'Original, thought-provoking' - Elizabeth Macneal 'a delightful read . . . beautifully observed' - Daily Mail Mona and Wolfie have lived on Victoria Park for over fifty years. Now, on the eve of their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, they must decide how to navigate Mona's declining health. Bookended by the touching exploration of their love, Victoria Park follows the disparate lives of twelve people over the course of a single year. Told from their multiple perspectives in episodes which capture feelings of alienation and connection, the lingering memory of an acid attack in the park sends ripples of unease through the community. By the end of the novel, their carefully interwoven tales create a rich tapestry of resilience, love and loss. With sharply observed insight into contemporary urban life, and characters we take to our hearts, Gemma Reeves has written a moving, uplifting debut which reflects those universal experiences that connect us all.

Middle-aged heroine Vicki has had enough of being everyone’s doormat. She wants to create a world-class park on a rubbish tip, but her husband has other ideas and they don’t include her. Help arrives in the form of an elderly couple of misfits, a callow youth and a fast-track police inspector on her own road to Damascus. If you have ever wanted... To drive a real sports car... Visit Central Park... Save the world... Chase your wildest dreams... Or blow up a building site... You’ll be with Vicki every step of the way! Each chapter is a short set piece that leaves the reader wanting to know what happens next. This novel will appeal to over-thirty female fans of general fiction, and literature by Jan Morris and J. B. Priestly, authors who B. J. Haynes takes inspiration from.

Victoria Park is an urban novel with a hip-hop flavor running right through the storyline. Taking center stage is an extended UK family – the Blakeways, the Johnsons and the Barnbrooks. Tug and C-Jay Blakeway are basketball fans who make regular trips to the USA to watch this sport. The Barnbrooks’ best friend Margo Turner is an opinionated and bigoted woman who gives no quarter, and as the dramatic events unfold, Margo’s adversary, Benson Harris, a teen boy of Caribbean heritage searching for his identity, gets embroiled in an ever more dangerous scenario. While crime and drama keep readers on the edge of their seats, this novel also depicts everyday family events which resonate so clearly with ordinary life. An industrial region in the UK is the primary setting, but there are scenes from overseas locations too. Spectator sport is a passion; both pro football (soccer) and college basketball are featured as the various family members travel far and wide to support their teams.

One of a family of generations (ancestors and descendants) of authors, Victoria Park became interested in fiction after a lifetime of technical writings of electronics and psychology. Pride and Prejudice II was born in the south of France while the author was writing technical works, which had to be shelved because the novel intruded on the author's consciousness demanding to be written. The author lives in North Wales with two Old English sheepdogs and a ginger cat. Wales, being a small principality attached to the western side of England and with its ancient castles, even more ancient mountains, convivial peoples, and breathtaking scenery, provides the inspiration for writing.

We are in the midst of a worldwide golden age of park creation, and featured here are powerfully telling examples at the forefront of this renaissance. Parks are essential to our well-being; this has never been clearer than it is today, and a recent surge of park development offers us much to celebrate. Parks of the 21st Century presents 52 parks in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Europe, and China that have turned despoiled and polluted land (including former factories, railroads, and industrial waterfronts) into beneficial landscapes. Landscape architects have been referred to as “the first environmentalists,” and Parks of the 21st Century shows how parks are being designed as proactive, dynamic green spaces. The High Line in New York is an early example of how an obsolete railroad could be transformed. Opened in 2009, it now attracts nearly 8 million visitors a year. In addition to providing public open space, these renewed landscapes offer economic revitalization and large-scale environmental improvement. Among the parks featured in this book are designs by well-known professionals such as James Corner Field Operations, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Kongjian Yu/Turenscape, and Catherine Mosbach.

Discover how yielding ourselves wholly to God, especially in the midst of challenging circumstances, lends new purpose to our lives. “Vivian Mabuni is a kind and trustworthy guide through one of adulthood’s secrets: life doesn’t go like you thought it would.”—Jen Hatmaker, New York Times best-selling author of For the Love and Of Mess and Moxie As women after God’s heart, we honestly desire to please God. We want to be used by Him and to experience the peace and fulfillment He wants for us. Yet it’s all too easy to fall into living mechanically, with a rule-based approach to the Christian life, or to focus on getting what we want when we want it. Even when we want to be willing, saying yes to whatever God asks often feels scary, and the distractions of this world get in the way. Vivian Mabuni knows this all too well, but she’s discovered that open-handed living starts with an intentional posture of the heart. Through surrender to His will, we draw closer to God in a way that makes our day-to-day lives more purposeful, powerful, and pleasing to Him. With Vivian’s warm encouragement in Open Hands, Willing Heart, you’ll learn how to step out in courageous trust as you invite God to give and take—and move and work—in your life as He sees fit. Along the way you’ll discover true joy and serenity that will carry you through every circumstance.

Exclusive online content, photos, and more, available here Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as “natural oases,” and urban parks as “pure nature” in the midst of the city — but that’s absurd. Parks are as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called ‘public’, they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks — as they are currently constituted — are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park — Vancouver’s Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park — as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (səliľwətaʔɬ) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon. The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.

2024 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner in "Religion / Spirituality of Western Thought" CategoryWinner of the Living Now Book Award, Church of the Wild reminds us that once upon a time, humans lived in an intimate relationship with nature. Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz certainly did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world, eventually cofounding the Wild Church Network and Seminary of the Wild. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it--and calling it church. Through mystical encounters with wild deer, whispers from a scrubby oak tree, wordless conversation with a cougar, and more, Loorz helps us connect to a love that literally holds the world together--a love that calls us into communion with all creatures.

"Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein together with their teaching staff and students at ETH Zurich expanded their research on building typology to four more metropolises, again in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. 180 buildings were analyzed over the past two years to find inspiration and models that can be adapted for the local context of any given city. Each example is documented with an image, site and floor plans, axonometric projection, key data, and a brief description. An introduction and four essays on the interaction between various protagonists and in particular the effect of governing local building regulation again show the potential for contemporary urban architecture. The result is again a rich sourcebook of great practical value for students, lecturers and practitioners of architecture." (Note de l'éditeur).