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  Inspiration An - From their pens...

  George Gissing

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  George Robert Gissing was born on November 22nd, 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire.  
  He was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield. Gissing loved school. He was enthusiastic with a thirst for learning and always diligent.  By the age of ten he was reading Dickens, a lifelong hero. 
  In 1872 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College. Whilst there Gissing worked hard but remained solitary. Unfortunately, he had run short of funds and stole from his fellow students. He was arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in 1876. 
  On release he decided to start over.  In September 1876 he travelled to the United States. Here he wrote short stories for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. On his return home he was ready for novels. 
  Gissing self-published his first novel but it failed to sell.  His second was acquired but never published. His writing career was static.  Something had to change.  And it did. 
  By 1884 The Unclassed was published.  Now everything he wrote was published. Both Isabel Claren-don and Demos appeared in 1886. He mined the lives of the working class as diligently as any capitalist. 
  In 1889 Gissing used the proceeds from the sale of The Nether World to go to Italy. This trip formed the basis for his 1890 work The Emancipated. 
  Gissing's works began to command higher payments. New Grub Street (1891) brought a fee of £250.  
  Short stories followed and in 1895, three novellas were published; Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. Gissing was careful to keep up with the changing attitudes of his audience.  
  Unfortunately, he was also diagnosed as suffering from emphysema. The last years of his life were spent as a semi-invalid in France but he continued to write. 1899; The Crown of Life. Our Friend the Charlatan appeared in 1901, followed two years later by The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 
  George Robert Gissing died aged 46 on December 28th, 1903 after catching a chill on a winter walk.

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  Short Stories Set on Holiday - A...

  John Buchan

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  The expected joy that a few days in a different setting can, and most probably will, make is one of life’s most pleasant pleasures.  Usually.  But in this volume our classic authors including John Buchan, Edith Wharton, E M Delafield, M R James and a host of others really do seem to want to make some of those few days of indolent pleasure into something rather unpleasant. 
   
  1 - Short Stories Set on Holiday  - An Introduction 
  2 - Roman Fever by Edith Wharton 
  3 - The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner 
  4 - An Alpine Divorce by Robert Barr 
  5 - No Man's Land by John Buchan 
  6 - Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad by M R James 
  7 - The Blank Cheque by Lewis Carroll 
  8 - A Little Holiday by Oswald Sickert 
  9 - Strychnine for Village Dogs by Arthur Gask 
  10 - The Green Bowl by Sarah Orne Jewett 
  11 - The Vampire by Jan Neruda 
  12 - Holiday Group by E M Delafield 
  13 - Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House by Clara Venn 
  14 - The Vampire Maid by Hume Nisbet

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  Ten Notorious Crimes Solved by...

  Vivian Brightwell

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  Ten Notorious Crimes Solved by Accident 
  True stories of killers exposed through luck, timing, and one small mistake 
  By Vivian Brightwell & Beckett John 
  Some crimes are solved by brilliance. 
  Others—by pure chance. 
  In this gripping collection of real-life cases, fate becomes the greatest detective of all. Ten Notorious Crimes Solved by Accident explores how simple moments — a misplaced photograph, a wrong turn, a child’s curiosity, or a routine traffic stop — unraveled the darkest secrets hidden in plain sight. 
  From backyard discoveries to digital slip-ups, each chapter reveals how justice can emerge not from design, but from coincidence. With haunting realism and cinematic detail, Vivian Brightwell and Beckett John uncover the fragile line between order and chaos, truth and secrecy — and remind us that sometimes, evil is caught not by method, but by mistake. 
  Suspenseful, reflective, and unforgettable, this book invites readers into the eerie world where accidents expose murderers, and fate delivers justice in the most unexpected ways.

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  Humble Heroes - Uplifting and...

  Ben Shephard

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  'This is an audiobook about real people, real stories, real heroes. You might not know their faces, and you might not know their names - but once you've met them, you'll never forget them.'Ben Shephard is passionate about people - their lives, their stories and their challenges. Presenting one of the UK's most popular TV breakfast shows, Ben frequently meets people with stories that reaffirm our collective faith in humanity.This is an audiobook about those special stories. It is about the real people Ben has met and their real acts of everyday heroism which inspire and lift us all up, even on the gloomiest days. From the old friend running marathons to raise money for children with heart conditions (and roping Ben in with him), to the man fighting for our right to safe housing, to the founder of an equestrian school that helps trauma survivors; these are stories of ordinary people who have taken it upon themselves to make the world a better place.In a world that can feel increasingly complicated and divisive, Humble Heroes is a rousing tonic to remind us of what we can achieve through determination and positivity - and of the essential goodness of human nature.

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  Cactus Country - A Boyhood Memoir

  Zoë Bossiere

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  A STRIKING MEMOIR OF GENDERFLUIDITY, CLASS, AND THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST 
   
  Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë enters a world of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled palo verde trees. In Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut. Although Zoë doesn’t have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy—and here, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes. 
   
  As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working-class men he’s grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self. But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond. 
   
  Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to fight to be themself. 
   
  “Cactus Country shimmers with the complexity of becoming. Zoë Bossiere writes their way into a truer story of selfhood, resisting the simpler narratives the world demanded. The result is lush, beautiful, and deeply liberating.”—Alex Marzano Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

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  Jordan's End - A poignant story...

  Ellen Glasgow

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  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born on 22nd April 1873 in Richmond, Virginia. 
  She published her first novel ‘The Descendant’ anonymously in 1897 at age 24.  
  As a ‘Southern’ writer much of her work integrates themes of class and gender struggles, many of them based on her own experiences and relationships.  She wrote realistically of the changing contemporary South; very different from the then idealistic escapist fare after Reconstruction. 
  As the women's suffrage movement developed at the turn of the century Glasgow was very active, but later felt it had come at the wrong time for her, accordingly her enthusiasm waned although her later books did have heroines who displayed their ambitions in the social and political struggle. 
  In 1923 came her short story collection ‘The Shadowy Third & Other Stories’ which included ‘The Difference’, a classic tale of a marriage hitting a problem and the moral and realistic reaction to that. 
  Further works followed and, in 1941, she published ‘In This Our Life’.  This bold and progressive book on African-Americans, followed the central characters and portrayed the blatant injustices they faced in society.  It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. 
  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow died in her sleep at home on 21st November 1945. She was 72.

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