Weatherglass Books

“I ask the internet the difference between something being too close tothe bone and something being too close to home.” This funny andterrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don't, inour latest machine age. In it something unforgiveable has happened. The main character, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharpunderstanding, is only just holding things together and trying to workout how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half ofa fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented? Pink Soap examines the massive everyday pressures we’re all underwith real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief. Isense it becoming as much a classic for now as Plath’s The Bell Jar hasbeen for the decades behind us." Ali Smith

The Wrong Son is a memoir of emotional precision - a searching, unsparingaccount of what it means to come into being in the absence of love. In 1963, a young husband loses his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old sonin a car accident. Six months later, he meets a woman who abandons her ownhusband and child for him - a man who seems to her everything she has everwanted. Within two years, a boy is born into this family of grief and guilt, into a housealready filled with ghosts, where neither parent can see him clearly throughwhat each has lost. His mother demands perfection. His father, meanwhile, decides early on thatthis child exists only because the first one died - and cannot forgive him for it. Moulded by his mother, rejected by his father, he is given no space in which tobecome himself. Throughout his life, no matter how much he tries to invent himself, he is drivenby the fear that nothing real exists underneath. Fifty years on, after his parents'deaths, that fear begins to unmoor him. He turns to the work of psychoanalysts who were pioneers of early childhoodpsychology around the time he was born. Drawing on the insights of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, The Wrong Sontraces a life shaped not only by loss and violence, but by psychic damage thatmay never fully be shaken off. With forensic clarity and unexpected humour, The Wrong Son is a quietlydevastating work: deeply human, psychologically attuned, and unafraid to staywith what cannot be resolved.

From Ali Smith: “The Hyena’s Daughter tells the far-too-untold story of a c19th sisterhood, thedaughters of Mary Wollstonecraft: Fanny Imlay and Mary Shelley, the famedwriter of Frankenstein, plus their step-sister Claire Clairmont, lover of LordByron. Are they the three graces? The fates? They’re women, as alive and breathingand rebellious and analytical as you and me, and well aware and critical of thehemmed-in nature they’re expected to accept as women of their time – a timeof “a new way of thinking, a new-world independence, a revolutionary world.” It features their connection to Percy Bysshe Shelley – “how could we not lovehim, with his lofty ethics and words that flew like birds?” –and many of theother contemporary poets and thinkers of the time. Pacy and assured, it turns its history to life from fragment to sensuousfragment. If the dead brought to life is to be Mary Shelley’s theme, this novellaasks what the real source of life spirit is, the vital spark. This book, full of detailand richesse, is a piece of vitality in itself.”

Gloria has a learning disability. She’snineteen, and there’s nothing to do exceptwander the local parks, look for friendshipand keep out of trouble – or go roundJack’s. Jack needs Gloria's company, buthe’s unpredictable and angry at the world. After an act of violence, their friendshiphas to end. Now Gloria's on her own. But when she hears Jack's out of prison,her whole world is turned upside-down. Heartbreaking and beautiful, Gloria Don’tSpeak is a deeply empathetic portrait of awoman dealing with vulnerability, violence– and the desire for connection.