Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Personal Values - cover

Personal Values

Chloë Lawrence-Taylor

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

'You clung on to everything. Her things.'
Veda and Bea haven't spoken since their dad's funeral; not since Bea scratched something obscene into the bonnet of Veda's cherished convertible. But one wet Tuesday morning, Veda shows up out of the blue on Bea's doorstep, determined to break down the walls built by so many things left unsaid.
But before they can do that, there's the small matter of the physical walls Bea has surrounded herself with – walls made of newspapers, suitcases, cutlery, commodes, keyboards and hundreds, likely thousands, of bags-for-life...
Chloë Lawrence-Taylor's play Personal Values is a perceptive, poignant and witty look at sisterhood and grief. It was first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2025, directed by Lucy Morrison.
Available since: 04/17/2025.
Print length: 80 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Glass Menagerie - cover

    The Glass Menagerie

    Tennessee Williams

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Tennessee Williams’s iconic work is an evocative memory-play about an eccentric Southern family revolving around the domineering Amanda Wingfield and her grown children: the cynical Tom and the fragile Laura. This L.A. Theatre Works production reunites the cast of the Roundabout Theatre’s celebrated revival, which earned Drama Desk Awards for Kevin Kilner as Jim, and, in her Broadway debut, Calista Flockhart as Laura.
     
    
     
    Recorded at KCRW, Santa Monica in January 1996.
     
    
     
    Directed by Gordon House
     
    Producing Director: Susan Albert Loewenberg
     
    
     
    An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast recording, starring:
     
    
     
    Calista Flockhart as Laura Wingfield
     
    John Goodman as The Narrator
     
    Julie Harris as Amanda Wingfield
     
    Zeljko Ivanek as Tom Wingfield
     
    Kevin Kilner as Jim
     
    
     
    Recording Engineer: Theo Mondle
     
    Stage Manager and Live Sound Effects: Jode Ryskiewicz
     
    
     
    A co-production with the BBC and KCRW, Santa Monica.
    Show book
  • A Lick and a Promise - cover

    A Lick and a Promise

    Imelda May

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The audiobook version of A Lick and a Promise read by Imelda May.
    A Lick and a Promise is the debut poetry collection of one of Ireland's most famed female musicians, Imelda May.
    Following the release of her first poetry EP Slip Of The Tongue  in 2020, this collection contains 100 poems, including two each from both her father and young daughter. Using the themes of Breast, Below, Blood, Eyes, Tongue and Temple, the poems are written in May's absorbing, visceral style and encapsulate heartbreak, sex, nature and womanhood. Included in the collection is 'You Don't Get to be Racist and Irish', the powerful poem which was written in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and was recently used by Rethink Ireland campaign.
    Show book
  • Intruder - cover

    Intruder

    Jerrold Yam

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    At home with loneliness and passing encounters, can we be familiar with another or even ourselves? Does love outweigh the uncertainty of its memory? In his third and latest collection, award-winning poet Jerrold Yam ushers us into a traveller's world through sensitive and enquiring eyes, navigating a landscape of flitting figures, thoughts and emotions. 
     
     
    Informed by expansive travel across Asia and Europe, Yam's poetry is as varied as his journey, exploring geysers, horse riding and Picasso, while building on his preoccupations with family, sensuality and displacement. His poems make fresh the contradictions of young adulthood, its heady mix of determined restlessness, bold insecurities, desire for intimacy and fear of commitment. In his unflinchingly honest treatment of these themes, Yam exhibits new range and complexity as he describes a shifting terrain, where moving on is as difficult as letting go. 
     
     
    Above all, Intruder is an attempt to make sense of the impermanent structures that hold up one's life. Home, like love, may be a fiction that we must resist claiming for our own. After all, can we--and should we--be more than intruders? 
     
    "Jerrold Yam writes with an old voice and the youthful abandon of a poet out of his safe shell; a strong conviction of his depthless solitude yet weak in the presence of love and desire. His poems are lamentable etudes of one-word titles so vocal of absence and longing they are heartrending to those in the thick throes of love's discovery, loss and reconciliation." 
    -Grace Chia, author of Cordelia and womango
    Show book
  • Winter Dreams - Author of the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald explores a young mans rise to riches and his regrets at the loss of love - cover

    Winter Dreams - Author of the...

    F Scott itzgerald

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
     
    His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
     
    In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
     
    He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
     
    Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
     
    The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
     
    In ‘Winter Dreams’ Fitzgerald carefully unravels the life of a young entrepreneur who, many years before, meets a hauntingly beautiful woman at the summer resort where he caddies.
    Show book
  • Rhyme A Dozen A - 12 Poets 12 Poems 1 Topic ― America - 12 Poets 12 Poems 1 Topic - cover

    Rhyme A Dozen A - 12 Poets 12...

    Emma Lazarus, Ann Plato,...

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    ‘A dime a dozen’ as known in America, is perhaps equal to the English ‘cheap as chips’ but whatever the lingua franca of your choice in this series we hereby submit ‘A Rhyme a Dozen’ as 12 poems on many given subjects that are a well-rounded gathering, maybe even an essential guide, from the knowing pens of classic poets and their beautifully spoken verse to the comfort of your ears. 
     
    1 - A Rhyme A Dozen - 12 Poems, 12 Poets, 1 Topic - America - An Introduction 
    2 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus 
    3 - The Natives of America by Ann Plato 
    4 - America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates 
    5 - Bury Me In a Free Land by Frances E W Harper 
    6 - A Nation's Strength by Ralph Waldo Emerson 
    7 - To America by James Weldon Johnson 
    8 - The Crowd at the Ball Game by William Carlos Williams 
    9 - Harlem by Langston Hughes 
    10 - Wild Peaches by Elinor Wylie 
    11 - The Railway Train by Emily Dickinson 
    12 - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver by Edna St Vincent Millay 
    13 - I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman
    Show book
  • SAUCE and All honey: Two Plays - cover

    SAUCE and All honey: Two Plays

    Ciara Elizabeth Smyth

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Two sweet and saucy comedies from an award-winning Irish playwright.
    In SAUCE, Mella is a compulsive liar, Maura is a kleptomaniac – and neither has any friends. Recently out of controlling relationships, they are thrust into uneasy freedom. Can they overcome their flaws together to avoid dying alone? Or will their compulsions engulf them in the end?
    A play about death and rebirth, Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's SAUCE was first staged at Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin, in 2019 as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, and revived there in 2022.
    In All honey, Ru and Luke are throwing a house-warming party. But their guests are more interested in whispering in the box room than joining the festivities. Explosive characters and unfolding secrets mean the hosts will have to clean up more than red-wine stains and glitter.
    Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's debut play, All honey is about sex, secrets and suspicion. It premiered at the New Theatre in 2017 as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, winning the 2017 Fishamble New Writing Award. It was revived at Bewley's in 2018 and Project Arts Centre in 2020.
    Show book