I'd fallen in love with the idea of living... because we don't do what we want to do, do we? We do what we have to do and pretend that it's what we want to do. Shirley Valentine is the joyous, life-affirming story of the woman who got lost in marriage and motherhood, the woman who wound up talking to the kitchen wall whilst cooking her husband's chips and egg. But Shirley still has a secret dream. And in her bag, an airline ticket... One day she may just leave a note, saying: 'Gone! Gone to Greece.' Willy Russell's celebrated one-woman play originally premiered in 1986 and became an instant classic, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and later being adapted into a successful film. This revised edition was published to coincide with the 2023 revival starring double Olivier Award and BAFTA winner Sheridan Smith.

Shirley Valentine, 42-year-old put-upon mother and housewife, leaves the drudgery of cooking dinner for her husband, packs her bags and heads for the sun. The note on the kitchen table reads "Gone to Greece back in two weeks." "It is a simple and brilliant idea...the profound and perennial point of the comedy is the problem we seem to have contemplating the idea of a woman alone - in a pub, on a beach, in a restaurant. This is what Shirley learns to combat as she unravels her own sexual and social identity. The play is not only funny, it is also moving." (Michael Coveney, Financial Times) One for the Road "starts...with the mid-life hero torn between the security of married life in a dormer bungalow on a northern housing estate and dreams of being a rucksacked super-tramp. Mr Russell writes with knowledgeable venom about a world where Beethoven Underpass leads to Wagner Walkway and where anyone who doesn't join Weight Watchers or the Ramblers Club is regarded as a social deviant." (Francis King, Sunday Telegraph)

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

A demon thinks of a special gift to win the love of a lady dragon on Valentine's Day.

A debut novelist interweaves a trio of voices--haunting, dangerous, full of longing--mysteriously linked by a shocking crime and the search to heal the past Many long years have passed since the winter of blinding white when Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate drove across the hushed midwestern landscape and left a trail of blood and pain. So why does Lowell, a Manhattan collector of antiquities, still dream of what happened, despite his wife's best attempts to draw him back and offer comfort? And who is Susan, the teenager who appoints herself a detective, piecing together the story of the murders while wondering if she'll ever be loved like Starkweather loved his girl? And then there's Caril Ann herself, who takes us back to relive the ride she swears she could not control. It began on the day Charlie first saw her, dangling her bare legs off the edge of a tree house. It ended outside Valentine, Nebraska, on that night when she still believed that life could somehow go back to being normal . . . ' Every so often a novel comes along that is capable of redeeming the losses it so devastatingly conveys. Disturbing, bittersweet, and lyrical, Liza Ward's Outside Valentine is a story of people torn apart by tragedy and yet, finally, transformed by love.

"Inside Mrs Joe Bradshaw--42-year-old mother of two grown children--is the former Shirley Valentine longing to get out. Her hope and self-confidence badly shattered by school, marriage and life, she is reduced to talking to the kitchen wall whilst preparing her husband's evening meal--to be on the table as he opens the front door every night. As she sips a glass of wine she dreams of drinking in a country where the grape is grown. Her feminist friend offers her a holiday in Greece and, with great trepidation and a lot of forward planning, Shirley seized the opportunity and goes, to encounter a totally different lifestyle. Shirley, breaking out of the mould cast for her by society, is brilliantly shown with humour, warm sympathy and human insight by the author of Educating Rita and Blood brothers"--