Paul Schaffer

The Veiled Sun is a Holocaust memoir written in a highly literate style. Paul Schaffer spent his teenage years on the run from the Nazis in Austria, Belgium and France, and then in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945. He survived to become a successful industrialist who was honoured by the government of France. Paul Schaffer’s story provides insights into a middle-class Jewish childhood in pre-war Vienna, attitudes to Jewish refugees in Vichy France, arrest and detention in France, survival in Auschwitz, and the return to post-war France to face the challenges of re-integration into French society.

Published with the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.

Shoshanna Wingate

Radio Weather explores the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems. Wingate tracks the moments that alter us from who we might have been to who we are, in narratives of rural poverty, urban decay, a child’s improbable friendship with a murderer, a father’s death from AIDS. “The days depart in minor steps,” she writes, “then slip away for costume change.” Radio Weather is a memorable debut by a poet of exceptional promise.

Advance Praise for Radio Weather:

“Clear-eyed, musical, deeply-considered and deeply-felt, Radio Weather contends with the inhospitable. Bringing both child and adult perspectives to bear, it calls to account both the living and the dead. Brilliantly-crafted and wise, occupying a provisional space that is both wary and compassionate, somewhere ‘between what we didn’t want and what we could afford,’ these are poems of great psychological tension, poems for grown ups.” —Patrick Warner, author of Perfection

Beginning with the arrival of the Campbell clan in Canada in 1827— “pale Scot farmers fording the river, / seated backwards in refusal”—Laws & Locks tracks the history of one family’s struggle with depression, madness and mental illness. Chad Campbell’s first book of poetry is a brilliant investigation, at once dazzling and unflinching, into the way our predecessors bear on our choices in the present, and how present-day consequences extend backwards in time. A skilled, self-possessed and clear-eyed poet, Campbell has produced a work of art that, while not quite confessional, transforms the private, dark, often stigmatized regions of his life into powerful poetry. It is a bracing debut. “Come now to the burning forest / not burning anymore and feel / safe enough.”

Andy Sinclair

A bold and explicit debut novel by one of the most visceral new voices in gay fiction. Breathing Lessons is the story of Henry Moss, a homosexual everyman whose life knows none of the limitations or abuses his predecessors experienced. When a teenaged Henry came out to his mother, she worried only that he’d be lonely. At the time, he thought her concerns were old-fashioned. Two decades later, he’s had supportive family and friends, he’s well-liked by the athletes who train with him, trusted in his professional life, parties whenever he pleases, and performs all manner of sexual acts with whomever he wants. But as he gets older and, increasingly, the men he sleeps with are married, Henry finds that his mother may have been right. Can he find the lasting intimacy he craves in his life amidst the equal-opportunity freedom afforded by his generation’s openness? Learning to navigate between the two is as delicate as learning to breathe again.