The third book in a hilarious, heart-warming series for children from Costa Award-winning author A.L. Kennedy, illustrated by Gemma Correll.Uncle Shawn and his best friend Badger Bill are back for another brilliantly bonkers adventure. With their trusty llama pals they've seen off the nasty Dr P'Klawz and everything on their farm up on the sunny side of Scotland should be just about perfect. What could possibly go wrong?

Alfie Day, RAF airman and former World War II POW, never expected to survive the war. Now, five years later and more alone than ever, Alfie finds himself drawn to unearth those strange, passionate days by working as an extra on a POW film. What he will discover on the set about himself, his loves and the world around him will make the war itself look simple. Funny and moving, wise and sad, Day is a truly original look at the intensity and courage to be found in the closeness of death, from one of Britain's most iconoclastic and highly acclaimed young writers.**

"Kennedy is a world class writer."--The New York Times Book ReviewA brilliant American debut from one of Scotland's most acclaimed writers, named by Granta as one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists.Emotionally numb, crippled with insomnia, and caught in a frightening, abusive marriage, Helen Brindle believes that God has recently left her. She spends her days performing banal domestic chores in front of a blaring television. On the BBC one day she watches a self-help guru expound on, among other things, the "rules" of masturbation and the importance of "interior lives." Edward G. Gluck, she discovers has developed a program that guides lost souls toward contentment. Helen seeks him out, hoping to find an answer. Instead she discovers Gluck's own sadomasochistic obsession, and his profound shame and disgust. And what they both encounter, painfully, is the love each fears and both yearn to embrace."A darkly comic tale.... [that] is...

A dozen stories: a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love. Over five previous collections, A. L. Kennedy has shown herself to be a master of the short form, with a perfect way with sentences and a voice so distinct as to be instantly recognizable. Here, as before, lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered disaffection, alienation, or emotional damage somehow emerge — haltingly, awkwardly — into the astonishment of intimacy. And here, too, are the ones who will not shake off the hurt and the loss, who will not come through. The extraordinary title story takes place on a railway platform, with a couple waiting for a train that never comes, and opens out into the husband's shocking admission of years of deceit, and a devastating portrait of a failed marriage, a failed man. Another story shows a woman who is, in every sense, lost and who finds herself — to her bewilderment and alarm — walking the aisles of a sex emporium holding an electric penis. There is great compassion in Kennedy's stories, and deep, dark humour, but also a stronger sense than ever before that emotional paralysis can be loosened — that an impossibly uncomfortable lunch, say, between two apparent strangers, can culminate in a passionate kiss. “You do not know this man. He is practically a stranger. Only he's not.”

"Some time ago, perhaps before you were even born, a young girl was walking in her garden. She may have been called Mary - that's what most of the stories say. Mary was a little bit taller than the other girls her age and had brownish crinkly hair. She was quite thin, because she didn't always have exactly enough to eat. She liked honey and whistling and the colour blue and finding out." This is the story of Mary, a young girl born in a beautiful city full of rose gardens and fluttering kites. When she is still very small, Mary meets Lanmo, a shining golden snake, who becomes her very best friend. The snake visits Mary many times, he sees her city change, become sadder as bombs drop and war creeps in. He sees Mary and her family leave their home, he sees her grow up and he sees her fall in love. But Lanmo knows that the day will come when he can no longer visit Mary, when his destiny will break them apart, and he wonders whether having a friend can possibly be worth the pain of...

Hannah Luckraft sells cardboard boxes for a living. Her family is so frustrated by her behavior they can barely stand to keep in touch with her. Each day is fueled by the promise of annihilation, the promise of a reprieve, the paradise that can only be found in a bottle. When Hannah meets Robert, a kindred spirit, the two become constant companions. Together and alone Hannah and Robert spiral through the beauty and depravity of a love affair with alcohol. Paradise is a spectacular novel of desire and oblivion.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From award-winning author A.L. Kennedy, an original Doctor Who novel featuring the beloved Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker."I shall make you the jewel at the heart of the universe."Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers' Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch--owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word.Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he'll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction.Because something huge,...

