Lights Down

Lights Down . . . when debts owed must be paid in blood. Actress Enora Andressen is facing the perfect storm. Her favourite French director, Remy Despret, has lost his touch and is keeping dangerous company. Her agent, Rosa, has been seduced by a kiss-and-tell novel of doubtful provenance. While H, sicker by the day at home at Flixcombe Manor, is battling both Long Covid and something far darker. Devoting herself to H, Enora needs good news, and it arrives in the shape of a fascinating Remy idea based on Flixcombe's role during the Second World War. But the tonic soon turns sour when Enora is drawn into the project, with chilling consequences.

Inspired by a marionette show he saw, C.S. Forester, a novelist and theatre lover, decided to create his own puppet theatre at home. In Marionettes at Home, first published in 1936, he shares his experience and enthusiasm for amateur puppeteering and takes the reader step-by-step through the stages of creating one's own theatre; from stage construction and puppet making, to acting and production. Written with passion and sense of humour Marionettes at Home is a little gem that anyone interested in the theatre and puppeteering history would enjoy.

“A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir. In these pages, we watch Cree LeFavour evolve from a wounded (and wounding) lost girl to a woman who can at last regard her existence with a modicum of mercy and forgiveness...a story of true self-salvation and transformation.”—Elizabeth Gilbert As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour's began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed to an unblemished patch of skin calling out for attention and the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to the skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years, allowing us to feel the pull of a stark compulsion taking over a mind. We see the world as Cree did—turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady, vertiginous thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. X—whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing—comes to be the only bright spot in her mental solitude. Her extraordinary access to and inclusion of the notes kept by Dr. X during treatment offer concrete evidence of Cree’s transformation over 3 years of therapy. But it is her own evocative and razor-sharp prose that traces a path from a lonely and often sad childhood to her reluctant commitment to and emergence from a psychiatric hospital, to the saving refuge of literature and eventual acceptance of love. Moving deftly between the dialogue and observations from psychiatric records and elegant, incisive reflection on youth and early adulthood, Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.

Based on the bestselling book by Osha Gray Davidson, BEST OF ENEMIES is a true story about the relationship between C.P. Ellis, a Grand Cyclops of the KKK, and Ann Atwater, an African-American civil rights activist, during the desegregation of the Durham, North Carolina, schools in 1971. BEST OF ENEMIES exposes the poison of prejudice in the hearts of Atwater and Ellis who, by facing each other, are forced to face the worst, and best, in themselves.