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  Ben Pitcher's Elly - Mann delves...

  Mary E. Mann

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  Mary Rackham was born in Norwich on 14th August 1848 to a merchant family.  Little is known of her early life and her biography only re-appears in September 1871 with marriage to Fairman Joseph Mann, a farmer with 800 acres.   
   
  Mary moved to Shropham, Norfolk and became involved with the workhouse, visiting the sick and other unfortunates of the parish, her observations and experiences a valuable source for her later stories.  
   
  She took up writing, partly to offset the dreary village life of her surroundings, in the 1880s and published her first novel, ‘The Parish of Hilby’ (1883) at her own expense. It was well received by the critics.  
   
  Thus began a career that spanning three decades provided thirty-three novels, hundreds of short stories, and fourteen plays.  Her work was largely focused on rural life in Norfolk and centered on the fictional town of Dulditch, with grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation.  
   
  Her marriage produced one boy and three girls. With her husband's death in 1913, she moved to Sheringham.  
   
  She is regarded as a major contributor to East Anglian literature with particular praise given to her short stories. 
   
  Mary E Mann died on 19th May 1929.  She was 80.  Her grave-marker is a carved open book with the epitaph ‘We bring our years to an end, as if it were a tale that is told’. 
   
  Life in ‘Ben Pitcher's Elly’ is degrading, awful and unvarnished.  The chances of this young girl having a happy life are remote but her story must be heard.

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  The King's Man

  Rachel Lawson, Don Lawson

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  On a cool crisp night in the Epping Forest, a stagecoach was moving amongst the shadows of a full silver moon. "the moonlight gives the forest a magical glow", said Mary Gregory a passenger in the coach. The other passenger was her brother, Magistrate Sir Thomas Gregory, but he thought it felt less magical but more eerie and dangerous. He was seeing highwaymen and footpads in every shadow. The driver was also very nervous as highwaymen were known to work within these woods. Suddenly a handsome well dressed man carrying a brace of gleaming duelling pistols appeared, He was riding a white horse and had come out of the shadows into the moonlight. The nervous driver sped up the coach. The horseman was following the coach but at a faster pace, shouting "Stop now or I'll shoot!" "Stand and deliver, your money or your life!" shouted the highwayman Firing his pistol he winged the driver who knowing the next shot might kill him slowed the coach to a stop. 
  Edited by Don Lawson author's Dad

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  The Goth House Experiment - And...

  SJ Sindu

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  An uncanny and electric story collection from SJ Sindu, Lambda Literary finalist and Publishing Triangle Edmund White Debut Fiction Award–winning author of Blue-Skinned Gods 
   
  In “Dark Academia and the Lesbian Masterdoc,” a millennial English professor finds viral fame on TikTok, but her newfound notoriety could wreck her already unstable life. In “Patriots’ Day,” a man having an affair finds himself caught up in larger currents of anti-Asian violence.  
  Throughout the collection, an array of loners and artists—a young poet haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, a home brewer and wife during lockdown, a boy with wings—struggle for connection and fulfillment in a world battered by the pandemic and reactionary politics. A daring  
  writer with limitless range, SJ Sindu can depict shocking cruelty as readily as small moments of queer joy. The Goth House Experiment isa startling and very funny collection by one of America’s most exciting young voices.

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  Dreaming Awake

  Ella Stories

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  A brilliant yet reclusive neuroscientist discovers a way to manifest his dreams as augmented reality. With this technology, he inadvertently manifests an imaginary girlfriend, who is witty, charming, and challenges him in ways he never expected. As the line between dreams and reality blur, he must grapple with the bitter-sweet reality of falling in love with someone who may exist only in his mind.

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  Hot Milk - Suffragette author...

  V F Friedlaender

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  The bookshelves of European literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Grazia Deledda.

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  A Garland of Earth - From their...

  Dorothy Edwards

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  Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards was born on 7th June 1831 in Islington, London.  She was educated at home by her mother and showed early promise as a writer, publishing her first poem at the age of 7 and her first story at 12.  Thereafter several popular periodicals published her poetry, stories and articles. 
  In addition she also illustrated some of her own writings and painted scenes from books she had read.  This talent was not supported by her parents, who saw an artist’s life as scandalous.  Undeterred Amelia took up composing and performing music until a bout of typhus caused throat damage.  Other interests soon followed until, early in the 1850s, Amelia focused exclusively on writing.  Her early novels were well received, and with ‘Barbara's History’ in 1864, a work revolving around bigamy, her reputation was established.  
  Amelia’s pen was also the purveyor of ghost stories for magazines and are still anthologized as classic tales to this day. 
  In January 1851, Amelia became engaged, apparently to please her parents, but she quickly broke it off.  In reality her emotional attachments were almost exclusively with women.  From the early 1860s she lived with Ellen Drew Braysher, a widow 27 years her senior, until both women died in early 1892.  During this relationship other women also entered and left her life.  Her frequent travelling companion, Lucy Renshaw, accompanied her to Egypt in the winter of 1873 and there she found a life-changing interest in Egyptology.  Aware of increasing threats from tourism and modern development she became an advocate for their research and preservation.  
  To advance the work Amelia largely abandoned much of her writing in favour of Egyptology and even took on strenuous lecture tours to raise funds. 
  After catching influenza, Amelia Edwards, ‘the Godmother of Egyptology’ died on 15th April 1892 at Weston-super-Mare.  She was 60.

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