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The Rye Man
Returning to rural Northern Ireland for a fresh start, John Cameron takes on the role of headmaster at his old primary school. But as dark memories are disturbed and his marriage falters, Cameron is left feeling powerless in this fractured community. Driven by unresolved grief and tormented by his waking dreams, he is forced to confront his past as he struggles to prevent history from repeating itself.
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The Poets' Wives
Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake - a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin's terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband's death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish.Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another's creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands' work, work that has been woven with love's intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways. Deeply insightful and beautifully wrought, The Poets' Wives is David Park at his best - a novelist whose work has the power to bring the hidden from the shadows, into a delicate and shimmering light.
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The Stone Kingdom
Haunted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and trapped in a land between the mountains and the sea, Naomi dreams of another life far from the rainy shores of Donegal. When she moves from the rain swept shores of Ireland to work in a refugee camp in the burning heat of Africa, Naomi exchanges the city streets of Belfast for the arid desert. Though she leaves behind the land where she was born, escaping her past is not so easy.