Bøger udgivet af Any Subject Books

"What she don't know can't hurt me." A tyrannical 'mam', a semi-absentee West-Indian father and a brood of children, all girls apart from the 'Chosen One', who would have thought an account of childhood in 1960s Manchester could be so much fun? This is a society where a telly is a must, an inside bathroom is a luxury, and a scrubbed doorstep and ostentatiously clean net curtains are ultimate marks of respectability. Amina, as the eldest daughter whose 'care' of her younger siblings includes posting one of them down the 'slide' of the rubbish chute, is the one upon whom her mam relies and who therefore cops most of the backlash from the sisters' adventures and mishaps. A precocious child, she loves school but hates PE and becomes a dab hand at forging excuse notes until her fictional injuries lead to an investigation of child abuse. Mam receives a note from school about the impending visit. "We don't want them to have a wasted journey, do we?" she says with a glint in her eye. "Oy! get back here you little sod." An archetypal Mancunian Mam, Amina's mother governs her family with an iron rod but is fiercely loyal, trading insult for insult with her less-well-meaning neighbours and defending her 'half-caste' children. Her authority is absolute, and her discipline both harsh and sometimes irrational, but she carefully, in order of putting on, lays all her children's clothes on the fireguard to warm before school in the winter. The comic timing of this book, where a child's limited viewpoint is set ironically against the storyteller's superior awareness, is up in the same league as that of Adrian Mole's diaries. Devoid of sentimentality, recalled from the clear-eyed perspective of a child whose life's goal is to get the most treats and flaunt them in the face of her siblings, these are joyful memoirs - truthful and forgiving, entertaining and illuminating.

This is a collection of stories whose endings you can try to predict, but you will almost always get it wrong. From the lottery-winner who inspires enmity in his neighbour, to the fraudulent fortune-teller discovering that she has a psychic gift after all, to the down-trodden schoolboy whose 'daydreams' reveal a crime which he then uses all his ingenuity to expose, a huge range of characters walk through these pages. Some of them are innocent; others, like the greedy property-developer, border on evil; but most of them are human with all the foibles and self-interest inherent in that condition.To read these stories is to share in the author's jaundiced view of the world - a world nonetheless illuminated by flashes of humour, pathos and warmth. You will be hugging yourself with glee at the 'comeuppance' doled out to some characters, and wishing you could dive into the story to give a timely warning to others. You will certainly be turning the pages rapidly to see what happens ...

"e;I have to state right now that we never had any intention of buying a farm. Least of all in South West Scotland. It wasn't one of those nice, rational decisions that we all think we will make, when the time comes. It was totally irrational and made absolutely no sense at all - but we made it just the same!"e; So begins a new life for Jennie and her actor husband Conrad, star of the long-running TV series, William Tell. This is the story of their titanic struggles against cold, wind, drought, disease, illness and ill luck of every kind in their establishing of a home and a viable farm against the backdrop of a mountain called Skeoch.