What Did you do in the War, Mummy? Frank and vivid stories from a wonderfully varied collection of women who talk to Mavis Nicholson about their lives during the second world war. Their frank and vivid stories reveal intimate details of how they lived, worked, loved and coped in those years. Foreword by Dame Vera Lynne.

“A wonderful read” Paul O’Grady

Seahorses are real by Zillah Bethelll is a powerful debut novel of love and damage. Zillah Bethell tells the haunting tale of a relationship warped by depression, at once tender and destructive, where violence is not only perpetrated by men and love is not necessarily enough.

“Savage and tender, Seahorses are real is a rich, unflinching fantasy of love and abuse.” Kate Bingham

Into this Rabelaisian world enters sister Bernadine, a nun with a past, whose best friends, Sister Agnes, has just surprised everyone by giving birth and now lies dying in her convent cell. The resulting mayhem throws into relief the absurdity, glories and tragedies of warfare, and the decisions of those forced to question their own ways of living, or dying, amongst the pandemonium around them.

The Colour of Grass by Nia Williams is a story about families, past and present, and life’s unexpected connections.

Helen’s family is falling apart. There are no answers from her husband. She can’t communicate with her daughter. So she turns to other relatives: the ones who are dead and gone. Straightaway she finds herself floundering in a new world of friends, secrets, enemies and family history enthusiasts. Clandestine meetings, a mugging, and the surprisingly tragic story of her mystery grandmother – all of these weave themselves into Helen’s present and her unknown past.

“This read will draw you into its story within minutes” Woman Magazine

The Ivy Hides the Fig Ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’

“…The Ivy Hides the Fig Ripe Duchess successfully leads the reader through strange places and strong emotion. I very much enjoyed the trip.” Poetry Wales

Judy Brown’s beautiful first collection of poetry is called Loudness. A straightforward manner and a gift for ironic humour belie the artful complexities and the exacting observations evident in her work.

Titles like ‘The ExPats’, ‘The P45′, The Crash’, kick start edgy narratives featuring characters who will suffer their modern sins. Alternatively there are also disquisitions on colour, perception, ex-angels, spontaneous combustions and other mysterious phenomena.

This debut collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection in 2011

A beautifully written first novel, Foreign Bodies by Candy Neubert explores the spaces between people, and the nature of encounters in romantic idylls on the other side of the world.

Fresh from the UK, Emma thinks she has fallen in love with a place, a person, and pursues the man of her dreams with a colonial zeal. But for all her poetic sensibilities, she seems unaware of the destruction she is capable of leaving in her wake.

Inroads is a debut collection from a startling new talent Carolyn Jess-Cooke who has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun.

The opening piece, ‘Accent’  where ‘stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own’ is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, “The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory…”.  This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multi-faceted and often paradoxical. ‘Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube’ is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms.

Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010.