Alex Gray's stunning new Lorimer novel, set against the backdrop of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, brings the vibrant city to life in a race to stop the greatest threat the city has ever known In Alex Gray's page-turning new Glasgow-set crime novel, Detective Lorimer must protect his city from a terrifying threat in the countdown to the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The Commonwealth Games is coming to Glasgow and security is extra tight, particularly after a mysterious bomb explodes in nearby countryside. As the opening ceremony for the Games draws ever closer, the police desperately seek the culprits. But Detective Superintendent Lorimer has other concerns on his mind. One is a beautiful red-haired woman from his past whose husband dies suddenly on his watch. Then there is the body of a young woman found dumped near to the bomb site who is proving impossible to identify. Elsewhere in the city, people prepare for the events in their own way, whether for financial gain or to welcome home visitors from overseas. And, hiding behind false identities, are those who pose a terrible threat, not just to the Games, but to the very fabric of society.

Long on charmconsiderable entertainment value.--Seattle Times

Twenty-seven years after she adopted her baby in Ireland, Lena Molloy receives a call from the nun who set up the adoption. Sister Monica claims that she wants merely to tie up loose ends in her old age, but Lena becomes frightened that something more threatening lies behind the call, and she sets off on a journey to Ireland, with her best friend, to find her daughter's birth parents.

From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness. Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rain and battering wind. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wants it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sounds a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, and rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Distinctive and artistic illustrations filled with energetic details make this a wonderful story about a bird who ultimately realizes he is not as alone or atonal as he had thought. Full color.

The Birds that do not Sing: A world on fire, a community in turmoil, a family torn by its principles Beautifully observed and thought provoking, this unforgettable story of growing up in wartime Britain will appeal to fans of Crooked Heart and Angela's Ashes, with its captivating window into the mind of a young boy searching for meaning and purpose as the bombs are falling. November 1940 - The Coventry Blitz That day changes everything for ten-year-old Jim. Coventry smoulders on the horizon, neighbours are missing, and faces are grim all around. It is the day when family and neighbourhood collides, a time of confusion and recrimination, of choices that will echo for a lifetime. Jimmy Brown plays in the park on Sundays whatever anyone says. His family has a reputation, his father a militant socialist who makes surgical boots in his shed, his sister struggling with polio as she distributes pacifist leaflets, and his brother refusing to fight for his country. When the Luftwaffe comes and public opinion shifts behind the war effort, social expectation and conflicting loyalties send Jimmy down a fateful path. Present day. 'The past is never still, never silent.' 'Little birds that do not sing... must be made to sing.' That is what old Jim's teacher would say in a classroom where beatings were a daily occurrence, and as threatening than the Luftwaffe passing overhead. Seventy-five years later the words still have their hold on him, and the events of that November day haunt his dreams and waking hours despite the passing of decades. When he hears about a concrete elephant in a nearby garden he wonders if it is the one his father made before the war, the elephant who listened to his troubles when he was young, who heard him when nothing made sense. Will it help him to face what happened that day in 1940 at last, or open up new and more painful wounds?

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin From the Paperback edition.