in an international incident.
Will Christina be able to save Slaughter from himself, or will he continue in his path of self-destruction?
Add to the mix a French politician and his sidekick with an axe to grind; a hardcore group of Englishmen with vengeance in mind; and a mysterious Turkish billionairess with her own designs on Slaughter; and you end up with a volatile mix of sex, intrigue and bloody hand-to-hand combat.£11.99
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