A quietly devastating tale of innocence caught up in civil war, Jonathan Falla's The Morena was shortlisted for the National SHort Story Prize. Other tales here have been widely published and broadcast of BBC Radio, and won a PEN fiction prize."Glacial and understated, Falla's prose has an almost mythical quality. Beautifully evocative and utterly engrossing." Textualities.com

Jonathan Falla weaves a powerful tale of love and war, exile and homecoming...and of one man’s desire to lose himself in a foreign land, only to find himself caught in a time of chaos and change.Blue PoppiesThe year is 1950 and, as the world recovers from the ravages of World War II, the Chinese army is perched on the border of a fragile land awaiting its destiny. Jamie Wilson, a young Scottish wireless operator and veteran of the war, has just arrived in t...

The Karen – one of the many insurgent groups in Burma (Myanmar) – have been waging an increasingly desperate fight for freedom for the past half century. Jonathan Falla, a British nurse, spent an illegal year helping to train village health workers, while writing this remarkable portrait of an ancient culture remade for the purposes of ethnic rebellion. There are chapters on food, music, love and marriage, the Karen military hierarchy and its weaponry, on mercenaries and missionaries, on y...

Jonathan Falla, author of the acclaimed Blue Poppies, follows up with a devastating story set among the harsh deserts of Western Sudan. Ten years in the writing, the book is disturbingly prescient of recent events.Set in Darfur, this is the dramatic and frightening story of improbable love between two people working for a European aid agency caught up in an African crisis. Mogga and Leila, a black and an Arab, have been badly wounded by their past. But, as the country teet...

"Forty-eight occasional pieces ranging from the music of forest rebels to Arabic novels by way of Kenyan trains and the automatic pistols in my mother's attic."Jonathan Falla's life and work has taken him from origins in the Caribbean to disaster relief agencies and children's rights, by way of university scholarships and nursing. His writing career includes award-winning stage and film drama, widely acclaimed novels and short stories, and these inquisitive, witty essays taken from...

"Your parents know that somebody is spying on them? Why doesn't your father rip down the microphone?""He's proud of it.""Proud? It's an outrageous intrusion!""Father says: better spied on than not worth spying on."Jonathan Falla's sixth novel is a startling and creepy tale of exiles living in ruined factories in a city determined to ignore their presence. Until, that is, a well-meaning but naive doctor gets involved, and the political situation becomes both ...

THE WHITE PORCUPINE is a virtuoso novel by a critically acclaimed British author. It is a mystery, and a profound exploration of loyalties: father and daughter, lovers and friends, soldiers and nations. Set in Java in the 1940s and the Netherlands in the 1970s, it tells the peculiar story of Ben Pinksterbloem, a military radio expert caught up in a post-colonial drama. Ben is brave, cunning, and ruthless, but in Java he commits the soldier's ultimate betrayal.Thirty years later, loy...

"Glenfarron" is the tale of a rugged Scottish Highland landscape, and of the impact of three generations of incomers: Polish aircrew at a military hospital in the 1940s, a young Glaswegian couple who inherit a remote property in the 1970s, and African diplomats visiting Scotland in an attempt to recover stolen artefacts in 2006. These three stories overlap in a web of hauntings, illicit love, and a farcical battle to protect cultural heritage.This is fine prose, filled with highly e...

The killing of a mammoth obstructing the tourist routes in the Scottish Highlands, and the death of a Red Brigade terrorist in an attic overlooking the Venetian lagoon. Desperate negotiations with an architect in Iran, and the beating of an aid worker for failing to deliver rain - these are some of the startling scenarios of Jonathan Falla's second collection of stories."Falla's harsh, precise and constantly sensual portrayal of a cruel world is partly offset by his evocative descr...

A beautifully written and absorbing story of exile and redemption set against the stark Patagonian wilderness at the start of the modern age.Matthieu Macanan has fled his home in France, to work as a doctor in a remote region of South America where his past is unknown. There he tends to the locacl tribes and tries to avoid contact with European settlers. When Silke Kahn and her husband Theo fly into his world with plans to run an airmail service in the area, his reclusive life is i...

The stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl).Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. Her new novel tells the story of Ursula Todd's beloved younger brother Teddy—would-be poet, RAF ...

From the author of the USA Today bestseller The Girl Who Came Home comes an unforgettable historical novel that tells the story of two long-lost sisters—orphaned flower sellers—and a young woman who is transformed by their experiences."For little sister. . . . I will never stop looking for you."Among the filth and depravity of Covent Garden's flower markets, orphaned Irish sisters Flora and Rosie Flynn sell ...