"Heather Taylor Johnson has a poet's understanding of the world: her exploration of the way in which our lives intertwine – for better or for worse – is nuanced and poignant." Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Burial Rights and The Good People Jean Harley – wife, mother, lover, dancer – is a shining light in the lives of those who know and love her. But when tragedy strikes, what becomes of the people she leaves behind? Her devoted husband, Stan, is now a single father to their young son, Orion. Her best friends, Neddy and Viv, find their relationship unravelling at the seams. And Charley, the ex-con who caused it all, struggles to reconcile his past crimes with his present mistakes. Life without Jean will take some getting used to, yet her indelible imprint remains. Jean Harley Was Here is a touching and original exploration of love, relationships, and the ways in which we need each other.

It is customary to bring gifts to a wedding. But as daughter Luna prepares to marry her dream husband, the Smith family instead have in tow their own idiosyncratic brands of emotional baggage. Her father, Graham, struggles to write his own own obituary; her mother, Velma, attempts to negotiate her mid-life crisis with a lover seventeen years her junior; her brother, Ginsberg, tries to come to term with being a homosexual who has inadvertently fallen in love with his wife; and her obese uncle, Darren, starts an obsession with the absurd hero Ignatius J Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Can these hopelessly misguided attempts to unravel the complexities of family, legacy, sexuality and, ultimately, love and death, ever come to a resolution? A stunning debut novel by Heather Taylor Johnson, PURSUING LOVE AND DEATH is a darkly comic family saga, written with wit, lyricism and poignancy. It asks just how well we can really know our own family members, and what might be 'good enough' for them, as well as for ourselves. With clashing personalities uniting for the first time in years, the result is explosive. 'A novel where comedy and small tragedies are dealt a generous hand ... this is a work brimming with poetic carnality' Brian Castro 'An impressively confident debut .. Funny, poignant and messy' Caroline Baum

In her third collection of poetry, Heather Taylor Johnson celebrates the liminal spaces between two cultures – the neither here nor there, the neither in nor out. It is indeed a world where 'Home is a relative term'.Thirsting for Lemonade is an affirmation of the migrant's acceptance of never-quite-belonging, and still it is her attempt to forge new paths in foreign, and remembered, territory, where past is always present.These poems recall the many things which get us home – photographs, a common cereal, a record album, a foosball table. This latest collection is a celebration of 'the things that are especially good / because they cannot last.'