The Flesh Market

It is Edinburgh, 1822, and young Robbie is eight years old when he witnesses his mother's pain and subsequent death from an operation - without anaesthetic - to remove a tumour from her breast at the hands of Dr Knox. Haunted by this terrible event, Robbie, his hapless father and baby sister Essie attempt to move on with their lives. But when Robbie's father loses all their money and disappears, Robbie is left to look after himself and his sister in the Edinburgh slums. Somehow he falls in with Burke and Hare, the two men whom Knox employs to 'collect' bodies for medical research. Robbie sees a way to avenge his mother's death. Convincing himself that Knox is having people killed for him to experiment on, Robbie eventually confronts him. But Robbie comes to realise that for all his hard-heartedness and corrupt methods, Knox's motives are ultimately for the good: to improve surgical conditions, and operate on patients with the greatest speed and therefore minimum risk. Robbie eventually trains to be a surgeon, finally giving meaning to his mother's tragic death.

"Doon the wynds an' up the streets, Where revenants sought souls tae eat, The Butcher called for twitching meat An' Burke an' Hare did answer." -anon. 1827. A year after the Cadaver Riots tore the heart from Edinburgh. Fear still chokes the Old Town, for though the revenants were driven back with shot and steel, they still lurk in the city's shadowed closes. When night falls, they strike. In dissecting rooms anatomists slice twitching flesh as they dream of cures and glory. For the greatest among them, Robert Knox, there is no price that cannot be met in the quest for knowledge. Behind closed doors he trades in walking death, dealing with devils to keep the flesh market supplied... Set between the slums of 19th Century Edinburgh and the ivory towers of its academia, The Flesh Market is an almost true story of murder, mad science, obsession, and the restless dead. "The setting is absorbing and vivid, the period fascinating and the distant echoes of this factual case are compelling in themselves, but it is the characters who bring this story to life. For a tale so concerned with death, it's bursting with human vitality." - J.J. Marsh, Bookmuse (bookmuse.co.uk)

Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

The SUNDAY TIMES No 1 bestselling author is back...

"Doon the wynds an' up the streets,Where revenants sought souls tae eat,The Butcher called for twitching meatAn' Burke an' Hare did answer."-anon.1827. A year after the Cadaver Riots tore the heart from Edinburgh. Fear still chokes the Old Town, for though the revenants were driven back with shot and steel they yet lurk in the city's shadowed closes. When night falls, they strike.In dissecting rooms anatomists slice twitching flesh as they dream of cures and glory. For the greatest among them, Robert Knox, there is no price that cannot be met in the quest for knowledge. Behind closed doors he trades in walking death, dealing with devils to keep the flesh market supplied...Set amidst the slums of 19th Century Edinburgh and the ivory towers of its academia, The Flesh Market is an almost true story of murder, mad science, obsession, and the restless dead."The setting is absorbing and vivid, the period fascinating and the distant echoes of this factual case are compelling in themselves, but it is the characters who bring this story to life. For a tale so concerned with death, it's bursting with human vitality." - J.J. Marsh, Bookmuse (bookmuse.co.uk)

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award – from the University Coop (Austin, TX) Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR) Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

There is only one rule for a vampire – never target your own kind. The winding streets and alleys of modern-day Edinburgh hold a deadly secret. Disappearances are increasing at an alarming rate and the authorities are helpless to stop them. Danny, a naïve nineteen-year-old, is plunged headfirst into the frightening and deadly world of the supernatural when his older sister Aurelia is attacked and abducted in front of him. Injured and left with a permanent disability, Danny must hunt for her attacker if he is to discover Aurelia’s fate. Mercy is a six-hundred-year-old loner who is as jaded with the vampire community as she is with humans. However, when a reckless nest of vampires move to Edinburgh and start feeding from the poor and homeless, Mercy becomes increasingly desperate to stop them. A coincidental meeting unites Danny and Mercy. She needs him to do what she cannot: kill the vampires. He needs her to help him overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles and become a feared vampire hunter. Together they set off into the unknown with just one certainty: if they fail, not only will Aurelia remain lost, Danny, Mercy, and many of the city’s most helpless will die.