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

The love story (as well as the story of love lost, obsessed over, or longed for) gets a complete and thrilling renovation at the hands of the most virtuosic literary stylist to appear in the British Isles since Jeanette Winterson. A. L. Kennedy's men and women huddle in foreign hotel rooms, immobilized by travel-sickness and betrayal. They plan seductions on the line at a cheese shop. They're undone by a passing embrace in the office men's room. Their passion is so urgent and imperious that it invades the stories they tell their children.By turns chaste and ferociously sexy, funny and unbearably sad, every story in Indelible Acts is a testament to the lengths to which desire drives us. And all are marked by Kennedy's wisdom and humanity, and language that captures the briefest tremor of the infatuated heart.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Elizabeth Barber is crossing the Atlantic by liner with her perfectly adequate boyfriend, Derek, who might be planning to propose. In fleeing the UK - temporarily - Elizabeth may also be in flight from her past and the charismatic Arthur, once her partner in what she came to see as a series of crimes. Together they acted as fake mediums, perfecting the arcane skills practised by effective frauds. Elizabeth finally rejected what once seemed an intoxicating game. Arthur continued his search for the right way to do wrong. He now subsidises free closure for the traumatised and dispossessed by preying on the super-rich. The pair still meet occasionally, for weekends of sexual oblivion, but their affection lacerates as much as it consoles.She hadn't, though, expected the other man on the boat. As her voyage progresses, Elizabeth's past is revealed, codes slowly form and break as communication deepens. It's time for her to discover who are the true deceivers and who are the truly deceived.What's more, is the book itself - a fiction which may not always be lying - deceiving the reader? Offering illusions and false trails, magical numbers and redemptive humour, this is a novel about what happens when we are misled and when we are true: an extraordinarily intricate and intimate journey into our minds and hearts undertaken by a writer of great gifts - a maker of wonders.

Mary Margaret Hamilton was educated in Scotland. She was born there too. These may not have been the best possible options, but they were the only ones on offer at the time. Although her father did his best, her knowledge of life is perhaps a little incomplete. Margaret knows the best way to look at the moon, how to wake on time and how to breathe fire. Now she must learn how to live. A. L. Kennedy's absorbing, moving and gently political first novel dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from Margaret's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with Colin, her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and state.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZEA good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience.Meg Williams is 'a bankrupt accountant – two words you don't want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV'. She's 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety.Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can't break. He's a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life. Set in 2014, this is a novel of our times. Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world: ready to sacrifice what's left of...

A New York Times Notable Book A San Francisco Chroncile Book of the Year Twice selected for Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists and winner of the Costa Book Award, A. L. Kennedy returns with a not-to-be-missed addition to the canon of one of this generation’s most unique and inventive writers. A man abandons his indifferent wife and wanders into a small-town movie theater, only to find himself just as invisible as he was at home. A woman trying to relax in a flotation tank is hijacked by memories of her past, while another is inadvertently drawn into a stranger’s marital dysfunction. Whether documenting unexpected one-night stands or quotidian absurdities, the powerful stories in What Becomes capture the spirit of our times with unmatched brio and dazzling wit.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. A bold new collection by relentlessly surprising Scottish author Kennedy (Day) finds her characters pinned somewhere between love and pain. In the title story, about a lone man's evening attending a smalltown cinema, the denouement comes very gradually, as it does frequently throughout, reflecting a kind of reluctant dawning of consciousness: the protagonist, a forensics expert traumatized by having seen so much carnage, has left his wife after the death of their young daughter, an event that has rendered them unable to stand the guilt and anger evoked by the other's presence. Wasps captures a young wife and mother as she is making a Sunday breakfast. This seemingly typical scene is frozen by the menace of the philandering husband's leaving for good and his icy treatment of his angry wife. Saturday Teatime depicts the panicked delayed memory shock experienced by a child listening to her father's abuse of her mother, while Marriage portrays the excruciating emotional and physical aftermath of a violent sexual encounter between a husband and wife. These stories are polished to perfection, full of very dark turns and exemplary of Kennedy's inventiveness. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistThe Motown classic asked “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?” Kennedy gives the bleak answers to that question in 12 devastating stories. Bankruptcy, the loss of a child, and spousal abuse are just some of the traumas with which these characters try, and frequently fail, to cope. In the daring “Sympathy,” a couple indulges in a sexually raw one-night stand, which only succeeds in crystallizing their loneliness. In “Whole Family with Young Children Devastated,” the sight of a missing-dog poster sends the female narrator into a state of rank desperation in which she longs to know the outcome and to see it posted: “Found. Exactly what we hoped for. Thanks to everyone for your concern. No problems anywhere.” Kennedy is unsparing in her depiction of the difficulties of communication, which are only superseded by the claustrophobia of being trapped in one’s own neurotic thoughts. Loneliness and depression are described in agonizing detail as the characters struggle to lift themselves out of despair through vitriolic rants and moments of fleeting intimacy. These are stories that are hard to read and even harder to forget. --Joanne Wilkinson