This is a complete list of Mantle Lane Press books. To buy please click 'Bookstore' on the menu.
| Pocket Books | ||
| The Geometry of Distance | Katie Daniels | Poetry sequence exploring the breakdown of a marriage after an affair against the background of a family wedding in Brazil. |
| Behind a Wardrobe in Atlantis | Emma J. Lannie | A magical collection of short fiction exploring moments within ordinary lives, that are evocative of fairy tale and myth. "A truly remarkable first collection." Ray Robinson |
| Night Swimming | Garrie Fletcher | A collection of dark, urban tales: the pros and cons of stealing a pensioner, a mother's prison visit, incipient love and roller skating, the guilt of a brothers death, and a past love burnt out by rioting. Stories that deal with loss, longing and hope. |
| A Far Cry | Valentine Williams | A Maori granddaughter safeguards her strange legacy, transsexuals beguile tourists in a Cuban park, a migrant Romanian family finds an unexpected new home. In this collection of short stories change occurs in far-away communities, with consequences that are unexpected, far-reaching and heartening. |
| Kaleidoscope | Sarah Leavesley | In this novella, Claire relives her past but her memories are fragmented, shattered like the remains of a toy kaleidoscope. A troubled childhood, the loss of her baby, and the end of her marriage are seen through a distorting lens, twisted and unclear. What really happened? |
| The Music Maker | Liz Kershaw | A stranger with a beautiful tenor voice joins a choir and uses his voice to influence some of the singers, in particular a middle-aged woman who has led a blameless life: a ‘good soul.’ The stranger’s takeover leads to an appalling outcome... |
| Always Another Twist | Sarah Leavesley | After taking revenge on her boss, Julie has just found out she's pregnant and doesn't know how to break it to her sister Claire, currently in a psychiatric unit following the death of her baby and marriage break-up. A companion novella to ‘Kaleidoscope’. |
| A Painting for a Blind Man | Valentine Williams | The lover scared to enter the water with his younger girlfriend. The dominatrix who can no longer resist showing her own weakness. The businessman who loses his car in the labyrinth of a multi-storey car park. Valentine Williams has written a collection of subtle and clever stories which focus on relationships, and characters reaching a tipping point. Can they embrace change or will they cling to the familiar? |
| Submerged | Garrie Fletcher | Submerged is one man’s journey across a deserted land in search of his family. Beset by packs of wild dogs, unnerving dreams, and the ‘ping’ of sonar, it isn’t until he returns to the overgrown city he once called home, determined to take his own life, that he realises his demons are not merely external. Garrie Fletcher’s surreal and disturbing novella takes us on a strange journey through a dystopian landscape of the mind. |
| A Change of Direction | Frances Thimann | A father tries to care for a son transformed by war. A young man is caught between new love and his stifling parents. A mother imagines a good life for her daughter. An old lady contemplates a lost past. Frances Thimann’s beautifully written stories explore the impact of change on the lives of a vivid range of characters. |
| Fiction Anthologies | ||
| What Haunts the Heart | Various | Fifteen tales of the things that haunt us... ...obsession, regrets, madness, and redemption. A waxwork maker in Victorian Whitechapel receives help from an chilling source; a doomed puppeteer performs in a lonely village; an isolated writer tries to put her life back together. Features stories by Graham Joyce and Ray Robinson. |
| Mrs Rochester's Attic | Various | What can Father Divine do when a nun confesses a disturbing secret? How does Eleanor bear watching her old love Paul, hidden as she is at the bottom of his garden? How can Sarah's suddenly bottomless bag be full of bees? The stories in this book explore secrets, doomed relationships, and madness. They all have a hint of the gothic and a tinge of strangeness. |
| It Came From Beneath the Waves | Various | A collection of weird sea stories exploring the strangeness lurking beneath everyday reality. Includes 'The Selkie' by Joanne Harris. |
| Songs for the Elephant Man | Various | A collection of strange contemporary stories featuring outsiders and their tormentors – from the paper based life forms of Alan, to the ghosts of migrants haunting The International Hotel. These stories include horror, humour, historical fiction, and fantasy. They highlight our capacity for good and for evil – for terrible acts, and for generosity of spirit. And they force us to ask, ‘Who are the real monsters here?’ |
