The Second and Third Generation have become increasingly active in remembering and researching their families’ pasts, especially now that most refugees from National Socialism have passed away. How was lived experience mediated to them, and how have their own lives and identities been impacted by persecution and flight? This volume offers a valuable insight into the personal experience of the Second Generation, as well as a perceptive analysis of film, art, and literature created by or about the subsequent generations. Recurring themes of silences, transferred trauma, postmemory, and “roots journeys" are explored, revealing the distance, connection, and collaboration between the generations. Contributors are: David Clark, Miriam E. David, Rachel Dickson, Yannick Gnipep-oo Pembouong, Anita H. Grosz, Andrea Hammel, Brean Hammond, Stephanie Homer, Merilyn Moos, Angharad Mountford, Teresa von Sommaruga Howard, Jennifer Taylor, and Sue Vice.

A luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure and loss on the banks of the Nile. ‘Wonderful – a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination’ JENNY UGLOW

Adam O'Riordan's remarkable first collection traces the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, seeking familiarity in a world of 'false trails and disappearing acts'. Here relatives, friends and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh. Journeys begin with indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Whether in graceful elegies for the dead or the charged lyrics of love and desire, poems cross space as well as time, from the 'blackened lung' of Victorian Manchester and the fateful events of the 1913 Derby, to enter a modern era of satellites and late night searches for lost lovers. At the heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence 'Home', a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits. Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of place and presence, longing and loss; of history captured in an irrevocable moment. In the Flesh is a startling debut from one of our finest young British poets.

The award-winning author of The Yellow Birds returns with an extraordinary debut poetry collection. National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience. Just as The Yellow Birds was hailed as the "first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war," this collection will make its mark as a powerful, enduring work (Los Angeles Times).

In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.