Will Harker has always believed the best things in life are free: the great outdoors, a good laugh, a perfectly steeped brew. He's earning his keep as an apprentice farrier at Stanley Lampitt's workshop - although his gaffer would say he makes half the money and causes double the trouble. But business isn't exactly booming. While Stanley's trying to make ends meet Will is handed a wedge of family inheritance - and a problem as big as a horse to sort out... As every Yorkshireman knows, where there's muck there's brass. So just how dirty are Will's hands going to get? A laugh-out-loud caper packed with Yorkshire humour, heart and charm, from the author of Forging On - longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize 2019.
In the glorious May of 1998, the governors of the Tanswold School Trust are looking forward to a new era in which they are about to build a new dining hall for their independent school. However, the unbridled optimism soon turns to despondency as they realise that the bursar has been doing DIY stock-broking with a very large bequest which has provided security for the school. For the band of elderly socialites that form the governing body this is not just a disaster, but a scandal that attracts the attention of the fraud squad of the Middle Riding of Yorkshire Constabulary who open up a financial can of worms. And it’s not just financial; the appalling standard of hygiene in the school dining hall leads to a serious outbreak of food-poisoning with heart-breaking consequences. The headmaster is placed under the spotlight and his management becomes more and more capricious as the spotlight is shone on him. The remaining part of the summer term becomes more and more of a comedy of errors as he loses his grip. As for speech day...
From rebels to writers, athletes to astronauts, join Kate Fox takes on an entertaining and eye-opening journey through the lives of these extraordinary women whose lives and achievements have too long been hidden.
“Those who lament that the novel has lost its prophecy should pay heed and cover-price: Muck is the future, both of Jerusalem and of literature. God is showing some rare good taste, by choosing to speak to us through Dror Burstein.” —Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers In a Jerusalem both ancient and modern, where the First Temple squats over the populace like a Trump casino, where the streets are literally crawling with prophets and heathen helicopters buzz over Old Testament sovereigns, two young poets are about to have their lives turned upside down. Struggling Jeremiah is worried that he might be wasting his time trying to be a writer; the great critic Broch just beat him over the head with his own computer keyboard. Mattaniah, on the other hand, is a real up-and-comer—but he has a secret he wouldn’t want anyone in the literary world to know: his late father was king of Judah. Jeremiah begins to despair, and in that despair has a vision: that Jerusalem is doomed, and that Mattaniah will not only be forced to ascend to the throne but will thereafter witness his people slaughtered and exiled. But what does it mean to tell a friend and rival that his future is bleak? What sort of grudges and biases turn true vision into false prophecy? Can the very act of speaking a prediction aloud make it come true? And, if so, does that make you a seer, or just a schmuck? Dramatizing the eternal dispute between poetry and power, between faith and practicality, between haves and have-nots, Dror Burstein’s Muck is a brilliant and subversive modern-dress retelling of the book of Jeremiah: a comedy with apocalyptic stakes by a star of Israeli fiction.
