Showing results by narrator "Eve Webster" in All Categories

This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one's thoughts - absurd, encompassing, oblique - may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm. Attrib. and other stories celebrates the trickiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.

When Ruby and Verity met as girls, they came from different worlds. Verity was privately educated, living in a beautiful Hampstead home, while Ruby was being raised in extreme poverty. Nevertheless, they became firm friends. However, fortunes are not set in stone, and soon the girls find their situations reversed. As Ruby goes up in the world, Verity encounters more and more tragedy, but still the girls remain large parts of each other's lives.

It's raining blood on the village of Happenstance. As the end of summer beckons, the local folk are planning the festival of Tatty Bogle. Hideous scarecrows are appearing all over the place, and almost everyone is behaving as if they're fudgeknocking bananas. Retired TV star Tom Baker is in the garden making friends with cabbages (especially Eric), and Mrs Frimbly is up to curious, malinky deeds of her own.

This is a memoir about a mother's love for her son, Louis. It is addressed to him. This is a memoir about hope - hope in others, hope in systems and hope for the future. I've never quite known where to begin when someone asks me what I've been up to. I've never quite known how to explain what our daily life is like. I wanted to write how it is in order to give others a greater understanding of disability and caring. And to be totally honest, I wanted to write something that would make people consider being Louis' friend.

Peg always felt a little blurred, a little lacking in definition. Her mother died when she was six, her father simply disappeared, and she was brought up by her grandparents and her obese, bedridden aunt. But, despite all this, she never developed the habit of asking questions. At least, not until she met Loz, her straight-talking, psychotherapeutically literate girlfriend, who urges her to confront her demons. But Peg starts to wonder whether her youthful lack of curiousity might not have been a good thing. A very good thing indeed....