Quite Early One Morning

A dazzling collection of prose from one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century.

Thomas's unfinished novel of a Welsh boy's adventures in London is accompanied by twenty short stories.

'As gripping as any thriller' Daily Mail A grey dawn in 1943: on a street in Rome, two young women, complete strangers to each other, lock eyes for a single moment. One of the women, Chiara Ravello, is about to flee the occupied city for the safety of her grandparents' house in the hills. The other has been herded on to a truck with her husband and their young children, and will shortly be driven off into the darkness. In that endless-seeming moment, before she has time to think about what she is doing, Chiara makes a decision that changes her life for ever. Loudly claiming the woman's son as her own nephew, she demands his immediate return; only as the trucks depart does she begin to realize what she has done. She is twenty-seven, single, with a sister who needs her constant care, a hazardous journey ahead of her, and now a child in her charge - a child with no papers who refuses to speak and gives every indication that he will bolt at the first opportunity. Three decades later, Chiara lives alone in Rome, a self-contained, self-possessed woman working as a translator and to all appearances quite content with a life which revolves around work, friends, music and the theatre. But always in the background is the shadow of Daniele, the boy from the truck, whose absence haunts her every moment. Gradually we learn of the havoc wrought on Chiara, her family and her friends by the boy she rescued, and how he eventually broke her heart. And when she receives a phone call from a teenage girl named Maria, claiming to be Daniele's daughter, Chiara knows that it is time for her to face up to the past. This epic novel is an unforgettably powerful, suspenseful, heartbreaking and inspiring tale of love, loss and war's reverberations down the years.

The award-winning first Parlabane thriller mixes paranoia and politics for “a lean, nasty, fun little page-turner” about a powerful Scottish scion’s murder (The New York Times). Investigative journalist Jack Parlabane has visited plenty of crime scenes, but whoever carved up Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby wanted to send a particularly revolting message. As jet-lagged, hungover, and nauseated as he may be, Parlabane knows this was no break-in gone wrong. Dr. Sarah Slaughter, anaesthetist and ex-wife of the victim, is beginning to believe it, too. Ponsonby had plenty of secrets, but the motivations for her ex-husband’s murder cut even deeper than they can imagine. Are Parlabane and Slaughter a match for the skullduggery? It depends on how much more of the black morals and full-color bloodshed of the Edinburgh medical society they can stomach in this “thrillingly unpleasant” winner of the First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year (Esquire).

The most complete and current edition of Dylan Thomas' collected poetry in a beautiful gift edition celebrating the centenary of his birth The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched. This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.

A collection of poems written by Dylan Thomas between 1934 and 1952.