The Silence Living in Houses unlocks the doors to houses of secrets and dreams where ghosts of the past are more real than the living. In unsettling poems rich with intrigue, Esther Morgan traces the presence of those whose stories are fading like the wallpaper: the servant girl who smashed the dinner service and disappeared; the sisters whose macabre end is still spoken of in whispers; the mistress who breathes sweet nothings from behind the roses. At the heart of the book is the darkest of interiors where the threat and practice of violence forges a bond as unbreakable as the Mafia's code. But not all these houses are unsafe: the final poems summon up the haunted blood of family, revealing how what remains unspoken is as much concerned with love as it is with loss.

"A group of notable writers ... celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past"--Provided by publisher.

Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

When I was 5 years old my father inserted mashed chillies into my genitals and burned my eyes with a flaming torch.’ Life Behind the Silence is a heartbreaking and inspiring autobiography which gives hope to children and women who have been abused. Gina Azizah’s Malaysian childhood was not filled with toys, presents and love, it was filled with physical, sexual and mental abuse from a monsterous father and a dysfunctional family. Her childhood was punctated by episodes of abuse from the very people who should have been caring for her – even her grandfather (a Muslim priest) tried to rape her. Gina had no one she could tell about her abuse – who would believe her word against that of respected members of the community? So Gina has now chosen to give voice to the darkness of her childhood in her memoir Life Behind the Silence.Gina’s story proves that if you believe in yourself and are strong, anything is possible.

This story begins when I was much older, worlds away from those early years, and I had a daughter of my own. Im Miranda, and Im living a life Ive prepared myself. But that life never came. My parents worried about me. So did my teachers. Though the safe path was always right in front of me, I kept veering off it into something which did not seem unknown or perilous until it was too late to prevent the damage. My aunts and uncles referred to me as a free spirit and exchanged glances, which suggested in an adult way that they were a little worried about how I was going to turn out. Despite my mothers many attempts at reeducation, I never quite got over that impulse toward wandering and adventure that got me into so much troublenot until the events which form the basis of this story, anyway.

Winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, The Game of Silence is the second novel in the critically acclaimed Birchbark House series by New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich. Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior. One day in 1850, Omakayas’s island is visited by a group of mysterious people. From them, she learns that the chimookomanag, or white people, want Omakayas and her people to leave their island and move farther west. That day, Omakayas realizes that something so valuable, so important that she never knew she had it in the first place, could be in danger: Her way of life. Her home. The Birchbark House Series is the story of one Ojibwe family’s journey through one hundred years in America. The New York Times Book Review raved about The Game of Silence: “Erdrich has created a world, fictional but real: absorbing, funny, serious and convincingly human.”

‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.