Item category 1: Read Past/Discover Future

Jessie Kesson's 'The White Bird Passes' tells the moving story of a young girl's experiences as she passes from the city streets into a bleak life in an orphanage in Scotland during the 1920s.

In a fast-paced narrative spiced with genuine wit, this novel describes the billionaires' banquet going on around us daily in contemporary Britain - who feasts and who pays the bill. Intriguing, disturbing and hugely entertaining, 'Billionaires' Banquet' is an immorality tale for the 21st century.

Kent, 1940. The women of Chilbury village have taken umbrage at the Vicar's closure of the choir now that its male singers are at war. But when spirited music professor Primrose Trent arrives, it prompts the creation of an all-female singing group. Dependable Mrs Tilling sees the choir as a chanc...

Far away on the planet Meta, Loma's going nowhere fast. She's dropped out of school, dumped her boyfriend and is bored out of her mind. She longs to feel things. That's where her idol, the lunatic poet Rac Shade, and his infamous madness coat come in. Loma steals the garment and makes a break acr...

There can be no relationship in Europe's history more creative, significant, vexed and uneasy than that between Scotland and England. From the Middle Ages onwards the island of Britain has been shaped by the unique dynamic between Edinburgh and London, exchanging inhabitants, monarchs, money and ...

When Mary Davidson, the eldest daughter of a whaling family in Eden, New South Wales, sets out to chronicle the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells is poignant and hilarious, filled with drama and misadventure. It's a season marked not only by the sparsity of whales and the...