Part-time librarian Molly Matthews lives with the painful and exhausting chronic illness ME. The condition has broken every part of her life, except that she has plenty of time to escape into books. Especially her favourite fantasy series, Tamass the Fearless. And when Molly escapes, she really escapes, because she possesses a rare talent that allows her to enter a book and meet its characters and share their adventures. Molly is a Storywalker. Novelist Paul Best doesn’t walk in stories, but he’s always been good at making them up. At least, that’s what he believes, until he learns that he’s spent years unconsciously channelling the life of his unknown twin brother Tamass as the hero of his successful series. When Tamass turns up at Paul’s door one dark and stormy night with murderous demons on his tail, it’s the start of a frantic multiverse-hopping adventure. And then there’s Molly, one of Paul’s readers, a woman who is so quietly ill in one world that she’s nearly invisible, but who is seen riding a warrior dragon in other worlds. A generation ago, the ruthless demon Baron Rake put an end to the snooping of Paul’s and Tamass’s parents into his plans to enslave the multiverse. He is furious when their sons and Molly pick up the investigation again just when he’s about to make his final move. Separately, and each with the help of friends old and new, Molly and Paul cross worlds that leak people, creatures, and mythologies back and forth, and their paths converge as they fight against impossible odds to save their entire multiverse.

There is a great deal of polemical interest in churches across the UK, US and Europe about applying ideas from the world of leadership and management to Christian ministry. On one side of the debate are those who wish to apply (sometimes quite uncritically) quantitative approaches which they hope will enable churches to be run in a more ‘business-like’ manner. On the other side there are those who argue that insights from organizational studies have no place in churches whatsoever. This innovative and original book argues that the qualitative thinking about organizational narrative can provide significant insights into how churches function, which is much more in keeping with their ethos and history. As well as analysing how stories and storytelling work in churches it also provides practical ideas for how they can be used to improve church leadership. Taking the work of organizational thinkers and researchers and bringing it into conversation with biblical scholars, theologians, and church historians, the authors establish a conversation across these disciplines and explore how story and narrative work through and within churches. Table of Contents: 1. What Is Leadership? 2. Leading the Stories and Storying the Leading 3. Stories and Identities: Story, Character and Becoming 4. Living in Multiple Stories 5. Who Owns the Story? 6. Church Narratives: Interpretive Stories 7. Church Narratives: Identity Stories 8. Church Narratives: Improvised Stories 9. Curating Congregational Stories in a Tick Box Church?

Named one of Time magazine's most influential leaders of her generation, celebrated writer Rebecca Walker delivers her stunning debut novel--a heartbreaking, unforgettable love story in the tradition of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Marguerite Duras's The Lover.

This collection of original and classic essays examines the contributions that female authors have made to the short story. The introductory chapter discusses why genre critics have ignored works by women and why feminist scholars have ignored the short story genre. Subsequent chapters discuss early stories by such authors as Lydia Maria Child and Rose Terry Cooke. Others are devoted to the influences (race, class, sexual orientation, education) that have shaped women's short fiction through the years. Women's special stylistic, formal and thematic concerns are also discussed in this study. The final essay addresses the ways our contemporary creative-writing classes are stifling the voices of emerging young female authors. The collection includes an extensive five-part bibliography.

You'll be doing all the work. You'll be picking apart plots, analyzing characters, exploring the setting of biblical narratives, and engaging with narrative levels and reader response theory. And you'll be doing all the work. This is a book about you, the reader. Drawing on narrative theory, this book places readers in the way of the story, reading biblical narrative through fresh eyes. Using entertaining explanations of literary theory, it liberates readers to read their own chosen Bible stories with a fresh understanding of how narratives work. Practical activities will inspire the reader to develop their own understanding of stories and, in doing so, this book tackles hallowed and authoritarian interpretations that can sometimes get in the way of the story. This is a book of clear explanation and practical application.