August 2016

1.

One Day meets The Time Traveler's Wife in this spellbinding, magical debut novel about love, loss, hope and heartbreak that shows us that for each of us, the world can be as lonely or as beautiful as the comets that illuminate the skies above us.

Róisín and François first meet in the snowy white expanse of Antarctica. And everything changes.

While Róisín grew up in a tiny village in Ireland, ablaze with a passion for science and the skies and for all there is to discover about the world, François was raised by his beautiful young mother, who dreamt of new worlds but was unable to turn her back on her past.

As we loop back through their lives, glimpsing each of them only when a comet is visible in the skies above, we see how their paths cross as they come closer and closer to this moment.

Theirs are stories filled with love and hope and heartbreak, that show how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and the world can be as lonely or as beautiful as the comets themselves.

The Comet Seekers

2.

Arizona, 1884, and Vera Palmer, a 23 year old widow from genteel Connecticut arrives in the frontier town of Goose Flat to take up a prospecting claim inherited from her dead husband, and a part-time job as a bookeeper in a local boarding house. The boarding house is in fact a brothel but, needing the money, Vera takes the job anyway.

She's soon drawn into the violent, abused lives of the working girls and Sadie, their Madame. Vera is attracted to bar regular Will Keane, a local lawyer, who helps her investigate the mining claim. Can love offer her an escape or will the unpredictable, dangerous world surrounding the Star Mansion brothel destroy the relationship and Vera's hopes of a new life? Here Allyson Stack offers a gripping, beautifully wrought love story amidst a wholly authentic evocation of the Wild West at its most threatening.

Under the Heartless Blue

3.

A poetic take on the Scottish childhood of writer Sean Michael Wilson, in comic book form, drawn by lovely Swedish artist Hanna Stromberg. The book mixes together 14 intimate and interesting childhood stories and adventures, with a touch of magical realism.

Once Upon a Time in Morningside

4.

Simpson, a native of Glasgow, was one of the leading pictorial illustrators of the 19th century, and spent most of his career travelling the world on behalf of his employer, the Illustrated London News. In 1878, the paper dispatched him to Afghanistan to cover the anticipated war. He spent seven months covering the campaign although much of his time was spent exploring the numerous ancient Buddhist remains that dotted the landscape in and around Jalalabad.

The current volume uses Simpson's diary and his exquisite original sketches and drawings to paint a picture of Afghanistan at the time and offers a glimpse into colonial archaeology practiced in a war zone.

William Simpson’s Afghanistan. Travels of a Special Artist and Antiquarian During the Second Afghan War 1878-1879

5.