With a fanfare, we can announce that Marie Marshall‘s new novel aimed at older children and teenagers, The Everywhen Angels, is now published. It tells a story of kids in a comprehensive school on the outskirts of London, who find themselves with strange powers. Perhaps they are the first skirmishers in the great battle of Armageddon – but how would they know? Despite their visions and their adventures, they have to deal with the normal stuff of teenage life – homework, parents, bullying, dating, not talking to strangers, bereavement and so on. But do they really know what is going on? Angela, the poet with the questioning mind believes they don’t; hers is the first pair of eyes through which we see the story. Charlie, her boyfriend, is a young man with a vision – but does he really appreciate the trouble he’s in? He tells his story backwards, from the last scene to the first and makes the reader question what is good and what is evil. Ashe is the youngest and smallest of the group – diagnosed with Asperger’s, he is in fact the key to everything. But that isn’t to say his path is easy. The novel is not just a fantasy adventure. It’s action breaks the rules of time, encompassing murder, a bomb outrage, a flood which engulfs London, and the Battle of Waterloo; it’s themes include guilt, courage, cowardice, and delusion. The author says of it: “I believe children can handle difficult philosophical questions. They can handle stories told in a strange way. Young readers are much more intelligent than adults give them credit for.”

The Everywhen Angels is available direct from P’kaboo publishers in eBook form, with possibly more formats becoming available in due course.

Also newly published is a short work by erotic writer Morgana Somerville. Her An Air That Kills is available at HoneyMead Books. It traces, in four episodes, the lives of a petty aristocrat, Alicia, and a country girl, Emma from the Edwardian era to the Second World War. As a girl, Emma is taken on as maid to Alicia – they become more like playmates than mistress, eventually explore their sexuality together. Through Alicia’s marriage, cut short by the First World War, via her flirtations with a crowd of ‘intellectual’ women in the 1920s and Emma’s erotic encounter with the lovely Mrs Patel, to the Alicia’s mental disintegration under the pounding bombs of the London Blitz, the two women find, lose, and find love again – but will the story end in tragedy?

Both of these books, and maybe others, will be added to out ‘Bookshelf‘ page soon.