This passionate new book gathers together for the first time many of Vanessa Gebbie’s award-winning short stories. Described by Maggie Gee as ‘a prodigiously gifted new writer’, she develops her narratives with a deceptively light touch. Those in Words from a Glass Bubble (Salt Publishing) are about coming to terms with the cards we are dealt: they pivot around the recognition that those who seem powerless can prove to be the strongest catalysts for change.
Vanessa’s short fiction has won many awards and has been published throughout the world, sometimes in translation. Her novel in progress won a first prize in the 2007 Daily Telegraph Novel Competition.

Tamara McKinley's latest title is A Kingdom For The Brave (Hodder & Stoughton), the eighth of her Australian sagas and the second in a trilogy which began with Lands Beyond the Sea and follows the lives of pioneers, warriors, families and lovers, all set against the rich tapestry of newly-colonised Australia.
Tamara has been described in Australia as 'Britain's Best Kept Secret'. Her sagas are published in 15 different languages; her books go straight into the German bestseller list with each title selling around four million copies; while in Sweden Matilda's Last Waltz was voted Booksellers' Novel of the Year.

Here's the dramatic story of smallpox in Sussex (Dale House Press). Diana Crook uses personal accounts which poignantly reveal what it was like to live in fear of the disease and watch those around you succumb. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Edward Jenner's discovery of cowpox vaccination was not at first greeted with enthusiasm. The last major outbreak of smallpox in the county was in Brighton in the 1950s.
Diana's other books include Ragged Lands, the story of Frances Wolseley's College for Lady Gardeners at Glynde, her Lewes anthology A Box of Toys and A Lewes Diary – the distinctly non-PC scribblings of the once-famous author Mrs Henry Dudeney.