134,841
edits
Changes
no edit summary
'''Read [[:Category:Features|the latest features]].'''
{{Frontpage
|isbn= 1806344777
|title=Arthur and the Land of Nimbostratus: Arthur's Able Adventures
|author=Rob Keeley
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary= Arthur dreams of adventures. He looks out of his window each day and thinks of all the escapades he could have, the places he could go and the things he could see. His favourite day is Saturday because that's the day his friend Maxine - she of the booming laugh and silver bangles - comes to visit. Maxine is a great believer in the power of imagination.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1035043092
|title=The Killing Stones (Jimmy Perez)
|author=Ann Cleeves
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=I can't have been the only person who was sad when Inspector Jimmy Perez [[Wild Fire (Shetland, Book 8) by Ann Cleeves|left Shetland]] to start a new life on Orkney. It's been seven years since we heard from him, but he's now living with Willow Reeves and their young son, James, as well as Cassie, the daughter of his former partner. Willow's also his boss, and she ''should'' be on maternity leave, but when the body of a popular islander, Archie Stout, is found, in the aftermath of a storm, she can't resist getting involved. He'd been battered about the head with a Neolithic stone - one of a pair - which had been stolen from a museum.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Polly Barton
|title=What Am I, A Deer?
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Polly Barton's debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and governing metaphor. The narrator, newly relocated from London to Berlin, works translating video games into Japanese through the process of localisation, rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to a new audience. Barton treats this as a paradoxical act: arguably, in striving for universality, language is endlessly repackaged, its originality at risk of disappearing altogether. From this, the novel opens out into a wider, resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in order to be understood, accepted, or loved?
|isbn=1804272175
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn= Zabriskie1
|title=A Village Where Many Ways Meet: A Story of Belonging and Community, Rooted in Indigenous Wisdom
|author=Stephanie Zabriskie
|rating=5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=''Across many African and Indigenous systems, differences in how children learn, sense , or process the world were not treated as disorders to be corrected. They were understood as natural variations of human intelligence and awareness, each holding value within the community.''
This lovely story is a synthesis of that tradition, which was carried down through generations by oral retellings. It shows that a community or society is not made up from interchangeable building blocks of human beings but by a range of people with different skills and different personalities, all contributing to a whole that combines them all and to the benefit of them all.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1787333175
|title=You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here
|author=Benji Waterhouse
|rating=5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=I was tempted to read ''You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here'' after enjoying Adam Kay's first book {{amazonurl|isbn=1509858636|title=This is Going to Hurt}}, a glorious mixture of insight into the workings of the NHS, humour and autobiography. ''You Don't Have to be Mad...'' promised the same elements but moved from physical problems to mental illness and the work of a psychiatrist. I did wonder whether it was acceptable to be looking for humour in this setting but the laughter is directed at a situation rather than a person and it is always delivered with empathy and understanding.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)
|title=The Disappearing Act
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Despite her anonymisation of place names and people, Stepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the town of F for a literary festival she is to be a guest speaker at. Detoured by erratic train schedules and nudged by forces beyond her control, her journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. Swept up in this series of events, M eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who has unexpectedly left the show. The train functions as a motif of transience and impermanence, while the circus embodies the reshaping of identity and a retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the very heart of the novel form itself.
|isbn=1804272329
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0GFQ81YQK
|title=How the Sky and the Earth Made People: From the Oral Stories of Malagasy Elders
|author=Stephanie Zabriskie
|rating=4.5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary= Before people came and joined the animals, there was only the sky and the earth. Everything was quiet until the earth and the sky began to tal to each other. First, the earth created bodies. And then, the sky breathed life into them. These were the first humans and they belonged to both earth and sky. And so people lived between sky and soil and they planted and learned and remembered, especially how they came to be. When they grew old and died, their bodies returned to the earth and their life returned to the sky. And that is why the earth and the sky are both revered. Only together can they create human beings. And that is why people must pay attention to, and care for, both.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0GHPMNF6P
|title=The Zookeeper's Dragon: A Magical Modern Fantasy Tale for Grown-Ups
|author=Carolyn Mathews
|rating=4.5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary= When Phil's father unexpectedly dies, he quits his Canary Wharf finance job to take over the running of the family's farm zoo. He's not expecting much excitement, until he receives an unidentified egg that his new-age stoner uncle Edgar found in a cave in New Zealand, and suddenly life is no longer quite what it seems. Then the egg hatches into neither a reptile nor a bird, but a dragon! Now he, Edgar, his mother Abi, and the zoo's part-time café waitress Pearl have to raise this little bundle of scales and joy, despite having no idea how to actually raise dragons and not being able to tell anyone about it. But this tiny little dragon may show them love and connection in ways they had never before imagined…
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Stephanie Zabriskie
|title=How Maasai Women Spoke to Cows: From the Oral Stories of Maasai Elders
|rating=5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=''How Maasai Women Spoke to Cows is a children’s nonfiction book drawn from the oral traditions of Maasai elders in Ngorongoro, Tanzania.''
The Maasai are a cattle-herding people and this story writes down its oral tradition explaining how they came to be so. Cattle are status and wealth in Maasai culture but this doesn't tell the whole story of the intimate and symbiotic connection its people, and especially its women, have with their cows and for the natural world. The oral tradition retelling the many conversations Maasai women have had with their cows, does.
|isbn=B0G9WTGY6J
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Livi Michael
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's unusual for anyone from the Hardie family to approach the police. Neither side likes or has any respect for the other. But Davie Hardie is struggling in prison and he's prepared to tell the police where the body of a missing person is buried and who was responsible for her death. This person, he promises, is someone big and it will be worth the police doing what he wants. And what he wants is to be transferred to an open prison to serve the remainder of his sentence and to get an early parole date. Not much to ask, is it? The new Deputy Police Constable doesn't think so and she's even prepared to do the other thing that Hardie demanded - make certain that DS Max Craigie and anyone who works with him is kept well away from what's happening.
}}
{{Frontpage
|summary=Elk and Mab are best friends, or more than that even, their friendship is a once in a lifetime connection. They meet as children one day on a trip out but unfortunately they don't get each other's contact details at the time. But then chance brings them back together, and they are inseparable. Something has happened though, something terrible and tragic, and now they must work through their grief, and their friendship, together.
|isbn=1471196585
}}