At the core of this debut collection is a question – what is worth holding onto? Through poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Rhiya Pau queries complex characters and tender landscapes. Routes journeys from Ba's kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road. Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In this multilingual discourse exhibiting vast formal range, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to architect her own identity. '[Routes]...holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it...a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve' - Sarah Howe, Judge of Eric Gregory Awards 2022
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I am Eve. Collector of words. I look them up. I write them down. I knead them into sentences. I am the story. When her mum rescues a book from a garbage can, Eve's life changes. She reads her way into the stories, into a place in the world, worlds she never knew existed. Eve becomes the story. Everything is possible. But with adulthood comes deception and betrayal; to survive Eve strips life bare. No stories, no people, no connection. But the stories are determined to win her back.
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'one day I wake up and it's November / bare branches are faulty umbilical cords / failing to implant the sky' In Tree, Natalie Whittaker is writing about her personal experience of stillbirth and the mental illness that can follow such a traumatic event. It is a subject that is still rarely addressed in poetry, writing or conversation. That she is able to do so here, in eighteen intricate, carefully crafted poems, in a way that is engaging, communicative, distressing and yet also beautiful, is a testament to her abilities as a poet, her strong grasp on the power of language and the power of her imagination. With these powers, she brings a harrowing subject close up and enables the reader to truly feel, to see, to understand, to share. It is a brave and necessary work, wonderfully and heart-breakingly realised.
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Europe, Love Me Back is a collection of relentlessly questing, sharply satirical poems about the continent, and the poet's fraught relationship with it. Hurting yet clear-eyed, Rizwan explores and exposes what it means to be a small brown woman in Dutch suburbs, hospitals and academia This is an angry love letter, to a place left behind yet always there, continuing to matter and hurt and shape the poet's identity. "But no one was interested in eliciting my testimony; after all I wasn't dead – I wasn't ill – and hadn't this country treated me so well? For it is not a human right to be much more than Agamben's bare life, to exist in the hallowed halls of the academe, because there comes a point when our wanting is simply too much, obscene –"
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SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin's enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond's nemesis in Ian Fleming's novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH's operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks - often without cause - across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for 'Death to Spies'. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin's political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations - this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.
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Was Philip de László a secret agent and was MI5's source really as they claimed? Did an enemy spy really paint the portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth? In 1917, noted society portrait painter Philip de László, who painted such luminaries as the Pope, the Austrian emperor, King Edward VII and Prince Louis Battenberg, was subjected to a secret tribunal which interned him for trading with the enemy. At the outbreak of the First World War, de László had pulled strings to be naturalised as British, but in 1919 he was referred to a public committee to revoke his naturalisation. With the aid of skilled counsel, de László had the application overturned – however, newly discovered records show MI5 had evidence obtained from a top-secret source that alleged that he was supplying the enemy with important information on politics and industrial production. Crucially, the source's anonymity prevented MI5 from presenting evidence to the tribunal, which has particular resonance in the contemporary War on Terror. In the only book to examine MI5's secret evidence, Phil Tomaselli explores these allegations and reaches a shocking conclusion.
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This is the only trivia book a Sky Blues fan could ever need, packed with facts, stats, anecdotes and history about Coventry City. From cult heroes and extraordinary escapes to FA Cup glory and championships, it's all here – can you afford not to own a copy? FIND OUT . . . - Which City star was once allegedly arrested for espionage. - How a lick of paint once kept City in the top flight. - Which star striker has been busy inventing a whole new sound. - How Jimmy Greaves helped City win the FA Cup. - Which competition City are unbeaten in for 30 years.
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'masterly account of the massacre of the African elephant' - The Spectator It is more than a thousand years since the exploitation of the elephant began, when they were most commonly used as war elephants. However, it is only in the last hundred years, with the coming of the 'great white hunters' and their special elephant guns, that the very existence of the African elephant has been threatened. With an update by John Hanks, WWF's former leading elephant scientist, this new edition of Blood Ivory tells the story of how the professional hunting fraternity was the first to realise the threat to the elephant and how it kick-started the whole conservation movement. It is not a story with a happy ending, however. It is a tale of war: colonialists against traditional practices and customs; newly independent African countries against each other; poachers and smugglers against any kind of constraint. Robin Brown draws on his depth of knowledge and understanding of Africa and his career as a leading wildlife film-maker to paint a vivid picture of hunting's impact on Africa's elephant population, vividly portraying the powerful personalities of those involved on both sides of the massacre.
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