A darkly comic reflection on homelessness, life writing and dermatology.
 The homeless are dying; a pestilence is sweeping them off the streets, while the authorities herd the not-yet-dead into sinister 'clinics' in derelict industrial wastelands… until suddenly The Public is no longer immune.
 Word on the Street is about love and squalor, tenderness and disease, dead dogs and midnight burials, boils and pus and body hair. And politics, of course. It's about what separates people, and what joins them: courage, resistance, self-sacrifice, humour and friendship. It's a gruesome black farce: absurd, profoundly moving, and very, very, funny.
 * * *
 About the Author:
Romy Wood is a recovering secondary school teacher. She has an MA in The Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing from Cardiff University and lectures in Creative Writing for the Open University and has supported beginner writers in prisons and hostels. She drinks too much Coca-cola, likes to win at Scrabble and walks the tightrope that is Bipolar Disorder.
Word on the Street is Romy Wood's second novel, following Bamboo Grove(Alcemi 2010). Romy lives in Cardiff with her husband and three children. She is a Member of The Welsh Academy.
 * * *

Word on the Street

Literature & Fiction

Wood, Romy

Humor & Satire

Cillian Press

Abandoned by his mum and with his dad in prison, 16 year old Alvin is facing life on the streets. Taking refuge in a school hiking expedition across Dartmoor, Alvin sees it as a way of avoiding his problems, but he didn t account for Miss Tregarthur and her dreadful Promise. Following catastrophic events, Alvin finds himself, together with his old friend Jenna, lost in an unknown time and place, leading a group of school children in a desperate fight for survival. Disease, death and disaster follow them as they try to decipher the Promise and search for the way back home. But Miss Tregarthur has not played her last game. Tregarthur s Promise was inspired by the Ten Tors Challenge, an annual event organised by the British Army, for 2,400 teenagers to visit ten tors across Dartmoor,UK over two days. A modern day Lord of the Flies, it follows a group of teenagers who find themselves cut off from the adult world in an unfamiliar environment. It deals with themes pertinent to the lives of young adults, such as bullying, leadership, grief, and friendship, whilst at the same time having a page turning story line full of adventure and mystery. This is the first book in The Tregarthur Series.

Tregarthur's Promise: Book 1

Teen & Young Adult

Mellanby, Alex

Historical Fiction

From the award winning author of Vanessa and Virginia, set amidst the glamour and intrigue of the contemporary art world, Given the Choice is about growing up and growing older, about making choices and learning to live with them.
At 39 Marian has a lot going for her. She's talented, ambitious and married to a wealthy financier who adores her. She's also capable of lying when the odds seem stacked up against her, but she's a good deal more vulnerable than she lets on. Amidst the glamour and spin of the contemporary London art and classical music worlds, money rules and an artist's skill is rarely enough. Marion's top clients - a brilliant French painter and a virtuoso Estonian pianist - benefit from her entrepreneurial flair, but when her husband says it's time they had a child, this contrary heroine starts to panic and the cracks in her carefully constructed lifestyle start to show.
Will Marion become ensnared in the web of deceit she has cast round herself? Or can she learn enough to save her business and her marriage?
In this new novel by the award-winning author Susan Sellers, it is you, the reader, who is given the choice.
 'The piano was no longer a music-making machine but the source of a magical power. She could hear the swooping calls of birds as they darted through treetops or skimmed and dived in a free expanse of air. The bare walls of the practice room had metamorphosed into an enchanted forest, teeming with flashes of brilliant plumage and abrupt, raucous caws.'
 * * *
After a nomadic childhood, Susan Sellers ran away to Paris. While studying for her doctorate, she worked as a barmaid, tour guide and nanny, bluffed her way as a software translator and co-wrote a film script with a Hollywood screenwriter. She became closely involved with leading French feminist writers and translated Hélène Cixous. From Paris she travelled to Swaziland, teaching English to tribal grandmothers, and to Peru, where she worked for a women's aid agency. Moving to Scotland she became a Professor of English at St Andrews University, began to write fiction, and won the Canongate Prize for New Writing in 2002. Sellers has published sixteen books, although Given the Choice is her second novel. Her previous novel, the critically acclaimed ,Vanessa and Virginia (Two Ravens Press, 2008) was translated into various languages and has been adapted for stage, performed at the Riverside Studio, London (2013). Susan now lives mostly near Cambridge with her husband, a composer, and their son.

Given the Choice

Sellers, Professor Susan

Contemporary

This haunting and comic fable from the author of The Sleepwalkers' Ball is a beautiful and heartbreaking journey through memory, loss and imagination. Rumour and suspicion engulf an eerily fog-bound town as its residents begin to receive tickets promising passage across the mist-shrouded bay to the mysterious 'other side'. For Alex and his family, this seems like the beginning of a great adventure, but as reports of a shadowy, half-glimpsed ship start to circulate, so too does the gossip and anxious speculation. Why have some been selected and not others? Who are the employees of the enigmatic White Star Shipping Company? And what ultimately awaits the passengers as they pass over to the spectral and unseen other side? Bilton has created an alternate universe, vividly detailed but utterly ambiguous, absurd and bewildering, a dream that lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned. Dreamlike and immersive, The Known and Unknown Sea is a pantomime nightmare, surreal, terrifying and hilarious, full of masks and metamorphoses. It's a world seen through the eyes of children, magical, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible, beautifully characterised: the fierce Bethan, little Hwyl with his rag-doll indestructibility, the bearded ogre of The Ship's Doctor. The book is a darkness lit by flashes of blinding light and sudden, bewildering changes of scene, an infinitely spiralled, inescapable world that echoes with strange voices: Freud and Dylan Thomas, Dante, Kafka and Günter Grass. * * * Alan Bilton was born in York, UK in 1969. In keeping with the two main sources of employment back then, his family either worked on the railways or in chocolate. Unlike his more practical and mechanically-minded brothers, he became neither a surveyor nor a train-spotter. Rather, he received his undergraduate degree in Literature and Film from Stirling University in 1991, and his PhD (for a study of Don DeLillo, an author with whom he has absolutely nothing in common in any way) from Manchester University in 1995. He then taught American Studies at Liverpool Hope University College and Manchester University before moving to take up a post teaching literature and film at Swansea University in 1996. He is married, with one small child and one hairy dog. His first novel, The Sleepwalkers' Ball, described by one critic as 'Kafka meets Mary Poppins', was published by Alcemi in 2009. He is also the author of books on silent film comedy, contemporary fiction, and America in the 1920s, alongside short stories, essays and reviews. He teaches Creative Writing, fiction and film at Swansea.

The Known and Unknown Sea

Bilton, Alan

Suffering the Fire

Hotson, Barry

Genre Fiction

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Cillian Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cillian Press