Red Hen Press

Ideas are dangerous . . .

James Appleby’s career as a social historian is drifting into mediocrity until the phone call that changes his life forever.

Appleby uncovers a dangerous secret hidden deep in a chest of 400-year-old documents. To his horror, its discovery ignites a global firestorm that threatens to engulf all that he loves.

Expertise in Elizabethan country life wasn’t supposed to be controversial. But when Appleby and his Dutch colleague Van Stumpe find evidence about the suppression of a heretical cult, they arouse the ire not just of Machiavellian academics, but a worldwide swathe of religious fundamentalists.

As the discoveries inspire thousands of followers, their enemies begin a murderous hunt from Amsterdam, to Washington, New York, and all over England.

And Appleby discovers just how dangerous ideas can be . . .

Through a series of love letters and individual poems that are both conversational and extraordinary, Cleary beautifully explores the ghosts of his past and what it means to experience a loss, promising to leave readers dewy-eyed with a deep yearning for more.

In Adamantine, award-winning poet Naomi Foyle demonstrates again her dazzling formal range, and broadens her stubborn commitment to the truths of female experience. Deploying visual poetry, free verse, sonnets, the ballad and spoken word rhythms, the book’s opening sequence honours the achievements of outstanding women from Mohawk writer and performer Tekahionwake and Canadian painter Emily Carr to Anglo-Irish revolutionaries Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz; and eulogises unsung heroines including the prematurely deceased writer Emily Givner, the mothers and orators of West Belfast, and Pamela Jean George, a murdered young Aboriginal woman from Foyle’s home province of Saskatchewan. Developing Foyle’s concern with the Middle East, so evident in her acclaimed second collection The World Cup, from troubled reflections on political violence spring tributes to Palestinian and Israeli prisoners of conscience – and to Arabic poetry. Elsewhere, a vividly imagined conversation between Old Testament wives imbues the collection with a deeper historical resonance, while personal pilgrimages lead the reader from chanteuse Nico’s graveyard in Berlin to the mass crematorium of Grenfell Tower. In its riveting combination of theatrical flair and emotional vulnerability, the book’s final sequence, The Cancer Breakthrough, recalls the imagistic pyrotechnics of Foyle’s PBS Recommended debut collection The Night Pavilion, but also pays homage, not just to the poet’s resilience and relentless creativity, but the power of loving community.

1864. In a Santa Fe gulley, scalped Scots thirteen-year-old Robert McGee lies bleeding to death. The Last Wolf of Scotland is his dream, etched onto the plate of pioneer America, his scalp lock speaking back to him, a hallucination projected in a near-death cinema.

This shocking real-life incident is our point of departure into the ritualistic imagination of MacGilivray. In this, her first collection, she dissects the Scottish imaginary and builds it up anew, creating a poetic panorama which stretches from the Highlands to the Wild West.