Willis's first book about the Second-World, The City Built of Starships, tells earthlings who crossed interstellar space to colonize "the planet with two suns" and start a new civilization. Colonization does not go well. The First-World emigrants had already divided into the rulers and the ruled even before landing on the Second World. When the new planet failed to provide sufficient food, tensions erupted into civil war.Soledad in the Desert offers the vivid, often terrifying back...

Creativity and freedom come when we break the bonds of dependence and allow ourselves to stand as whole human beings without the need of external and artificial supports. This is everyone's challenge, but especially so for women, since their voices and energy are so needed now, according to Thoele, a psychotherapist. She describes her own journey and how she was able to break the chain of dependence.

When Meredith Sue Willis's first novel, which tells the story of a troubled preacher's family in West Virginia, first came out in 1979, it was declared a cause for celebration by the Los Angeles Times. Comparing Willis to Anne Tyler, the Times wrote: "She has written with depth and honesty about a life style available to many of us only though books." A Space Apart, according to The Philadelphia Bulletin, "weaves a web of subtle suspense and poetic perception." Now the electronic re-issue ...

Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mount...

In the late nineteen sixties, West Virginia born Blair Morgan moves to New York City, where she works at Bellevue Hospital and is involved in the 1968 anti-war sit-ins at Columbia University. The novel includes scenes of political protest and personal coming of age as well as life on a rehabilitation ward in the old Bellevue Hospital.

Meredith Sue Willis turns her considerable talents to explore a new part of the world: the downtrodden New Jersey waterfront undergoing a radical Gold Coast transformation. In LOVE PALACE Willis has created a memorable cast of characters and a pitch perfect sense of place. The tale of a quixotic battle against redevelopment is narrated by an unlikely heroine. Martha Miller is neurotic, over-educated, under-achieving, over-libidoed, and in a tailspin over being left by Rotter number 3, her ...

Feral Grandmothers is a collection of literary short stories imagining and exploring the state of being a grandmother. They range from brief fables of grandmothers as mythic figures to revisions of fairy tales to realistic grandmothers from Appalachia. Some of the grandmothers protect their grandchildren fiercely, and others try to divorce their families. Some of them have turned inward, away from the world, and others are brave in unexpected ways.

Answering Back exposes the volatility of gender reform in many different schools and classrooms. It tells stories in close up and from below, allowing everyone to talk: anxious boys, naughty girls, cantankerous teachers, pontificating principals and feisty feminists.This book challenges many sacred ideas about gender reform in schools and will surprise and unsettle teachers and researchers. It draws on a deep knowledge of gender issues in schools and of feminist theories, ...

David Calder, David Tennant and Hamish Clark star in these BBC Radio 4 dramas based on the original TV series.George Dixon became one of the best-known and most-loved fictional policemen during the course of three decades of BBC TV's Dixon of Dock Green, in which he was played by Jack Warner. In these 12 radio adaptations he once again upholds the law on the streets of 1950s Dock Green.David Calder stars as PC George Dixon, with David Tennant and Hamish Clark as PC Andy Dixo...

Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, Unaccompanied young migrants explores in-depth the journeys migrant youths take through the UK legal and care systems.Arriving with little agency, what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen?Through international studies and crucially the voices of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narr...

Higher Ground, the first novel of the Blair Morgan trilogy, was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1981 and remains in print. The trilogy examines small town life and social movements of the 1960's through the lens of Blair Ellen Morgan's coming-of-age. Blair Ellen attends the high school where her parents teach, and her adolescence is richly realized in the complexities of relationships begun when she was 11, with a family of hill-country people who were her aunt's neighbors. B...

Blair Morgan leaves college to fight poverty following a charismatic, but unconventional religious leader. The familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation, focusing 1960's youth and political culture through finely cut lenses of race.Moments of personal anguish are at the heart of this novel, and they add up to a complex and convincing portrait o...