The Boy Who Loved Camping is the story of Tom seen through two windows of time in a country once called Rhodesia: the 1950s when he is a pre-teen, and the 1970s when he is a young man. Tom holds a shocking secret, a secret only the more perceptive reader will uncover. It alienates him from his people and guides him towards unlikely redemption.

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ëhis pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.í When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced wit...

Suburban and cosmopolitan, youthful and elderly, formal and experimentalÖ these binaries twist like threads which meet in this anthology, and interweave on the loom of prosody, forming rich and varied textures, Few can craft poems with the skill of these two artisans from Zimbabwe.

Born in South Africa in 1947, John Eppel was raised in Zimbabwe, where he still lives, now retired, in Bulawayo. Eppelís poetry collections include Spoils of War, which won the Ingrid Jonker prize, Sonata for Matabeleland, Selected Poems: 1965 ñ 1995, Songs My Country Taught Me, and Landlocked: New and Selected Poems from Zimbabwe, which was a winner in the international Poetry Workshop Prize, Judged by Billy Collins. Furthermore he has collaborated with Philani Amadeus Nyoni in a collecti...

White Man Crawling is a collection of short stories and poems by the award winning Bulawayo writer John Eppel. His stories are uncomfortably funny; his poems uncomfortably sad. His stories speak first to all of us, then to his own quirky nature; his poems speak first to himself and to those few who know him nearly, and then to all of us. For more than forty years John Eppel has been a unique double-voice in the annals of Zimbabwean literature: the satirist and the lyricist.

It is New Year in Bulawayo, and anybody who is anybody is out celebrating. Hatchings, with an introduction by Khombe Mangwanda, was chosen by Professor Anthony Chennells in the Times Literary Supplement as his choice for the most significant book to have come out of Africa.

Wendy Cope's first book of poems and parodies, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, went straight into the bestseller lists. Its successor, Serious Concerns has proved even more popular, addressing such topics as 'Bloody Men', 'Men and Their Boring Arguments', 'Two Cures for Love', 'Kindness to Animals' and 'Tumps' (Typically Useless Male Poets).

A revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected PoemsThis indispensable new selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes over sixty poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem 'v.', a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard which caused enormous controversy when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and is now regarded as one of the key poems of the late twentieth century.This su...

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occup...

How easy is it to fall off a log? Where is the middle of nowhere? Do we really have no bananas?The readers of OLD GIT magazine are a batty, befuddled, potty-mouthed bunch, who seem to spend a significant chunk of their spare time corresponding with the publication's popular letters page. DO ANTS HAVE ARSEHOLES? is a very funny, very silly collection of questions and answers taken from this column, none of which has any basis whatsoever in fact.A must for all those who relis...

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, bot...

Have you ever wondered where terms like ‘end of your tether’, ‘gets my goat’ or ‘letting ones hair down’ come from? Or why we call some people ‘geezers’, ‘sugar daddies’ or ‘lounge lizards’? Or where the words ‘eavesdropping’, ‘nickname’ and ‘D-Day’ come from? They are just a few of the many words and phrases that language expert Max Cryer examines in this fact-filled and fun new book. Max explains where these curious expressions come from, what they mean and how they are used. Along the w...