Linen Press: 12 books

This is a book of many voyages. There is the meandering trail that leads to the right boat for crossing an ocean. There is the preparation – stalled in a sweltering American boatyard while arguments about equipment and finance combine with the narrowing of the hurricane window. There is the...

The Deep Sea chippy and the Fantasy Island bar face each other across the neon glow of Junction Street. Beth shovels chips on one side and Amber spins naked around a pole on the other. Their work is mundane and predictable, each night much like any other, until a sudden, dramatic death forces them...

A novel which will speak to women of forty, fifty and upwards as it shows how even strong women can feel vulnerable and unwanted in a society which values youth over wisdom, beauty over experience. The two main characters, best friends since they were teenagers, are Clara, a workaholic, feminist TV...

Set in a river boat community in Arkansas in the 1930s, this poignant story chronicles Aiyana Weir’s spirited determination to break away from a life, like that of the women around her, defined and dominated by brutal patriarchy. Aiyana’s voice, unique, hesitant and uneducated, expresses the...

A rape. A war. A society where women are bought and sold but no one can speak of shame. Shanghai 1937. Violence throbs at the heart of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle. Song Anyi is on the road to Shanghai and freedom when she is raped and left for dead. The silence and shame that mark her courageous...

    A faded seaside town in autumn is the backdrop for this elegiac story of a vulnerable boy and the adult who befriends him. Eight year old Neville, who counts stars and steps and grains of sand, is the first to notice that the red beach hut is occupied again. Abbott is on the run...

It’s one minute to midnight on 27th October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis is entering its final countdown as the world prepares for nuclear winter. But in Istanbul’s old bohemian quarter, a confederacy of free spirits has gathered around a baby grand to see the night out in style. The...

“You’d think she was an angel if she wasn’t always flying so close to hell.” Released from prison on probation, 19-year-old Harper Haley returns to the brutal, sweaty, dogwood scented landscape of her youth. Chronicling her homecoming and struggle for rehabilitation, this is the story...

Breeze from the River Manjeera tells the story of the engaging Neela who arrives in England from a small village in India as a bride for the brutal Ajay. The life that awaits Neela is a far cry from her hopes and expectations. Treated worse than a servant by her in-laws, and unwanted by her husband,...

Alice Green realises that reaching fifty is much the same as being invisible so why not make the most of it? Her head-in-the-sand husband doesn’t notice the clothes mountain and the piles of pretty stationery. When two police cars draw up outside her house in leafy Edinburgh, Alice knows...

The date is 1937. The place Liverpool. Mary escapes a loveless childhood by marrying an infantry soldier who glories in active service. The date is 1952. The place Nairobi.  The Mao Mau are rising up to reclaim their land in bloody guerrilla warfare. Mary’s adulterous love affair unfolds...

In1843, Edinburgh artist, David Octavius Hill, is commissioned to paint the portraits of 400 ministers who have broken away from the Church of Scotland. Only when he meets Robert Adamson, an early master of the new and fickle art of photography, does this daunting task begin to look feasible. Hill...