The SYLE Press
Holly Ash – once a straggle of rural cottages a tram’s ride from Liverpool – has been transformed, Frank Bates discovers when he returns years later as local boy made good. Now a director of Amalgamated Cables, and son-in-law of the chairman, he is shocked to see that in place of Ash Cottages …
The Fratellini Winter they had called it, after the Italian scientist who had first detected the decline in solar radiation. The seasons pass and the cold bites ever harder. The Thames freezes over, stocks of food and fuel run low, and London falls under martial law. That first arctic winter, it seems, was only …
‘It is always nonsense for us that says some are chosen and others left to die. If that should be, it is better not to be chosen.’
‘You mean, we’re all chosen.’
‘No,’ Dadda said. ‘I mean, we are all left to die.’
One night, the island of Guernsey convulsed. As shock followed shock, the landscape tilted violently in defiance of gravity. When dawn came and the quakes had stilled to tremblings, Matthew Cotter gazed out in disbelief at the pile of rubble that had been his home…
London in the late forties: strange shifting times in the aftermath of the war. A motley sample of humanity has washed up on the shores of the down-at-heel boarding house that is 36 Regency Gardens, their mutual proximity enforced by shared impoverishment…
In 1949, Sam Youd – who would later go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – published his first novel. As he later said:
I knew first novels tended to be autobiographical and was determined to avoid that. So my main character was a woman …
An Englishman’s home, supposedly, is his castle, and property developer Rod Gawfrey was incensed when a gang of hooligans gatecrashed his son’s party, infiltrating the luxury residence that was also home to his wife’s parents and her sister Jane.
When the storm rages and the avalanche cuts off power and phone lines, no one in the chalet is particularly bothered. There are kerosene lamps, a well-stocked bar and food supplies more than adequate to last them till the road to Nidenhaut can be opened up…
The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads…
Five people enter the Frohnberg caves, three men and two women. In the glare of the Austrian sunshine, the cool underground depths seem an attractive proposition – until the collapse of a cave wall blocks their return to the outside world. Faced with an unexplored warren of tunnels and caves …
Long Lane was in great contrast to the busy Liverpool road from which it branched. It was narrow and not made up, a ribbon of mud and stone between walls, perhaps three feet high, constructed...
‘We’re all here now. We can be off.’ His words emphasized rather than covered the gap; without Patricia’s thin restless figure, her untidy near-auburn hair, they were so obviously not all present. Patrick said nothing,...
During that summer, Frank grew into being an integral member of the citizens. He was accepted in different ways by the different children – most enthusiastically by Diana, least by Patricia. Enthusiasm as such did...
‘I could have a word with Arnold, and get him to agree to have the whole thing quietly dropped. There shouldn’t be any difficulty about that. Or we can let it go through to the...
He heard John’s voice, muffled: ‘Push off, Paddy,’ and Patrick’s more boisterous cry: ‘Heave ho, me hearties!’ There was the scrape of wood, and the voices diminishing. He waited for a couple of minutes, his...
‘Why pick me out to have overwhelming ambitions? What about yourself?’ She smiled. ‘What about John?’ ‘John’s ambitions are on the surface. He isn’t as complex as you are, darling.’ Frank took up the oars...
Patrick put down his brush. ‘Two weeks? We’ll have this work finished this afternoon. What are we going to wait for?’ ‘For you to do a little job,’ John told him. ‘How on earth do...
‘Where you excel? It didn’t take me long to find out. I’ve never known anybody who learned things so quickly, with so little effort. I guessed it that first afternoon, over tea.’ ‘Yes, I was...
‘It’s the way you handle things. You go about them the way John would if he were here – with what I can only describe as a large-handed confidence. Neither of you have particularly large...
‘How conventional death makes us,’ she said. ‘Not like birth. I remember when the twins were born, Oliver picked each of them up in turn and tossed them so high that the midwife swore Paddy...