Contemporary Adult Fiction
Young Adults
Contemporary Adult Fiction
Flirting at the Funeral by Chris Keil Flirting at the Funeral is a story about love, money, and lost opportunities, ranging across Europe against a background of financial crisis, terrorism and the power of the super-rich. At the pool-side, the evening breeze is fragrant with the scent of grilled lobster and designer sun-block. Two German girls in starched white uniforms, buttoned up as tight as barbie dolls, are serving champagne to the guests. Dave Leaper sips his drink and dreams of death and vengeance. At a clinic in Southern Europe a group of young film-makers are recreating the songs, the slogans and the idealism of the years of revolution, while an old man, mummified by wealth and power, watches them and pays the bills. He pays and pays, missing nothing.
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‘Flirting at the Funeral’ is subtle, evocative, dealing with deep human themes. Keil’s novel reads with the pace and tension of a thriller, addressing urgent contemporary issues, as the global economy melts down. It’s immersive and atmospheric. The reader is drawn into the lives of the characters.
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The critically acclaimed Keil, one of Wales promising new writers, has delivered his best yet with this new novel and has already attracted very favourable critical attention from both the UK and US.
About the Author:
CHRIS KEIL has worked as a sheep-farmer, a journalist, and a tour-guide in a number of European cities. In academic life he has published and lectured widely on traumatic memory and representations of the Holocaust, and currently lectures at the University of Wales. He has held literary residencies, workshops and masterclasses in Europe and the United States. He is the author of two acclaimed novels: The French Thing (Carreg Gwalch, 2002) and Liminal (Alcemi, 2007). His third novel, Flirting at the Funeral, is published by Cillian Press.
Publication:
1st Sep 2012
Title: Author:
Flirting at the Funeral Chris Keil
Paperback: eBook:
978-0-9573155-0-1 978-0-9573155-1-8
Category:
All Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction: Adult & contemporary romance FA, F
BIC Codes: Formats: Size: Pages:
T Paperback/eBook Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5 234
Price RRP:
GBP 9.99
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
Given the Choice by Susan Sellers From the award winning author of Vanessa and Virginia, Given the Choice is about growing older and growing up, about making choices and learning to live with them. At 39 Marion has a lot going for her. She’s talented, ambitious and married to a wealthy financier who adores her. Marion’s top clients 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? But in the end it is the reader who is given the choice.
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• Set in the contemporary art and music world, it raises the question of what constitutes talent and what talent is worth. • Challenges the reader with a less than likeable heroine. • Deals with the pressure on women who are not instinctively maternal, and who don’t want to have children. • Deals with the difficulty men may face when they want children, but their partner would prefer to remain childless. • Provides a series of viable alternative endings – giving the reader their own choice of what happens to the main characters.
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About the Author:
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. Susan 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 (Spring 2013). Susan now lives mostly near Cambridge with her husband, a composer, and their son.
Publication:
1st Oct 2013
Title: Author:
Given the Choice Susan Sellers
ISBN:
978-0-9573155-6-3
Category:
All Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction: Contemporary Women FA, F
BIC Codes: Binding: Size: Pages:
Trade Paperback Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5 258
Price RRP:
GBP 9.99
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
The Known and Unknown Sea by Alan Bilton This haunting and comic fable from the critically acclaimed 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. Dreamlike and immersive, it’s a pantomime nightmare, surreal, terrifying and hillarious, full of masks and metamorphoses. It’s a world seen through the eyes of children, magical, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible.
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A page turning adventure story built around a central mystery with an unsettling and unexpected resolution.
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A mixture of anxiety dreams and childhood nightmares.
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Adult novel that will also appeal to teenagers with an advanced reading age.
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Inspired by silent films, surrealism and early 20th century art it is an intensely visual novel that blurs the boundary between the real world and the fantastical.
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Publication:
1st March 2014
Title:
The Known and Unknown Sea
Author:
Alan Bilton
ISBN:
978-1-909776-02-9
Category:
Fiction: General Fiction: Contemporary Fantasy - Sea Stories FA, F
Echoes with strange voices; Freud and Dylan Thomas, Dante, Kafka and Gunter Grass.
About the Author:
Alan Bilton was born in York in 1969. In keeping with the two main sources of employment back then, his family either worked on the railways or in chocolate; but he did neither. Rather, he received his undergraduate degree in Literature and Film from Stirling University in 1991, and his PhD from Manchester University in 1995. He is married, with one small child and one hairy dog. His first novel, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball, described 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.
BIC Codes: Binding: Size: Pages:
Trade Paperback Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5 220
Price RRP:
GBP 9.99
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
WORD ON THE STREET by Romy Wood
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.
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• A comic book on serious issues • Deals with themes of homelessness, emotional intelligence, mental health and the individual’s right to health care regardless of social standing • A scientific ‘What if’ • A tribute to the neglected heroism of dermatologists • Inspired by the media reaction to the bird flu outbreak • Large readership appeal - non-gender or age specific • Contemporary story of social stereotypes, misfits and prejudice
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About the Author: Romy 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.
Publication:
1st Oct 2013
Title: Author:
Word on the Street Romy Wood
ISBN:
978-0-9573155-2-5
Category:
All Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction: Medical Fiction: Humorous FA, F
BIC Codes: Binding: Size: Pages:
Trade Paperback Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5 256
Price RRP:
GBP 9.99
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.
