Kate Rigby: 15 books

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to...

A dark, edgy tale about death and suicide and its effects on two families.  Death is a fact of life for the principle characters and especially for Marina Reed who wishes to join her loved ones at ‘the dead club’, a place she and her sixth form friends obsessed about in their youth. Ultimately...

Maxine lives in Number 7, the peeling Jewish house, where she has to stand on cushions to change light bulbs because she doesn't know anyone well enough to ask for the use of their stepladder. She is also trapped in an unsatisfactory relationship with her misanthropist boyfriend Warren who "sits...

A hard-hitting novel based on my experience of working in the field of addictions It's the late 1980s and mother of four, Cheryl West, lands herself a job at a drugs project in London. But memories of her old life are never far away, especially when her surly daughter, Elaine, makes her unwelcome...

Have you ever worried about not being quite hip enough? Or maybe you are one of those who flaunts your unhipness with abandon. Either way, Little Guide to Unhip is for you. Although it charts my own personal unhip top 50 with the likes of Gilbert O’Sullivan, Morris Dancing, Vicar of Dibley, Shopping...

The volume offers a survey of the contribution of German literature and culture to the evolution of ecological thought. As the field of ecocritical theory and practice is rapidly expanding towards transnational and global dimensions, it seems nevertheless necessary to consider the distinct manifestations...

Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic...

Set in the nineteen-seventies, Did You Whisper Back? begins with Amanda Court's longing to be reunited with her estranged twin sister Jo. Following a false lead, Amanda leaves her Merseyside home and family and goes to Devon to work as a chambermaid where she believes Jo now lives. Amanda's new life...

It's the start of the 1999 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is not only about an obsession with Wimbledon: the game of tennis itself becomes a metaphor for the other psychological matches taking place at the house of peevish old Gwen McMahon. Carers come and go, but who will survive to the final? Winner...

A gritty story, served up with Scouse dialect, and retro sweets and food aplenty.  A life long and symbiotic friendship between two men begins in 1960s Liverpool when they are children: their early experiences in the nineteen-sixties and seventies having lasting effects on their adult lives and relationships.

The Fruit Woman has appeared to Helen - a quirky and naïve twenty-seven-year-old - at important times in her life, particularly in relation to her own sexual and spiritual awakening. In the context of the family holiday, where games of cards, scatological worries, and deep discussions abound, the...

Leila is the eight-year-old daughter of Hassan Nassiri, a wealthy Iranian property owner, and younger sister to the adored Fayruz, her father's favourite daughter. Then tragedy strikes in a holiday narrowboat accident having far-reaching consequences for the surviving family and so follows...

  Psychology graduate, Heidi Harper is appointed to work with Professor Mala, pioneer of a new project to rehabilitate dog-reared feral child, Nicki. Heidi is soon asking questions and her mission takes on sinister overtones. As the truth outs, the lives of all concerned begin to unravel....

This bittersweet collection reflects themes for our time, be it the angst of reaching fifty, emerging sexuality or sexual experimentation. In other stories, patterns of behaviour across generations or within a lifetime are explored. Other stories look at life from unusual viewpoints, while others still have voices of a generation.