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Wonderfully told, funny and touching, The Book of Ash is the story of a son's search for his father and his struggle to understand his family and the adult world. Twenty years ago Cooper James' life was torn apart. His family collapsed among the claustrophobic confines of a rural hippy commune. Cooper hasn't seen his father since the day his adultery was uncovered. As an adult he tries to forget his bizarre past and get on with the present but when a coffee canister, sent from America, filled with a strange grey dust arrives at his work, he is called before his superiors to explain. If it is not an anthrax hoax, then what is it? Could it be the ashes of his father. And if so, how has it found its way to him? Cooper leaves Britiain for the United States where he tries to piece together the shards of his father's life from the conflicting accounts of his wierd and highly unreliable friends. And through these encounters he learns all the things that his father might have told him, father-to-son - and what really happened the night his father left.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Wise and funny, touching and true, What We're Teaching Our Sons is for anyone who has ever wondered how to be a grown up. We're teaching our sons about money; about heartbreak, and mountains, and philosophy. We're teaching them about the big bang and the abominable snowman and what happens when you get struck by lightning. We're teaching them about the toughness of single mothers, and the importance of having friends who've known you longer than you've known yourself, and the difference between zombies and vampires. We're teaching them about sex, although everyone would be a lot happier if the subject had never come up... Meet the married Dads, the divorced Dads, the widowed Dads and the gay Dads; the gamblers, the firemen, the bankers, the nurses, the soldiers and the milkmen. They're trying to guide their sons through the foothills of childhood into the bewildering uplands of adulthood. But it's hard to know if they're doing it right. Or what their sons' mothers think... Wise and funny, touching and true, What We're Teaching Our Sons is for anyone who has ever wondered how to be a grown up.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Louis Lasker loves his family dearly - apart from when he doesn't. There's a lot of history. His father's marriages, his mother's death; one brother in exile, another in denial; everything said, everything unsaid. And now his father (the best of men, the worst of men) has taken a decision which will affect them all and has asked his three sons to join him on one final journey across Europe. But Louis is far from sure that this trip is a good idea. His older half-brothers are wonderful, terrible, troublesome people. And they're as suspicious as they are supportive ...because the truth is that they've never forgiven their father for the damaging secrets and corrosive lies of his past. So how much does Louis love his dad - to death? Or can this flawed family's bond prove powerful enough to keep a dying man alive? Let Go My Hand is a darkly comic and deeply moving twenty-first-century love story between a son, his brothers and their father. Through these vividly realized characters, it asks elemental questions about how we love, how we live, and what really matters in the end. Frequently funny, sometimes profound, always beautifully written, this intimate and life-affirming novel shows the Booker-longlisted author of Self Help at his brilliant best, and confirms his reputation as one of Britain's most intelligent and powerful writers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Empire of the Son is an original one-hander that blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines and continents. It is a unique theatrical hybrid that combines cinematography with the raw immediacy of a performance piece intimately connected to real life in real time. Through a series of audio interviews, playwright Tetsuro Shigetmatsu discovers vast worlds contained within his emotionally remote father -- from the ashes of World War II and Hiroshima to swinging London in the 1960s and work in broadcasting at the BBC. As the playwright learns about how his own father was once a son, he realizes all the ways in which he himself needs to step up and become a better dad. This funny, poignant story of one immigrant family and their intergenerational conflicts reminds us that no matter how far we journey out into the world to find ourselves -- across decades and continents -- we never stop being our parents' children. It is the story of two generations of CBC broadcasters and the radio silence between them. Nominated for six Jessie Awards. Remount completely sold out in Vancouver and scheduled for productions across Canada in 2017. Cast of 1 man.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Sebastian has long been haunted by the disappearance of his father, Jack Messenger: celebrated travel writer, potential spy and murder victim, his absent presence and equivocal past continue to cast inescapable shadows over his son, who must also contend with his ageing mother's fragmented memory and his own dereliction of a partner. So who is the stranger that buttonholes Sebastian at an academic conference on the Welsh coast, and reveals lies and transgressions neither outgrown nor comprehended? How does he know Sebastian, and what are his connections to Jack Messenger? Equivocator, in a story that stretches from Egypt to Germany, from Iran's Zagros Mountains to the Gower coastline, is a study of fathers and sons, lovers and betrayers, loss and recovery, and combines dark fable, satire and a love story in its pursuit of the question: can Sebastian find his own salvation, despite the inheritance from his father?
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Kuno, a male nurse in a Swiss retirement home, has a new inmate: his father. In the confines of their new home, the pair does something surprising-they finally begin to talk. Kuno had always regarded his father as a boring man without a history or a destiny, until they are thrust together and he learns that his father risked his life in the war. Stunned, Kuno embarks on a journey into his own psyche, taking him to the depths of the Congo. Here, longings awaken and dreams come true-rays of light in the darkness, meetings with kings, seductive women, and the songs of the jungle. This alluring far-away place he once regarded as the heart of darkness suddenly becomes an exciting locale of lunacy, wildness, and tests of inner strength. In Urs Widmer's characteristic style, In the Congo is a riveting yarn, threading through not only the relationship between a father and son, but that of Africa and Europe. Translated by Donal McLaughlin, this novel will delight Widmer fans the world over and will turn our notions of colonialism on their heads.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Dad wasn't angry. As I started to cry. He hugged me. He calmed me. And he taught me to lie. Wingman is a new father-son comedy from Fringe-First winner Richard Marsh. Mum's dead. Annoyingly, dad's not. After twenty years apart, can father and son say goodbye to mum without saying hello to each other? This achingly funny story reminds us that no matter how bad life is, family can make it worse. Wingman received its world premiere at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, on 30 July 2014, directed by Justin Audibert, before transferring to the Soho Theatre Upstairs from 2 - 20 September and then touring. The play is published alongside Richard Marsh's Skittles, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011 and then featured on Radio 4 as Richard Marsh: Love and Sweets, winning Best Scripted Comedy at the BBC Audio Drama Awards. 'For verse with heart and verve, see Richard Marsh's dazzling love-gone-wrong show Skittles' Telegraph 'Richard Marsh's Skittles came at high velocity, whizzing through the various stages of a romantic entanglement that began when two colleagues shared 'a noncommittal Skittle' during a work break, progressing quickly to proposal and marriage ...Funny and wise. ' Guardian.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Harlow tells the story of eighteen-year-old Leslie Somers, who trudges his way through the dark Louisiana backwoods one winter in search of his father. As he walks through the woods, Leslie thinks of the other male role models in his life: the men who took him hunting and fishing, the men who mistreated him.Since Leslie has been forsaken by his mother, he can only imagine a life with this man he has never met: his father, Harlow Cagwin. But when Leslie finally finds Harlow, the man is not what the boy had expected.The two end up on a crash course toward destruction, crime, and twisted relationships that will leave one of them dead, the other a hardly recognizable version of his former self.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

When a young woman named Carine enters their lives, Tom and his controlling father, who have fashioned a strained peace on their family farm, reach the breaking point, while a catastrophic volcanic eruption thrusts a discontented nation into open revolution.