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
WINGSPAN by Jeremy Hughes
In September 1943 an American Flying Fortress returning from a bombing mission crashes in Wales. A farmer is first on the scene to discover that its crew of ten have all perished. When the police arrive, only nine bodies are recovered. A lifetime later a son goes looking for the father he never knew, climbing steep hillsides into deepening mysteries of time and loss. Set in America, England and Wales, Wingspan tells two intertwined stories separated by fifty years and a thousand miles of ocean - stories of pursuit and discovery, love and war, bereavement and remembering.
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• Alternates between two love stories, one set in the 1940s, the second in the 1990s, connected by the mystery of a missing airman.
• A lyrical work set in both the Suffolk and South Wales countryside.
Publication:
1st Nov 2013
Title: Author:
Wingspan Jeremy Hughes
ISBN:
978-0-9573155-8-7
Category:
Literary Fiction Fiction : ..Romance - Historical ..War & Military
BIC Codes:
FA, FRD
Binding: Size: Pages:
Trade Paperback Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5 176
Price RRP:
GBP 9.99
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• Examines the effects of growing up in the 1940s and 50s without a father figure. • About letting go of the past and learning to live for the future. • Portrays the romance of flying and drama of mid air combat.
About the Author: Jeremy Hughes was born in Crickhowell, south Wales. He was awarded first prize in the Poetry Wales competition and his poetry was short-listed for an Eric Gregory Award. He has published two pamphlets - breathing for all my birds (2000) and The Woman Opposite (2004) - and has published poetry, short fiction, memoir and reviews widely in British and American magazines. His first novel Dovetail was published in 2011. He studied for the Master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford. He now teaches Creative Writing at Oxford and the University of Wales, Newport, as well as literature for Aberystwyth. He is married with a daughter and a son.
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
Young Adult Fiction
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT by Joe Kipling
In the near future, when the world’s population has been decimated by disease, the fortunate few live inside the Boundary, while the unlucky ones are left to die on the Outside. MaryAnn is one of the privileged. It doesn’t matter that her friends can sometimes be cruel or that the boy she likes just threw up on her shoes, it’s all about being noticed at the right parties. But it takes a single event to rip her life apart. Struggling with physical and psychological scars, MaryAnn must face up to the truth about the foundations of the Neighbourhood and the legacy of her family. Once she learns the truth she can never go back, but can she really put her faith in the Union?
Blinded by the Light is about death and coming to terms with loss, the abuse of power, discrimination and the fear of the unknown. It is the first book in the Union Trilogy.
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Publication:
1st Oct 2013
Title: Author:
Blinded by the Light Joe Kipling
ISBN:
978-1-909776-00-5
Category:
Pages:
Young Adult Juvenile Fiction : Science Fiction FICTION / Dystopian YFB 5AM, YFG 5AM E3N79 Trade Paperback 203 x133mm 5.5 x 8.5 268
Price RRP:
GBP 7.99
• Dystopian young adult fiction set in the near future. • Critiques aspects of society such as a preoccupation with celebrity, materialism and privilege.
• Examines the themes of death, coming to terms with loss, discrimination and the fear of the unknown. • Narrated in the first person, it follows the journey of a 15 year old
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girl from the most privileged background as she begins to question the legitimacy of the world she has grown up in.
• Shows that in real life good and evil are never clear cut and we all have to decide what it means to ‘do the right thing’.
About the Author:
BIC Codes: CBMC: Binding: Size:
Joe Kipling is a Hull born, west Yorkshire based young adult fiction writer with a lifelong passion for Sci-Fi, particularly the post apocalyptic variety. She currently lives in Holmfirth with her dog Rosie and is a full time consultant and part time writer. A lifetime of travelling and avoiding near catastrophe has provided endless inspiration for her debut novel Blinded by the Light.
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
Tregarthur’s Promise by Alex Mellanby
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.
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Tregarthur’s Promise was inspired by the Ten Tors Challenge, an annual event organised by the Army, for 2,400 teenagers to visit ten tors across Dartmoor 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. Going forward, each book in the Tregarthur Series will involve travel to a different time, where the group has to survive using skills and knowledge they have gained from their old life. This first book involves travel to prehistoric times and basic survival skills such as hunting, cooking, and finding shelter. Throughout the series the mystery of the Tregarthur family haunts them as they try to deal with their own personal problems of dysfunctional families and the trials of growing up.
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About the Author:
Publication:
1st Oct 2013
Title: Author:
Tregarthur’s Promise Alex Mellanby
ISBN:
978-0-9573155-4-9
Category:
Young Adult Fiction Action & Adventure Survival Stories Historical - General FICTION / Science Fiction / Time Travel
BIC Codes:
Pages:
YFC 5AM YFB 5AM E3N79 Trade Paperback 203 x133mm 5.5 x 8.5 220
Price RRP:
GBP 7.99
CBMC: Binding: Size:
This is Alex’s first novel, although not his first work of fiction since, as a doctor, he has had many research papers published. Unable to stick general practice, psychiatry or even being a physician, he took up a senior post in Public Health – which mostly involved drain sniffing. He was brought back to sanity with an MA in creative writing at the Anglia Ruskin University. Inspired whilst living in Devon, Alex is writing the Tregarthur’s series, following his characters through the worst of possible and impossible times.
www.cillianpress.co.uk Cillian Press Limited is registered in England and Wales, company registration number 8027846. 83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ. United Kingdom
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