Helen Peters' sequel to The Secret Hen House Theatre has all the same hallmarks: great writing and an emotionally engaging, entertaining story. It's good to be back with Hannah and the other characters - they've been much missed! The novel finds Hannah's farm facing a new threat - a water company wants to flood the land to make a reservoir. How can Hannah stand by and watch as her home, the land her family has farmed for generations, the wildlife, the ancient trees all disappear under a deluge of water? She isn't going to go down without a fight, and the school play might just be the answer. When the going gets tough, the tough take to the stage!
Since the death of her mother, Hannah's family life has been somewhat chaotic. Her father is absorbed by running their dilapidated farm, and the four children are increasingly left to their own devices. These include "farming" each room of the house, looking after an enormous pet sheep called Jasper, and writing and directing plays in a disused hen house. But when the farm is threatened with demolition, Hannah determines to save it and realise her dreams at the same time... Shortlisted for the Waterstones Prize, this is a brilliant story of eccentric family life where the children's imaginations run as free as the farmyard animals. From the award-winning author of Evie's Ghost, Anna at War, The Farm Beneath the Water and the Jasmine Green series for younger readers, this is perfect for fans of Iva Ibbotson and Philippa Pearce.
The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.
A 2017 Claymore Award finalist, Beneath the Water Lilies challenges southern norms of race, gender, sexuality, and love with a braided plot of ghosts, escaped convicts, violence, and voodoo. A romance sparks between Detective Brad Buchanan and Forensic Scientist Callie Crenshaw as they embark on a voodoo-laden trail of clues and close encounters to uncover the supernatural murder of an old man and a 70-year-old unlikely love story interrupted by unfathomable evil.There beneath the water lilies lies her silent frame. Let's see if we can summon her by calling out her name. . . In the muddy bottoms of Gould, Arkansas, the children hold hands and circle round and round chanting "Beneath the Water Lilies." They know "Ring around the Roses" and "London Bridge Is Falling Down" and even "Lizzy Borden," but they don't sing those nearly as much. Celia was real, and she was theirs-one of them-a fourteen-year-old girl who mysteriously vanished one brisk November night in 1948. A rumor spread that her body had been dumped in Wolf Slough, one side of which is covered with a green carpet of lily pads. The authorities never dredged the slough looking for remains because no credible evidence suggested that her body was there-only a rumor and a chant that every child in Gould for the past 70 years learned when they were young. No one knows who made it up. Someone did, though. Someone taught it to children.
