Клэр Уилкокс0.0 A linen sheet, smooth with age. A box of buttons, mother-of-pearl and plastic, metal and glass, rattling and untethered. A hundred-year-old pin, forgotten in a hem. Fragile silks and fugitive dyes, fans and crinolines, and the faint mark on leather from a buckle now lost. Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned. In Patch Work, Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear: their stories, their secrets, their power to transform and disguise and acts as portals to our pasts; the ways in which they measure out our lives, our gains and losses, and the ways we use them to write our stories.
Darran Anderson0.0 A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson’s grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality. Darran’s father survived the height of the political violence in Northern Ireland and Darran came of age during the final years of the Troubles.
As a young man, Darran lost his way in the midst of hedonism, division and isolation. To find a way to exist in the world, he felt compelled to leave his hometown.
But the disappearance of another young man in his family brings him back to the city and its history. Darran walks the banks of the River Foyle, his father and uncle by his side, searching for what has been lost and what might now be said.
Inventory is sunlight, exposing and cleansing. It is a challenge to generations of silence. A portrait of a city, a biography of a family, a record of the objects that make up a life. Darran Anderson’s lucid and intimate prose offers a vital new perspective on a troubled history.
Жан Спракленд0.0 Graveyards are oases: places of escape, of peace and reflection. Each is a garden or nature reserve, but also a site of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch: a liminal place, at the border of the living world.
Jean Sprackland’s prize-winning book, Strands, brought to life the histories of objects found on a beach. These Silent Mansions is also an uncovering of individual stories: vivid, touching and intimately told. Sprackland travels back through her own
