'A beautifully crafted and hugely uplifting tale of friendship, history and love. A real gem' HEAT magazine 'A captivating tale of love and loss' SUNDAY EXPRESS magazine 'A stunning book, brilliantly written ... THE SONG OF THE SKYLARK will totally captivate you and your emotions, impossible to put down' Kaye Thorne Lizzie has an unfortunate knack for attracting bad luck, but this time she's hit the jackpot. Losing her heart to her boss at the radio station where she works leads directly to losing her job, and with no money in the bank she's forced to swallow her pride and return home to her parents. As if that wasn't bad enough, her mother finds her work at the local care home for the elderly, and it's there that Lizzie meets Mrs Dallimore. In her nineties, Mrs Dallimore also finds herself in a situation which she's reluctantly coming to terms with. Old age has finally caught up with her, and with her life drawing to a close she gives in to the temptation to relive the past by sharing it with Lizzie. She tells Lizzie of the day when, as a young girl, and shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she left her home in America to cross the Atlantic to England where she hoped to meet her English grandparents for the first time. At best she hoped for a family reconciliation, but before long her visit turned into so much more. As Lizzie listens to Mrs Dallimore's story, she begins to realize that she's not the only person to attract bad luck, or make mistakes, and maybe things aren't so bad for her after all . . .

Skylark is the story of the tormented but glorious life and career of Johnny Mercer, and the first biography of this enormously popular and influential lyricist. Raised in Savannah, Mercer brought a quintessentially southern style to both his life in New York and to his lyrics, which often evoked the landscapes and mood of his youth ("Moon River", "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). Mercer also absorbed the music of southern blacks--the lullabies his nurse sang to him as a baby and the spirituals that poured out of Savannah's churches-and that cool smooth lyrical style informed some of his greatest songs, such as "That Old Black Magic". Part of a golden guild whose members included Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Mercer took Hollywood by storm in the midst of the Great Depression. Putting words to some of the most famous tunes of the time, he wrote one hit after another, from "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to "Jeepers Creepers" and "Hooray for Hollywood." But it was also in Hollywood that Mercer's dark underside emerged. Sober, he was a kind, generous and at times even noble southern gentleman; when he drank, Mercer tore into friends and strangers alike with vicious abuse. Mercer's wife Ginger, whom he'd bested Bing Crosby to win, suffered the cruelest attacks; Mercer would even improvise cutting lyrics about her at parties. During World War II, Mercer served as Americas's troubadour, turning out such uplifting songs as "My Shining Hour" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." He also helped create Capitol Records, the first major West Coast recording company, where he discovered many talented singers, including Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. During this period, he also began an intense affair with Judy Garland, which rekindled time and again for the rest of their lives. Although they never found happiness together, Garland became Mercer's muse and inspired some of his most sensuous and heartbreaking lyrics: "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Mercer amassed a catalog of over a thousand songs and during some years had a song in the Top Ten every week of the year--the songwriting equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak--but was plagued by a sense of failure and bitterness over the big Broadway hit that seemed forever out of reach. Based on scores of interviews with friends, family and colleagues, and drawing extensively on Johnny Mercer's letters, papers and his unpublished autobiography, Skylark is an important book about one of the great and dramatic characters in 20th century popular music.

'A thoughtful and passionate memoir, moving and respectful' Tessa Hadley Huw Lewis was born in Merthyr in 1964. His father an engineer at the Hoover factory, his mother first a housewife then a nurse. He has two older sisters and a younger brother, they were all brought up in the village of Aberfan in south Wales. To Hear the Skylark's Song is a memoir about how Aberfan survived and eventually thrived after the terrible disaster of the 21st of October 1966, when Pantglas school took the full force of thousands of tons of colliery waste and a community lost a generation of children. It is a story about how people held a community together and created a space for each other to thrive. It is also a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful story of what it was like to grow up in a Valley's community in the 70s: a thriving place of people, shops, clubs, chapel concerts, coal mines, interwoven with gossip and stories and, of course, the annual bus trip to Barry Island. Aberfan found a way to carry on, and Huw vividly brings to life how the sense of community provided strength and comfort in the shadow of a lifetime-long grief. A community that continues to innovate and inspire.

A memoir from one of Britain's legendary singers, folklorists, and music historians. A legendary singer, folklorist, and music historian, Shirley Collins has been an integral part of the folk-music revival for more than sixty years. In her new memoir, All in the Downs, Collins tells the story of that lifelong relationship with English folksong—a dedication to artistic integrity that has guided her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life. All in the Downs combines elements of memoir—from her working-class origins in wartime Hastings to the bright lights of the 1950s folk revival in London—alongside reflections on the role traditional music and the English landscape have played in shaping her vision. From formative field recordings made with Alan Lomax in the United States to the “crowning glories” recorded with her sister Dolly on the Sussex Downs, she writes of the obstacles that led to her withdrawal from the spotlight and the redemption of a new artistic flourishing that continues today with her unexpected return to recording in 2016. Through it all, Shirley Collins has been guided and supported by three vital and inseparable loves: traditional English song, the people and landscape of her native Sussex, and an unwavering sense of artistic integrity. All in the Downs pays tribute to these passions, and in doing so, illustrates a way of life as old as England, that has all but vanished from this land. Generously illustrated with rare archival material.

"Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World" combines popular music culture, science fiction fantasy, and horror to create a uniquely engaging metaphysical epic. The story takes us inside the world of Danny Blue, a young man struggling to make peace with the death of his girlfriend, a gifted artist named Valerie Hyerman whose passing sparks the creation of a controversial spiritual movement. Was her death suicide, murder, or something completely different from either? The stunning truth unfolds in Froggtown, a college community where many people are said to have ?died dirty? and wander the streets in search of release from a spiritual limbo. Such a town seems an unlikely place for a superstar musician like Jimmy Redfyre to kick off his tour on Christmas Eve, or for his main rival Ruzahn to keep popping up in Danny Blue?s life. Both musicians, it turns out, are something much more than entertainers. And both, for some reason, have released songs about Danny?s life? Equally bizarre are the strange changes he begins to experience as he seems to evolve from an ordinary human to something not so ordinary at all. Written with the visionary intensity of Franz Kafka, the mystical poetics of Khalil Gibran, and the psychological complexity of Philip K. Dick, "Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World" is a one-of-kind work of extraordinary modern fiction.

In the middle of his life, Jack Grout found himself abducted by aliens. There were other things. His wife left him. His son came one night to the Skylark Lounge - the pool hall Jack bought after throwing in his job in newspaper advertising - and punched him. And there was the mistreatment for melanoma. But what Jack really needed to know was why the aliens, who had first taken him when he was nine years old and shown him his life in unbearably vivid close-up, had returned.