‘A wonderful, uplifting story of friendship and courage. Characters that you can't help falling in love with! This new saga series will surely touch the hearts of saga readers everywhere’

A Liberty treasure chest of silks, satin, lace and ribbons with gritty wartime passion at its very core. A gem!

I loved the warmth of the friendship between Mary and her friends and the wonderful world of Liberty’s. It’s a page turner of a book with twists and turns than make you keep on reading to find out what happens next. I’m going to visit Liberty’s next time I go to London as I want to be able to see where the girls worked. Looking forward to find out what happens next in The Liberty Girls.

[McCracken has] considerable gifts as a novelist [and] instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling... This novel’s cast grows epic, but McCracken is always most impressive when she works small, when she is describing movie kisses or corsets or simply loneliness and longing.

Death and life, frosted with macabre comedy: it’s why we’ve enjoyed Elizabeth McCracken since her debut novel, The Giant’s House… nothing is ordinary in this story… There’s a wickedness to McCracken’s technique, the way she lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us… endlessly surprising.

Bowlaway is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss... McCracken’s gloriously vibrant and boisterously surprising narrative voice is one of the great triumphs of Bowlaway... A tour de force.

Wildly entertaining... [A] wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley... Bowlaway celebrates the oddest of oddballs and the freakiest of freak accidents with wit and heart. To read McCracken’s inimitably clever sentences and follow her quirky narrative twists is to be constantly delighted.

Irresistibly quirky… Packed with Dickensian characters and plot devices (orphans, secret wills, hidden treasure…), [Bowlaway is] lyrical and humorous, with some dazzlingly inventive twists. A family saga unlike any other.

McCracken’s imaginative reserves and her delight in outlandish events make [Bowlaway]… a kind of fable – a colourful and often captivating fantasia on New England themes.

McCracken’s newest novel, a 20th-century family epic centered on candlepin bowling, is populated by strange, excellent characters, and unfolds with all the offbeat coziness and heartache of a great American fable: molasses floods, workplace fires, surprising heirs, and all.

McCracken’s book is a little McCrackers – a woman falls from the sky, lands in a graveyard and survives to open a bowling alley… there’s a strong American Gothic, magical realism feel… But who is she really? Or any of us, come to that? As we follow Bertha and her family down the generations, the answer seems to be that people are strange, life is random and what matters is love.

At the turn of the 20th century a woman is discovered unconscious and nearly frozen in a New England cemetery with only a bowling ball, a candlepin, and 15 pounds of gold on her. The National Book Award finalist’s exuberantly weird and wonderful book unravels the mystery.

Bowlaway snatches up every individual that finds joy or tragedy in proximity to the bowling alley and allows them to be observed tenderly and precisely... McCracken’s love of language is the catching kind... In Bowlaway, the journey through McCracken’s lush, piercing prose is the destination.

Reading Elizabeth McCracken—the gorgeously-put-together sentences parading the pages like models on a Paris runway; the crazy, original insights; the definitive, wholly fictional pronouncements—is like going on an automotive safari... I could not stop reading.

McCracken’s delightful prose and rich historical details make this the perfect book to get lost in.

[An] accomplished novel.

Passionate and comically self-aware romanticizing of candlepin bowling itself… genius… McCracken’s… delightful voice and poetic facility have been present since her debut novel… Bowlaway…[is] a towering, hearty, multi-tiered cake, dazzling and confident in its construction.

Praise for Lesley Pearse

Deservedly one of the world's favourite story tellers . . . You simply have to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next

Heart-warming and evocative, a real delight to read

Glorious, heartwarming

Gripping

A narrative that gallops along, this is quintessential Pearse that will delight her army of readers

Evocative, compelling, told from the heart

Must-reads this month

Praise for Lesley Pearse:

Evocative, compelling, told from the heart

Deservedly one of the world's favourite story tellers . . . You simply have to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next.

Gripping.

Evocative, multi-faceted and sometimes disturbing, a story that grips from first page to last.

An impressive book that demands your attention, and rewards your commitment with a beautifully told, richly evocative tale

Comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel's generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics

A mastery of language, a deftness in description, and a dip into surrealist and speculative elements makes The Old Drift a worthwhile study in holding together several storylines through the characterization of those searching for their calling, and the cost of those pursuits

This inventive first novel by Serpell, a Caine Prize winner, spans two centuries in Zambian history, mixing styles from Gothic to Afrofuturist

I recommend Namwali Serpell's 2019 Zambian tour de force The Old Drift. This is a long book – all 563 pages of it – by a writer whose prose and outsize imagination will hold you spellbound throughout

A tremendous novel, completely hypnotising

Listening…brings out to the full Serpell’s dexterity in playing with words and her despairing love for her country