Cinnamon Press

Small miracles from distinctive voices

book launches

Launching two collections of transformation

The launch of The Chalk Butterfly by Jane Monson and Life’s Stink and Honey by Lynn Valentine rounded off our Spring into Summer launch season with extraordinary readings and lively discussion. Haunting, compelling, moving and beautiful were just a few of the responses from the audience.

Each of Jane Monson’s quietly immersive prose-poems is a light cast on the different facet of a vulnerable, interdependent world. Inanimate things are as charged with sensation and volition as the human minds and bodies that respond, sometimes painfully, to their disorder. This writing leaves us with no choice but to see more clearly; it enables us to care a little more.

Philip Gross

Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on – bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.

John Glenday

Catch up with the event here.

Two poets, two times zones, two outstanding collections

Sometime on Sunday, 24th April, saw the launch of Omar Sabbagh’s Morning Lit: Portals After Alia and Edward Raggs’s And Then the Rain Came. With Omar in Dubai, Edward in Beijing, and people watching in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere around the globe, there was a confusion of time zones (morning, noon and night). But everyone agreed the readings were fantastic. “A great way to spend a Sunday” as someone commented.

Journeys and Futures

Thursday 3rd March saw the launch of two of our latest series of pamphlets, Bonnie Thurston’s Forgotten Futures and Journey by Sue Lewis.

Bonnie and Sue gave wonderful readings of their work and there were some fascinating questions, afterwards. If you couldn’t make the evening, you can catch the recording here.

A winter of resistance and hope

 

What role can Athurian legend play in saving the future?

In the darkest times, where do we look for the light?

 

 

On the 18th of November a group of writers and readers gathered on Zoom to launch and celebrate two Cinnamon titles — one relaunched after 13 years in print — a novel that predicted Brexit and looked to how we use mythology in dark times — the other a new prequel.

The Standing Ground is set in a near-future world without privacy or freedom, life is unravelling for Luke, a teenager whose questions and individuality have no place in surveilled society. When a virtual encounter with a girl who claims to live beyond the all-controlling grip of E-Government, sets him on a quest not only for answers, but for escape. But is Alys real? Why are there echoes of her world in his father, Nazir Malik’s home, especially since Nazir is a celebrity artist trusted by E-Government? And what role can characters from Celtic Arthurian legend possibly play in saving the future? Most urgently, can Luke overcome the threats that surround him and find the Standing Ground?

The Roots of the Ground is the prequel toThe Standing Ground. We travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that gradually infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and global pandemic. But as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, who has also been known as Merlin.

The launch took the form of a conversation with Adam Craig about the issues raised in the novels, interspersed with short readings from the two books and followed by questions from those attending. If you couldn’t be with us for the launch the video is below and you are welcome to use the discount code WINTER20 which will give you 20% off everything in one basket when you buy these or other Cinnamon Press books.