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Piccadilly Press
Piccadilly Press publishes books primarily for readers aged 5 – 12 years old. Their books are fun, family-orientated stories that possess the ability to capture readers’ imagination and inspire them to develop a life-long love of reading.
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FictionSeptember 2017A Vision of Battlements
by Anthony Burgess
by Andrew Biswell, Paul Wake
A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured. The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess's forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.
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March 2021The Field
by Robert Seethaler
From their graves in the field, the oldest part of Paulstadt’s cemetery, the town’s late inhabitants tell stories from their lives. Some recall just a moment, perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one that they now realize shaped their life forever. Some remember all the people they’ve been with, or the only person they ever loved. These voices together – young, old, rich poor – build a picture of a community, seen from below ground instead of from above. The streets of the small, sleepy provincial town of Paulstadt, are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned and died there. From the author of the Man Booker International-shortlisted A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler’s The Field is about what happens at the end. It is a book of human lives – each one different, yet connected to countless others – that ultimately shows how life, for all its fleetingness, still has meaning.
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February 2021Nightshift
by Kiare Ladner
Nightshift by Kiare Ladner is a story of obsession set in London’s liminal world of nightshift workers. When twenty-three-year-old Meggie meets distant and enigmatic Sabine, she recognizes in her the person she would like to be. Giving up her daytime existence and the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the same nightshifts as Sabine, Meggie will plunge herself into a nihilistic existence that will see her gradually immerse herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker. Dark, sexy, frightening, prescient, Nightshift explores ambivalent female friendship, sexual attraction and lives that defy easy categorization. London’s stark urban reality is rendered other-wordly and strange as Meggie’s sleep deprivation, drinking and obsession for Sabine gain a momentum all of their own.
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January 2021Alexa, what is there to know about love?
by Brian Bilston
Alexa, what is there to know about Love? is a wonderful collection of poems about love in all its forms, covering everything from romantic love to familial love, to long-distance love, and even love on the internet. The collection also features poems about the true passions for many booklovers, reading and literature, and the odd one about the subject causing many of us heartbreak: politics. With titles like 'Hold My Hand While We Jump Off This Cliff' and 'Remembrance of Things Pasta', there's something for even the most jaded romantic within these pages. The perfect, witty gift for Valentines and beyond.
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March 2020Wayfinding
The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way
by Michael Bond
The physical world is infinitely complex, yet most of us are able to find our way around it. We can walk through unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction, take shortcuts along paths we have never used and remember for many years places we have visited only once. These are remarkable achievements. In Wayfinding, Michael Bond explores how we do it: how our brains make the ‘cognitive maps’ that keep us orientated, even in places that we don’t know. He considers how we relate to places, and asks how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and behaviour. The way we think about physical space has been crucial to our evolution: the ability to navigate over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage over the rest of the human family. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today few of us make use of the wayfaring skills that we inherited from our peripatetic ancestors. Most of us have little idea what we may be losing. Bond seeks an answer to the question of why some of us are so much better at finding our way than others. He also tackles the controversial subject of sex differences in navigation, and finally tries to understand why being lost can be such a devastating psychological experience. For readers of writers as different as Robert Macfarlane and Oliver Sacks, Wayfinding is a book that can change our sense of ourselves.
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July 2020Sex Robots & Vegan Meat
Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex & Death
by Jenny Kleeman
A timely investigation into the forces that are driving innovation in the four core areas of human experience: birth, food, sex and death We are on the brink of seismic change in every one of these four areas, from artificial wombs, to lab-grown meat; from sex robots programmable to have polite conversations with your wife, to a new frontier in assisted dying. Who are the people dictating and shaping the change taking place, and what is motivating them to do it? Can we safely assume that these entrepreneurs are in it for the thrill of human advancement, or might there be more sinister motivations at hand? Sex Robots & Vegan Meat will take the reader on a fascinating exploration of the changes afoot, and their implications for who we are as a society, and as humans.
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September 2020Dear Reader
The Comfort and Joy of Books
by Cathy Rentzenbrink
Cathy Rentzenbrink fell in love with reading at an early age and spent much of her childhood and adolescence with her nose in a book. When her life was upended by tragedy, reading was the raft she clung to. Books helped Cathy find consolation, and eventually led her on a new path – first as a bookseller, and then as an author. In this moving, funny, comforting and inspiring memoir, Cathy shares the story of her lifelong love-affair with reading and introduces the books that shaped her.
