Flambard is a small independent press that nourishes developing talent, particularly new and neglected writers. Poetry forms the backbone of the list, but Flambard now publishes some fiction as well.
The Legend of Liz & Joe
It’s 2008 and Joe Gladstone’s North Cumbrian gourmet guesthouse is losing a packet, not least because of the unusual requirements he makes of his would-be guests. Meanwhile, his wife Liz has embarked on her first extramarital affair at the age of seventy, and has started having spiritual visions. The Legend of Liz & Joe was published on 1 July.
John Murray was born in West Cumbria and now lives in Brampton, near Carlisle. He has published a collection of stories, Pleasure, for which he received the Dylan Thomas Award in 1988, and nine critically acclaimed novels, including John Dory, which won a Lakeland Book of the Year Award in 2002, and Jazz Etc, which was longlisted for the Man-Booker Prize in 2003.
John Murray’s Radio Activity shortlisted for Cumbria’s Best Book Ever
Judges Hunter Davies, Fiona Armstrong and Kathleen Jones have shortlisted Radio Activity as one of Cumbria's Best Books Ever. Radio Activity was first published in 1993 and re-issued as a Flambard Modern Classic in 2004.
The other shortlisted novels are: (the late) Hugh Walpole for Rogue Herries, Melvyn Bragg for The Maid of Buttermere, Margaret Forster for Shadow Baby and Sarah Hall for Haweswater.
The winner is to be announced at the Lakeland Book of the Year Awards, Old England Hotel, Bowness-on-Windermere on Tuesday July 7th.
Vote online at www.golakes.co.uk/information/lakeland-book.aspx.
Poets William Wordsworth, Susanna Blamire, Norman Nicholson and Helen Farish are also shortlisted.
Scars Beneath the Skin
Karl Dresner makes a decision he will come to regret and finds himself caught up in a bomb blast in London. The doctors repair the scars on the outside but Karl is left a lonely, withdrawn man, living in a private abyss and filling his nights with empty sex. Scars Beneath the Skin is a dark modern love story set against the anxieties of our uncertain world.
A. J. Duggan’s life changed on a sweltering day in Manchester in June 1996 when the city centre was torn apart by a huge bomb. Attempting to make sense of this experience, he began to write.
The Green Parakeet
The first half of Desmond Graham’s The Green Parakeet is an elegiac sequence for an older brother, in which Graham discovers vitality through loss and love through difference. The second half, ‘Postcards from Germany’, is a series of short, often elusive and teasing poems about places we cannot know without imagination. Throughout, pleasure and accessibility are brought by humour and invention; openness of mind and of feeling lead us to a knowledge of how much is absent.
Winged with Death
John Baker’s Winged with Death was published by Flambard in March: In 1972, 18-year-old Ramon Bolio arrives by ship in the heat and dust of Montevideo, Uruguay, and finds a country on the brink of dictatorship. As Ramon finds friends within the resistance movement and marvels at the beautiful girls, the world around him is changing rapidly. Then one night he discovers the tango and begins the long process of becoming a Milonguero – a master of the dance.
Sarah Walters interviews John Baker about Winged with Death on the Yorkshire Post web site (31 minutes audio).
John Baker's previous books included Shooting in the Dark and The Meanest Flood. He was born and brought up in Hull and lived for ten years in a rural commune. After time in Norway and the south of France, he settled in York.
Darwin’s Microscope
Kelley Swain’s Darwin’s Microscope reflects the life and influence of Charles Darwin, who was born on 12 February 1809. She uses the microscopic ‘lens’ as a metaphor for viewing the world with secular wonder, revealing greater meaning in looking deeper – even to the cellular level.
Contemplating the natural world, this new poet brings the Darwinian point of view into everyday life. Darwin’s Microscope brilliantly shows how science and poetry complement and enlighten each other, to the point where they become nearly inseparable. It will be published by Flambard in February.
Sticky
Just published: Sticky, from Andy Croft, is a book of poems about an age of imperial slaughter already sticky with blood and lies. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but depleted uranium really hurts us.
Sticky is a book about the stuck and the sticky, the straight and the crooked. Armed with only a pile of spooky sticks and a sticky file of spooks, Andy Croft sets off in search of the Land of Righteousness. He gets the wrong end of the stick in Vulgaria and finds himself in a sticky situation in Mudfog. When he meets the ghosts of Brecht, Bunyan and Baron Munchausen by the banks of the river Styx he realizes he can’t stick it any more. This is poetry for the pessimistick.
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Page last updated on 25th June 2009.
Flambard Press Ltd is a non-commercial, not-for-profit limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 05983763.
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