Böcker av Maureen Duffy

A new addition to the SF Masterwork series - the tale of the first human/gorilla hybrid, from his birth and growth to his inevitable end.

Includes poems which show us dealing well and also very badly with our kind and with the rest of the living planet. This title reminds us how funny people are, how vulnerable, lovable, bizarre and heroic.

Maureen Duffy's double-bill tells the story of two remarkable women: Hilda of Whitby and Virginia Woolf.

Their lovemaking throughout the book forms a recurring lietmotif, a counterpoint to the examination of the spiritual death of the characters. In a South London environment of pub and fairground, home and work, the wounds of 20th century experience are evoked in prose which is both lyrical and precise.

Most of the other residents in the cavernous Victorian house - and the friends and acquaintances Al meets in tow local pubs, the bohemian and relaxed crowd at the Nevern and the slightly more ambiguous and dangerous crowd at the Knacker's - are Londoners by adoption, some temporary exiles, some permanent.

Overcoming Mobbing is an informative, comprehensive guidebook written for the victims of mobbing and their families who often can't make sense of the experience or mobilize resources for recovery.

For Duffy, pictures are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words.

Centred on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, bringing them lucidly and vividly to life. There is a strong sense of compassion and fair play in her poems, reflecting Duffy's lifelong support for progressive social and political movements, and a beautiful lyricism and technical skill derived from her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, London past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.

The new novel from `a major writer by any standards: technique, curiosity, erudition, plus the sheer body, range and quality of her work' (Independent on Sunday). Restitution is the compelling story of a young woman in search of her identity at the end of the century.