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FictionCatch the Rabbit
by Lana Bastašić
Uhvati zeca (Catch the Rabbit), by Lana Bastašić – Literary fiction European Union Prize for Literature 2020 Original language/Publisher: Kontrast Publishers (Serbia) Foreign rights sold: Ed. Nutrimenti (Italian), Picador (UK & Commonwealth) Restless Books (USA & Canada), Actes Sud (France), Fischer (Germany), Meulenhoff (The Netherlands), Navona (Spanish), Edicions del Periscopi (Catalan), Metropolis Media (Hungary), Perseus (Bulgaria), Eksmo (Russia), Ilksatir (Turkey), Sanje (Slovenia). Full English translation available Catch the Rabbit is a story about two Bosnian young women and their complicated friendship. Twelve years after they last saw each other, Sara (who has been living in Dublin all these years) receives a phone call from Lejla (her closest friend from childhood) in which Lejla asks Sara to fly to Mostar and help her go on a road trip from Mostar to Vienna in order to find Armin, Lejla's long lost brother. Sara is reluctant to go as she has managed to build a new life in Ireland, away from the ghosts and horrors of the past. But something within her knows she will end up taking a plane… The journey would prove to be much more than an innocuous reconnecting of old school friends: it is a road to a deeply balkanized "heart of darkness," where Lejla's life was reshaped by strict identity politics and her sense of self was lost together with a single letter from her name. Growing up in a Serbian family, Sara has had all the privileges denied to her best friend and has managed to repress her guilt together with her mother tongue. Now, years later, she has to go down the "rabbit hole" of her language and bear the Colridgean burden of telling the story over and over again. But being the one who tells the story is yet another privilege and Lejla will fight for it until the very last sentence, which will only take them back to the beginning. Teresa Pütz, acquiring editor at Fischer Verlag (Germany) says about the novel: "I really enjoyed reading this thoughtful and quietly devastating novel about the friendship between two women. The book is rich with memorable scenes and the plot-line of their road trip from Mostar to Vienna propels the narrative along in a tangible way. I think Lana is a talent with a promising writing career on the horizon." Paloma Sánchez (senior publisher) and Sterre Houweling (editor) from Meulenhoff (Netherlands) say about the novel: “An excellent novel that is as captivating as it is impressive in style and has occupied our minds and conversations at the publishing house now for days. We literally can’t stop talking about how much we loved Uhvati Zeca/Catch the Rabbit. We especially love the very thoughtful portrayal of a confused relationship amongst friends and the protagonist’s own past as well as a very plot driven story. You want to read on and on. It is this combination that captures for us the essence of storytelling.” Ansa Khan, acquiring editor at Picador (UK), says about the novel: “I loved this brilliant, funny, moving novel. There is something immediately recognizable and affecting about the relationship between these two women; Lana Bastašić is so good on formative female friendship, and excellent on how we put our friends on pedestals and then are surprised when they fall off. The ending is a heart-breaking picture of how indelibly we’re marked by the loss of someone we love. I also found it a striking insight into how the traumas of war – in this case in the former Yugoslavia – echo down the years.”
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Illumination
by Nthikeng Mohlele
Mohlele describes the book as “…an exploration of the nature and pitfalls of an artistic life. The backbone of the narrative is essentially a love story, but also how the charges and passions inherent in art, particularly music, interface and become transformed when fused with passions and anxieties of a more personal and discreet kind” Bantubonke is an accomplished and revered musician, composer and band leader in decline – an absent present and inadequate spouse. He lives for art at the expense of all else, an imbalance that derails his life and propels him to the brink of madness and despair. A story of direct and implied betrayals, Illumination is an unrelenting study of art, possession and loss, of the beauty and uncertainty of love, of friendship and the dangers and intrusions of fame.
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FictionJanuary 2015Graveyard Grapevine
by Kim Ekemar
Not everything is what it seems – a tombstone doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a person’s life. The remarkable short stories included in this book narrate eleven extraordinary cases with the common theme that life challenges death. So, prepare yourself for the meeting with a Tibetan monk as he contemplates his way out of a Chinese prison, a Mexican mythomaniac’s idea of true beauty, and the secret caller of a Russian Duchess. You will encounter a ruthless German concentration camp commander, a shipwreck survivor in the Indian Ocean, and a spy novel writer with emerald eyes. You will be shown how too much luck can become a strikingly sad experience, how the prospect of taxes can be more aggravating than the knowledge of looming death, and that orchestrating your own demise for a new life is a daunting task indeed. There’s an account of the repeated delays for a man condemned to death because he refuses the humiliation of getting down on his knees yet another time. Most terrifying of these captivating tales is, perhaps, the unique opportunity to listen in on the cut-up confession of a plastic surgeon after his execution.
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Teaching, Language & ReferenceJanuary 2014The Odyssey: An Instructional Guide for Literature
An Instructional Guide for Literature
by Jennifer Kroll
Aid students as they explore a mythical world, and analyze and comprehend a timeless story. The Odyssey: An Instructional Guide for Literature provides rigorous and appealing cross-curricular lessons and activities to teach students to analyze story elements in multiple ways, practice close reading and text-based vocabulary, determine meaning through text-dependent questions, and more. Written to support the Common Core, this instructional guide is the perfect tool to add rigor to your students' explorations of rich, complex literature.
