LAND OF COCKAIGNE

Jeffrey Lewis

£9.99

5 July 2023

Fiction

B-Format paperback | 224 pages 978-1-913368-70-8

The Land of Cockaigne was an old medieval peasants’ dream of a sensual paradise on earth.

In Jeffrey Lewis’s novel, the Land of Cockaigne is a plot on the coast of Maine, once been a summer resort and now where Walter Rath and Catherine Gray, trying to assuage their grief and make meaningful their deceased son’s life, build what they hope will be a brief, fleeting version of paradise for a group of young men from the Bronx. But the town of Sneeds Harbour is not amused. Well-meaning doubts lead to well-hidden threats. The Raths’ marriage unravels as fatefully as Walter’s faith in democracy. Boys who’ve only ever known the city find themselves in a land that may as well be the moon.

A parable of American society today, Land of Cockaigne is by turns furious, funny, subversive, tragic, and horrifying.

Jeffrey Lewis has won a string of awards for his novels including the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. Among others novels, he is the author of The Meritocracy Quartet and Bealport.

Bevan

Creator of the NHS

Francis Beckett

Clare Beckett

£10.99

5 September 2023

Biography | Politics

B-Format paperback | 202 pages 978-1-913368-83-8

The creation of the National Health Service was the most significant of the many reforms of the post-war Labour government. The man responsible was Aneurin

‘Nye’ Bevan. The son of a Welsh miner, he became a local trade union leader at only nineteen and in 1929 was elected as a Labour MP. Bevan believed the war was Britain’s opportunity to create a new society, a position he maintained throughout the conflict. When the war ended in 1945, the landslide Labour victory gave him the chance to make this vision a reality.

Known for his impassioned oratory, Bevan’s fundamental belief that the new NHS should be freely available to all was ultimately at odds with a government struggling to balance the books. He resigned in 1951 over the introduction of charges for prescriptions and glasses. With the NHS requiring an ever-increasing share of national income, this updated edition considers Bevan’s legacy as the future of the health service he created is fought over as never before.

Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, playwright, and contemporary historian. His eighteen books include biographies of four prime ministers, the first of which is about his own political hero, Clement Attlee. Clare Beckett lectures in public policy at the University of Bradford, where she is the director of postgraduate gender study in the Department of Social Science and Humanities.