Renard Press Ltd

Part of Renard’s Christmas Card Classics series, 25% of the RRP of each book sold goes to Three Peas. This year, instead of a Christmas card, why not send a book?‘One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town… that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six…’Commissioned for the BBC for radio, Dylan Thomas’s enchanting tale A Child’s Christmas in Wales takes a nostalgic look at Christmases of yore – idyllic memories of white days and nights. Now considered one of his most enduring works, it has been described as ‘the twentieth-century Christmas Carol''.In a nutshell, Three Peas is a small charity supporting people who have had to flee war and/or persecution and who are seeking refuge and/or asylum in Europe. They are mostly active in Greece. They financially support a housing programme on Lesvos, a community centre in Sindos near Thessaloniki, a sports centre in Athens and NGOs’ emergency interventions in Thessaloniki, Lesvos and Samos. As well as the above they regularly support food and medical care providers.

Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing invites you to turn the way you read upside down and see what falls out. Drawing on an approach to reading developed over more than a decade of interactions with stories and booklovers around the world through the author’s hit blog ayearofreadingtheworld.com, the book puts not-knowing centre stage and plays with what examining the gaps in our understanding and the assumptions we use to plug them can teach us about ourselves and our world.Many books about books celebrate the cosiness and consolation of reading; Relearning to Read does the opposite. Built on the realisation that to read widely we must make friends with incomprehension – because no one can be an expert in all the world’s literatures – it explores how getting comfortable with discomfort and owning our limitations can take us further and deepen our appreciation of the world’s complexity and richness.

What happened, nobody saw, but everybody knew… Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why. This is what happened.’Written in 1933, immediately following the publication of the wildly successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is one of Stein’s most avant-garde pieces of writing, taking the murder mystery genre and working it masterfully into a Modernist mould.Based in part on truth, the narrative is set in – and written from – the country house where Stein and Toklas were living in rural France, and describes the strange death of their acquaintance Madame Pernollet. The novella takes the mystery and warps it, shot through as it is with the comings and goings of servants and the unstoppable march of modern life. Reissued as part of Renard’s accessible series of Stein’s work, this is the perfect edition for lovers of the Modernist icon’s work, and a new generation that is just as fascinated by crime and detection.

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.In startling prose that could have been concocted by a hallucinating Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, Saltburn is a town – and a book – like no other.

In the old back streets o’ PimlicoOn the docks at Monte VideoAt the Ring o’ Bells on Plymouth HoeHe’m arter me now wheerever I go…Charlotte Mew, a Modernist poet who in her day was considered one of the finest of the age by writers of great stature, has lived for long in the shadows of the literary canon. An avant-garde Bloomsbury poet that never quite broke through into the public’s consciousness, Mew’s experimental style, with prose-like lines, has stood the test of time, and is as relevant and powerful today as when it was written.Published in 1929, a year after her tragic death, The Rambling Sailor collects Mew’s final, most powerful verse, in which love, nature and religion all intermingle to paint pictures of pain, hope and a deep love of the natural world through the writer’s knowledgeable eyes.