| Poetry | ||
| The Geometry of Distance | Katie Daniels | Poetry sequence exploring the breakdown of a marriage after an affair against the background of a family wedding in Brazil. |
| Pig on the Wall | Rob Gee | Writer and poet Rob Gee, explored Moira in Leicestershire, gathering impressions of the village from local residents who shared memories, anecdotes, and feelings about the place they call home. From these, Rob created this selection of poetry and prose. Includes photographs by Linda Young and historic images provided by Graham Knight, Moira Replan. |
| My Daughter is a Donington Goth | Rob Gee | Leicester based writer and poet Rob Gee spent time wandering around Castle Donington in Leicestershire, accosting unsuspecting residents in order to gather their memories and anecdotes about the village. This selection of poetry and prose was created from that material. Includes photographs by Linda Young and historic images provided by Castle Donington Museum and local residents. |
| Local History / Interest | ||
| North West Leicestershire Voices booklets/CDs | Andy Barrett Matthew Pegg |
In the 1980s and early 1990s Mantle Arts made a series of oral history recordings of local people talking about their memories of living in North West Leicestershire. The oldest people recorded were born in the nineteenth century, and their memories range through two world wars, working in the pits, stone masonry, school, grave digging, childhood games, and cinema in the district. In 2021 Mantle Arts published four booklets with accompanying CDs . The CDs contain edited selections of the oral history recordings and the booklets set them in context. They explore 'Childhood', 'War', 'Cinema' and 'Work'. They are available to buy here singly or as a bundle of all four booklets. |
| Lemons for Chamberlain | Patricia Pegg | In 1929 Geoffrey Mander (1882-1962) was elected as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton East. He remained an MP until 1945, his career spanning the depression of the 1930s and the Second World War. This biography explores Geoffrey Mander's parliamentary career, his friendships with leading figures of the day, his involvement in the family firm of Mander Brothers, and his home - Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton - which inspired his lifelong interest in the work of William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the Pre-Raphaelites. |
| Wordsworth in Leicestershire | Matthew Pegg | In 1806 Sir George Beaumont Beaumont invited his friend William Wordsworth to live at Hall Farm, in Coleorton, Leicestershire. At Christmas, the family were joined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose obsession with Wordsworth's sister in law, Sarah, took him to the edge of madness. This illustrated book uncovers the details of this little known period in the lives of the most famous poets of the early 19th century. |
| Getting the Coal | Ed: Jeanne Carswell, Tracey Roberts |
Getting the Coal tells the story of Leicestershire's mining communities, in the words of the people who lived there, from the early years of the 20th century to the closure of the pits in the 1990s. Work and home life, childhood, the perils of toiling underground, sports and pastimes, two world wars, unions and the strikes of the 1920s and 1980s, are all brought vividly to life. |
| Marking Time: Voices from Bardon | Ed: Tracey Roberts | Bardon is a lost village of Leicestershire, demolished in 1989 to make way for a quarry and it's inhabitants rehoused. Marking Time is a record of Bardon Village by the people who lived there. Oral history, creative writing and visual art work undertaken with school children all combine to tell the story of the tiny settlement, now gone forever. |
| Scripts | ||
| Kevin King of Egypt | Rob Gee | Escaped psychiatric patient Kevin Haggerty is distinctly upset about being told he is not the reincarnation of the pharaoh Ramses II. On his way to Egypt, via the Tesco Express, he stumbles across the nemesis to all his plans: Millie – a lost six-year-old. Together they embark on a journey that will change both their lives forever. Written and performed by stand-up poet and psychiatric nurse Rob Gee (“Seriously funny” – Sunday Mirror), Kevin, King of Egypt been toured across North America. This book is the script of the show and contains an audio CD of the performance. |
