A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple's attempt to adopt a child.But would you take a ginger child? A social worker asks Patrick Flanery as he and his husband embark on their four-year odyssey of trying to adopt. This curious question comes to haunt the journey, which Flanery recounts with startling candour as he explores what it means to make a family as a queer couple, to be an outsider in a foreign country, to grapple with the inheritance of intergenerational loss, and to discover that the emotions we feel are sometimes as mysterious to ourselves as to others.Reviews For The Ginger Child:'It is shocking, and consoling, in its honesty.' - Emma Brockes'this is a book to be savoured' - Jackie Kay'A rare, brilliant and essential exploration of adoption'- John D'AgataThis uniquely powerful book moves deftly between heartbreaking memoir and...

From the critically acclaimed author of Absolution, a literary page-turner set in the American heartland. Poplar Farm has been in Louise's family for generations, inherited by her sharecropping forbearer from a white landowner after a lynching. Now the farm has been carved up, the trees torn down—a mini-massacre replicating the history of many farms before it, and the destruction of lives and societies taking place all across America. Architect of this destruction is Paul Krovik, a property developer soon driven insane by the failure of his ambition. Left behind is a half-finished "luxury suburb" of neo-Victorian homes on the outskirts of a sprawling midwestern city. To Paul it is a collapsed dream, but to Julia and Nathaniel, arriving from their small Boston apartment, it is a new start, promising a bucolic future. With their son, Copley, they buy Paul's signature home in a foreclosure sale and move in to their brave new world. Yet...

Jeremy O'Keefe, a middle-aged Professor of History, returns to his native New York after a decade teaching at Oxford, hoping to reconnect with his daughter and rebuild the life he left behind. He settles into a rhythm of long evenings spent alone after a day teaching students he barely knows. Then a strange encounter with a young man who presumes an acquaintance Jeremy cannot remember and a series of disconcerting events leave him with a growing conviction that he is being watched. The young man keeps appearing, a haunting figure lingers outside his apartment at night, and mysterious packages begin to arrive. As his grip on reality seems to shift and turn, Jeremy struggles to know whether he can believe what he is experiencing, or whether his mind is in the grip of an irrational obsession. I Am No One explores the tenuous link between fear and paranoia in our post-Snowden lives: a world of surveillance and self-censorship, where privacy no longer exists and our freedoms are...