Lost The Plot

'I loved it! It's got a kind of Bridget Jones feel and such a page turner. Great fun but with such beautiful heart. I've already cast the film/series in my head!' Rebecca Gibney 'A warm and very funny read.' Who, 4 stars Vanessa Rooney is a thirty-something dental hygienist who finds herself a single mum with a hole in her heart where her husband had been. Somehow she finds the courage to fulfil her childhood dream of writing a romance novel but soon discovers that her novel has been plagiarised by her idol, celebrity author Charlotte Lancaster. Vanessa reluctantly sues Charlotte with the help of suburban solicitor Dave Rendall, who's nursing some unfulfilled dreams of his own. When gun QC Marcus Stafford agrees to join their legal team, Vanessa feels like her perfect man has stepped right out of the pages of her book and into her life. As all hell breaks loose publicly and privately, Vanessa confronts a painful past and realises what Dave already knew - that she's an intelligent, funny, amazing woman and Marcus Stafford is, well, a tosspot. Vanessa finally understands that what she wanted wasn't what she needed, but has this realisation come too late?

A mysterious archive. A powerful enemy. And a cunning plan. Danger is part of the day job for a Librarian spy. So Irene’s hoping for a relaxing weekend. However, her jaunt to Guernsey proves no such thing. Instead of retrieving a rare book, she’s almost assassinated, Kai is poisoned and Vale barely escapes with his life. Then the attacks continue in London – targeting those connected with the Fae-dragon peace treaty. Irene knows she must stop the plot before the treaty fails. Or someone dies. But when Irene and friends are trapped underground, in a secret archive, things don’t look so good. Then an old enemy demands vengeance, and a shocking secret is revealed. Can Irene really seize victory from chaos? The Dark Archive is the seventh book in the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman. Genevieve is also the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Scarlet - which reimagines the tale of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but with vampires, mages and magic. . . Praise for the series: 'I absolutely loved this' - N. K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season 'Irene is a great heroine: fiery, resourceful and no one's fool' - Guardian 'Brilliant and so much fun. Skullduggery, Librarians, and dragons – Cogman keeps upping the ante on this delightful series!' - Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes series

How do we make sense of life? What’s our identity? Mixing memoir with theological and philosophical reflections, author David Wisener explores his struggle to understand God’s love and acceptance in his heart and how to find his place in the world when life didn’t go according to plan. Exploring the postmodern critique that we live our lives according to stories, Lost the Plot helps us realize how many of the stories we cling to aren’t part of God’s Story. Weaving deeply personal experiences of shattered dreams, bouts of depression, and disillusionment with the church, the book also explores concepts like perception, reality, and love, offering unique insight into the struggles and questions we face in understanding what life is about and what it means to be human.

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.

"It is widely understood that the modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the "tyranny" of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of Victorian, plot-driven novels, Pardis Dabashi shows that plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner-writers known for their moviegoing affinities and connections to early film-Dabashi uses the relationship between literature and the cinema to reveal a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction. Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of Larsen, Barnes, and Faulkner to the tensions in their works, tensions between the formal properties of the novels and the characters in them. In making a distinction between what the novel is doing and what their characters desire, these authors ponder how it is one thing to withhold plot as a gesture of modernist aesthetics, and quite another to be denied the comfort of plot's architecture in one's living and breathing existence"--

Over a decade after the release of their first album, The Dears have weathered the indie fringes, the collapse of the music industry as we knew it and the near implosion of the band itself, with their creative vision and gang dynamic intact. The Dears: Lost in the Plot looks at how The Dears survived the fallout, and helped launch the acclaimed mid-aughts music scene in their hometown of Montréal. The Dears: Lost in the Plot is the first book in Invisible Publishing's new Bibliophonic series. The Bibliophonic Series is a catalogue of the ongoing history of contemporary music. Each book is a time capsule, capturing artists and their work as we see them, providing a unique look at some of today's most exciting musicians.

When did things get so Grimm? A hilarious tale of readers finding themselves immersed in a story - literally! To save the football team, Basil Beedon is roped into listening to reluctant reader and star footballer Terry Clegg read fairytales out loud. Every. Single. Saturday. But when Terry brings over a battered copy of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, and haltingly begins reading Hansel and Gretel, the pair find themselves transported inside the book, having fallen through a plot hole. They meet Gretel, who can’t stop crying, but only because she ‘is written that way’ and endeavour to help find Hansel (who is stuck in a bottle). The bureaucratic world is run by FANCY (the Fairytale Alliance Network of Character Yunions), where Gretel is part of the subset SUPER FANCY (Stereotypical Unempowered Princesses and Extraneous Royalty). She and the boys are accused of breaching SLIP and SLIDE (Safety Laws of Interworld Portals/ Secrecy Laws of Interworld Demystification Experiences). Using a combination of Basil’s bookishness and Terry’s sporting skills, the boys must outwit their opponents, as Basil realises he has always underestimated princesses, and Terry realises that books are growing on him!