The Domain of Small Mercies


Book Description

Louis Phillips is a prolific and versatile author who has published over 50 books, including novels, short story collections, plays, nonfiction, and poetry. He has been a New York City resident for forty years and teaches literature at the School of Visual Arts.




Small Mercies


Book Description

Mercy needs to stand up for herself. She also needs a miracle.Eleven-year-old Mercy lives with her eccentric foster aunts - two elderly sisters so poor they can afford only one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eyeing their house, which suddenly starts falling apart - just as Aunt Flora does, too. She's forgetting words, names and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school but when a classmate frames her for stealing the school's raffle money, Mercy's teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life. With the help of a neighbour, Mr Singh, who teaches Mercy about Gandhi and his principles of passive resistance, Mercy finds a tool that can help solve her problems. But first, like Gandhi, she needs to stand up for herself. She also needs a miracle. And to summon it she has to find her voice and tell the truth - and that truth is neither pure nor simple. A book that already feels like a classic, Small Mercies holds a strong message for children today. Full of heart, it will shine among the best children's literature for years to come.




Small Mercies


Book Description

A killer is sending a message. But who is it for? DI Annie Delamere and her colleague DS Zoe Everett are off duty and enjoying a walk on the Peak District’s vast moorlands when they stumble across a mutilated corpse. The victim is unclothed and his tattoos indicate an affinity with the occult. While Annie is put in charge of the case her long-term partner, MP Sheena Pearson, is confronted by a group of far right extremists. Rather than back down Sheena chooses to stand her ground – and almost pays for it with her life. As more bodies are found, Annie is under pressure to prove her worth. But with one eye on her personal affairs can she catch a murderer and still keep her loved ones safe? And are the killings the work of a deranged mind – or a cover for something even more chilling? Don’t miss this first novel in a compelling new detective series that fans of Stephen Booth and Ann Cleeves will love. Praise for Small Mercies ‘Accomplished storytelling and perfectly meshed plot strands combine in this intriguing new series from Alex Walters’ Margaret Kirk, author of Shadow Man ‘Small Mercies gets Alex Walters’ new series off to a cracking start with a blend of police procedural and conspiracy thriller set in the atmospheric landscape of Derbyshire.’ Martin Edwards, CWA Diamond Dagger winner 2020 'Evocative, well plotted, with interesting characters and three concurrent mysteries. A definite 5 star read.’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘The storyline weaves all the seemingly unrelated threads together into a nail biting finale. I held my breath more than once, and couldn’t put the book down in case something terrible happened!’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Three plots swirl around each other, intersect and dance away again until the very end of this thriller where everything moves quickly to a totally unanticipated, breath-taking conclusion. I’m looking forward to the next in the series!’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐




A Mercy


Book Description

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.




A Boy Named Queen


Book Description

Who will be brave enough to make friends with the boy named Queen? Sara Cassidy’s acclaimed novel, A Boy Named Queen, is now available in paperback! Evelyn is both aghast and fascinated when a new boy comes to grade five and tells everyone his name is Queen. Queen wears shiny gym shorts and wants to organize a chess/environment club. His father plays weird loud music and has tattoos. How will the class react? How will Evelyn? Evelyn is an only child with a strict routine and an even stricter mother. And yet in her quiet way she notices things. She notices the way bullies don’t seem to faze Queen. The way he seems to live by his own rules. When it turns out that they take the same route home from school, Evelyn and Queen become friends, even if she finds Queen irritating at times. Why doesn’t he just shut up and stop attracting so much attention to himself. Yet Queen is the most interesting person she has ever met. So when she receives a last-minute invitation to his birthday party, she knows she must somehow persuade her mother to let her go, even if Queen’s world upends everything her mother considers appropriate. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).




A Little Life


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.




The King at the Edge of the World


Book Description

Queen Elizabeth’s spymasters recruit an unlikely agent—the only Muslim in England—for an impossible mission in a mesmerizing novel from “one of the best writers in America” (The Washington Post) “Evokes flashes of Hilary Mantel, John le Carré and Graham Greene, but the wry, tricky plot that drives it is pure Arthur Phillips.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE WASHINGTON POST The year is 1601. Queen Elizabeth I is dying, childless. Her nervous kingdom has no heir. It is a capital crime even to think that Elizabeth will ever die. Potential successors secretly maneuver to be in position when the inevitable occurs. The leading candidate is King James VI of Scotland, but there is a problem. The queen’s spymasters—hardened veterans of a long war on terror and religious extremism—fear that James is not what he appears. He has every reason to claim to be a Protestant, but if he secretly shares his family’s Catholicism, then forty years of religious war will have been for nothing, and a bloodbath will ensue. With time running out, London confronts a seemingly impossible question: What does James truly believe? It falls to Geoffrey Belloc, a secret warrior from the hottest days of England’s religious battles, to devise a test to discover the true nature of King James’s soul. Belloc enlists Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician left behind by the last diplomatic visit from the Ottoman Empire, as his undercover agent. The perfect man for the job, Ezzedine is the ultimate outsider, stranded on this cold, wet, and primitive island. He will do almost anything to return home to his wife and son. Arthur Phillips returns with a unique and thrilling novel that will leave readers questioning the nature of truth at every turn.




Domain of the Netherworld


Book Description

In a vast Bulgarian cave system, the discovery of new prehistoric cave paintings leads museum conservator Bryden,his nephew Chaz and their guide, Iskra, to a most shocking and bloodthirsty quest. Their survival skills are tested to the limit when they find themselves in a primitive yet magical world.




The Collaborators


Book Description

A new play by Louis Phillips.




Wherever the Sound Takes You


Book Description

David Rowell is a professional journalist and an impassioned amateur musician. He’s spent decades behind a drum kit, pondering the musical relationship between equipment and emotion. In Wherever the Sound Takes You, he explores the essence of music’s meaning with a vast spectrum of players, trying to understand their connection to their chosen instrument, what they’ve put themselves through for their music, and what they feel when they play. This wide-ranging and openhearted book blossoms outward from there. Rowell visits clubs, concert halls, street corners, and open mics, traveling from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to a death metal festival in Maryland, with stops along the way in the Swiss Alps and Appalachia. His keen reportorial eye treats us to in-depth portraits of musicians from platinum-selling legend Peter Frampton to a devout Christian who spends his days alone in a storage unit bashing away on one of the largest drum sets in the world. Rowell illuminates the feelings that both spur music’s creation and emerge from its performance, as well as the physical instruments that enables their expression. With an uncommon sensitivity and grace, he charts the pleasure and pain of musicians consumed with what they do—as all of us listen in.