On the shortest day of the year, as the Castle is lit with candles and everyone prepares to celebrate, Wizard Apprentice Septimus Heap marks his fourteenth birthday. He has reached a new stage in his Apprenticeship: Darke Week. Awe-inspiring, terrifying, unbelievably important, Septimus's future will depend on what happens during this week. He chooses a dangerous mission to restore his good friend Alther from Banishment. But as he embarks on this trial, something Darke and terrible engulfs the Castle. Septimus and his friends are about to face their most perilous challenge yet . . .

On the shortest day of the year, as the Castle is lit with candles and everyone prepares to celebrate, Wizard Apprentice Septimus Heap marks his fourteenth birthday. He has reached a new stage in his Apprenticeship: Darke Week. Awe-inspiring, terrifying, unbelievably important, Septimus's future will depend on what happens during this week. He chooses a dangerous mission to restore his good friend Alther from Banishment. But as he embarks on this trial, something Darke and terrible engulfs the Castle. Septimus and his friends are about to face their most perilous challenge yet . . .

This first of all is a story about mountaineering, accident and paralysis. About coming to terms with losing movement and regaining the will to live. But it's also about the borderline between body and spirit. Karen is drawn into the world of faith healing and psychic surgeons in the Brazilian jungle. In testing these improbable claims she explores her own inner world and self. An incredible story that will inspire and empower anyone striving to get to the other side of a sudden change in their lives.

A daringly entertaining debut about the nature of a good life, and a good death

Europeans are in denial. Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, they are increasingly distancing themselves from their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But while the legacy of Islam and the Middle East is in danger of being airbrushed out of Western history, its traces can still be detected in some of Europe's most recognisable monuments, from Notre-Dame to St Paul's Cathedral. In this comprehensively illustrated book, Diana Darke sets out to redress the balance, revealing the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. She tracks the transmission of key innovations from the great capitals of Islam's early empires, Damascus and Baghdad, via Muslim Spain and Sicily into Europe. Medieval crusaders, pilgrims and merchants from Europe later encountered Arab Muslim culture in journeys to the Holy Land. In more recent centuries, that same route through modern-day Turkey connected Ottoman culture with the West, leading Sir Christopher Wren himself to believe that Gothic architecture should more rightly be called 'the Saracen style', because of its Islamic origins. Recovering this overlooked story within the West's long history of borrowing from the Islamic world, Darke sheds new light on Europe's buildings and offers rich insights into the possibilities of cultural exchange.

***WINNER OF THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020*** 'Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius... she is as brilliant a writer as Britain has' Jenny Colgan, Mail Online Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body . . . Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.

"Passionately satirical and sharply observant, he is one of the most interesting of our playwrights" (Sunday Telegraph) The Dead Monkey - "Darke has something both hilarious and horrific to say about the decay of a marriage and he compels the attention while doing so." (Sunday Telegraph) The King of Prussia - "A meaty play...seethes with life, wit and ideas. Darke give shape to a Cornish identity that feels vital and real and has nothing to do with clay pipes and clotted cream. Like Cornwall's coves, it has many unexpected depths...It also raises questions about the points where justice, conscience and the law part company" (Financial Times) The Body - "The best moments in Nick Darke's play are extremely good - and not all good in the same way...the most obvious debt is to Brecht. There are other reminiscences of Auden and Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin, of Tom Stoppard's After Magritte and of T.S Eliot's verse plays." Tin Tang Mine - "A lament for an industry and a way of life; but this should not suggest anything sentimental. The writing is rugged and muscular; lyrical but not ornate; vigorous but not folksy...oddball, quirkily parochial and as authentic as a slice of rough bread." (The Times)