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Love in a lost land
The vivid reimagining of General Eisenhower and Kay Summersby’s infamous love affair in London after the Second World War.
Foreign Correspondent Richard Brady arrives in Africa to report on a nationalist insurgency that has gripped a once-beautiful country. An innocent newcomer, he struggles to stay neutral in a bitter war waged with terror and atrocity by both sides.
He is soon drawn to Patience, a young township teacher with a fast tongue and a sharp wit. Their affair is tested when Brady discovers that his lover is recruiting her students to join the guerrillas and helping smuggle them across the border.
Lost in love, torn between the nationalist cause and an embattled white regime and with the war closing in on all sides, Richard faces the ultimate challenge. Can he keep the woman he loves in a world at war?
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The Woman with Wings
In this heart-warming tale of female empowerment, a young woman comes to terms with the revelation that she may be able to fly.
Alison Spedding is a loner; no real friends, no boyfriend and a job in which she goes unnoticed. At thirty-two, her only passion is birdwatching.
One afternoon, high on a Scottish mountain, earnestly waiting for the rarest of sights – a white tailed eagle returning to its nest – she slips, falling silently. In shock, her fellow twitchers return to the hostel to raise the alarm, heavy with the realisation that she must be dead. What they find shocks them even more. Alison is already there, alive and unscathed…
Further similar episodes cause Alison’s grip on reality to slip, her mind spiralling towards breaking point. In her dreams she sees a huge shadow on the ground, as if there was a creature above her, a creature with huge wings…
Her infatuated colleague Jed is concerned. Can he intervene before Alison finally loses control?
This is an extraordinary novel, exploring one woman’s identity whilst posing universal questions: Who is she? Where does she belong? And must she accept her fate, or can she spread her wings and be free at last?
Ike and Kay
The vivid reimagining of General Eisenhower and Kay Summersby’s infamous love affair in London after the Second World War.
In 1942, Cork-born Kay Summersby’s life is changed forever when she is tasked with driving General Eisenhower on his fact-finding visit to wartime London. Despite Eisenhower’s marriage to Mamie, the pair takes an immediate liking to one another and he gifts Kay a rare wartime luxury: a box of chocolates.
So begins a tumultuous relationship that against all military regulation sees Kay travelling with Eisenhower on missions to far flung places before the final assault on Nazi Germany. She becomes known as “Ike’s shadow” and in letters Mamie bemoans his new obsession with ‘Ireland’. That does not stop him from using his influence to grant Kay US citizenship and rank in the US army, drawing her closer when he returns to America. When the US authorities discover Eisenhower’s plans to divorce from his wife they threaten the fragile but passionate affair and Kay is forced to take desperate measures to hold onto the man she loves…
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Midnight in Berlin
Berlin in the spring of 1939. Hitler invades Czechoslovakia and prepares for a wider war.
The West’s appeasement policies have failed yet in London Neville Chamberlain’s government continues to try and placate the Nazi leader. Colonel Noel Macrae, a British military attaché based in Berlin, realises the futility of further diplomacy.
He plans to defy his government and carry out the only alternative to a looming world war: assassination. The Gestapo, aware of Macrae’s hostility, seeks to compromise him in their infamous brothel, Salon Kitty. There Macrea meets and falls in love with Sara, a Jewish woman blackmailed into becoming a Nazi courtesan.
Macrae finds himself trapped between the blind policies of his government and the dark world of betrayal and deception in Berlin. As he seeks to save the woman he loves from the sexual sadism of a Gestapo bordello he moves towards a high risk plan to kill Hitler and avert what he knows will be a global war.
Inspired by true events and characters, James MacManus’s Midnight in Berlin is a passionate story that will leave you in awe of the human capacity for courage, sacrifice and love set against a world on the brink of war.
Black Venus
A vivid novel of Charles Baudelaire and his lover Jeanne Duval, the Haitian cabaret singer who inspired his most famous and controversial poems, set in nineteenth-century Paris.
For readers who have been drawn to The Paris Wife, Black Venus captures the artistic scene in the great French city decades earlier, when the likes of Dumas and Balzac argued literature in the cafes of the Left Bank. Among the bohemians, the young Charles Baudelaire stood out—dressed impeccably thanks to an inheritance that was quickly vanishing. Still at work on the poems that he hoped would make his name, he spent his nights enjoying the alcohol, opium, and women who filled the seedy streets of the city.
One woman would catch his eye—a beautiful Haitian cabaret singer named Jeanne Duval. Their lives would remain forever intertwined thereafter, and their romance would inspire his most infamous poems—leading to the banning of his masterwork, Les Fleurs du Mal, and a scandalous public trial for obscenity.
James MacManus’s Black Venus recreates the classic Parisian literary world in vivid detail, complete with not just an affecting portrait of the famous poet but also his often misunderstood, much-maligned muse.
The Language of the Sea
The seals paid no attention to Leo and as the light brightened with the rising sun they began to shuffle through the rocks towards a sea that had calmed into a gentle swell after the storm.
A young male led the pod,followed by the females,and within minutes the whole group had slipped into the water.
Leo stood up and walked slowly to the shoreline. He entered the water close to the pod, feeling totally at ease as he swam away from the shore. Again the seals appeared to pay him no attention. The pod headed some 100 yards out to sea before turning and swimming slowly up the coast.
Leo followed them swimming strongly and found no difficulty keeping up. He was elated that he was able to stay with the pod and that the seals seemed to accept this strange addition to their number. After twenty minutes the seals turned shoreward towards a long stretch of beach overlooked by a deserted lighthouse. They hauled up thirty yards from the water’s edge and settled down to face the sea and the sun. Leo walked behind them and sat down in the dunes. They knew he was there and they were not afraid. He was one of them now.
Sleep In Peace Tonight
In spite of the whisky and the long journey, Hopkins found sleep difficult that night.
In spite of the whisky and the long journey, Hopkins found sleep difficult that night. He had been shocked by the ear- splitting cacophony of guns, bombs, and sirens during the raid. News reports from London all talked of civilian deaths, the destruction of homes, the plight of the homeless, food shortages, rationing, queues, but none mentioned the deafen- ing nightly thunder of the Blitz. He wondered how anyone got any sleep.
The next morning, as his car drove down Park Lane to 10 Downing Street, he realized that sleep was probably a dimly remembered luxury for most Londoners. Despite the cold, he wound the window down and caught the acrid smell of smoke and burning. He saw pale faces pinched with cold waiting patiently at bus stops, trying to get to work. People stamped their feet and rubbed gloved hands against the cold, craning around the queue hoping to see their bus. Others gave up the wait and trudged past still-burning buildings, heads down, hands clasping handbags or briefcases, all wondering on that freezing morning whether there would be transport home that night. They looked exhausted, hollowed out, half people.
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