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This beautifully illustrated children's book is about loss and survival. It will be enjoyed by children and adults alike, and is ideal for parents and professionals to read with children who find it hard to love and be loved.

An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraine’s “voice” of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time. Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca. This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program .

The memories serve him with a sense of coherence and continuity. [...]the paper endeavours to unravel how Najeeb's memory of his past life serves as a model of security in promising a sustainable future for him. To place it more strategically, memory studies as a research area has always been of interest to social thinkers right from the beginning. [...]memory can define the age old question of who you are and hence, memory applies to the regular structuring of human lives. Memory drives us forward; our mind has a unique power of processing and retrieving huge information in the form of images, sounds and smell. [...]memory is a matter of choice, a matter of carefully drawn personal semantics that make up our life. Memory is an intricate human process and literature plays a substantial role in preserving the past. [...]memory and nostalgia can be linked and is one among the recurring themes in literature. Literature and creative writing exposes the memorial processes, unspoken thoughts, and feelings experienced by the characters created by the writers. [...]literature permeates the memory culture.

Anna-Liisa Haakana is a Finnish novelist best known for her realistic stories set in Sápmi (better known in English by its colonial name “Lapland”) during the 1980s. Haakana’s teenage protagonists, Ykä in Ykä Yksinäinen (Ykä the Lonely, 1980) and Anitra in Ykköstyttö (Number One Girl, 1981), feel lonely and isolated despite being surrounded by their families. Loneliness, as Fay Alberti reminds us, is a social and cultural phenomenon which has its own history. In Haakana’s pre-internet novels, loneliness is mapped onto the northern landscape such that the protagonists’ perceptions of their homes are tinged with feelings of isolation. In this article, I investigate the links between the feelings of loneliness and landscape by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer orientations to examine the geo-spatial dimensions of loneliness. Although neither of the novels by Haakana examined here are romances per se, desire acts as a form of way-finding for both Ykä and Anitra. For both teens, feelings of love combined with the desire to care for someone vulnerable orient them towards their homes. To do so, they must move: stillness leads to feelings of loneliness and topophobia, but movement leads to feelings of purpose and topophilia.

Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

Since 2010, successive Conservative-led governments in the United Kingdom have implemented austerity, cutting billions of pounds from the welfare state. These measures have adversely impacted disabled people, entrenched regional health inequalities, and exacerbated public health issues such as loneliness, drug addiction, and homelessness. While fictional counternarratives have emerged to expose the human consequences of welfare reform, this article focuses on a different creative response to contemporary austerity Britain: the burgeoning genre of up lit. Up lit has been marketed as a panacea, promising to temporarily reassure readers who seek imaginative worlds of comfort and hope in the contemporary moment of uncertainty. However, as my analysis of Mike Gayle’s All The Lonely People (2020) and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) reveals, beneath the seemingly progressive representations of marginalised protagonists and celebrations of community support, lies an emphasis on the neoliberal value of individual responsibility which works to conceal the harmful impact of austerity policies. Both novels celebrate “deserving” citizens who overcome adversity and take responsibility for their health and wellbeing while offering individual acts of kindness as the solution in the absence of state support. Paying close attention to the peripheral characters who are excluded from the central recovery narratives, I conclude that austerity haunts these up lit texts and cannot be contained within their hopeful neoliberal fantasies.

Anna-Liisa Haakana is a Finnish novelist best known for her realistic stories set in Sápmi (better known in English by its colonial name “Lapland”) during the 1980s. Haakana’s teenage protagonists, Ykä in Ykä Yksinäinen (Ykä the Lonely, 1980) and Anitra in Ykköstyttö (Number One Girl, 1981), feel lonely and isolated despite being surrounded by their families. Loneliness, as Fay Alberti reminds us, is a social and cultural phenomenon which has its own history. In Haakana’s pre-internet novels, loneliness is mapped onto the northern landscape such that the protagonists’ perceptions of their homes are tinged with feelings of isolation. In this article, I investigate the links between the feelings of loneliness and landscape by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer orientations to examine the geo-spatial dimensions of loneliness. Although neither of the novels by Haakana examined here are romances per se, desire acts as a form of way-finding for both Ykä and Anitra. For both teens, feelings of love combined with the desire to care for someone vulnerable orient them towards their homes. To do so, they must move: stillness leads to feelings of loneliness and topophobia, but movement leads to feelings of purpose and topophilia.

Ishiguro’s novel, A Pale View of Hills, the study of seclusion as a catalyst for self-annihilation takes centre stage, offering readers a deep glimpse into the workings of human solitude. The narrative disclosesa post-war Nagasaki, where the protagonist, Etsuko, wrestles with her own isolation and the haunting memories of the past.This article deals with the psychological dismays of Etsuko which remains mysterious throughout the narrative. Her fears and anguishes remain intact as she tries to connect with others. The present paper is analysed within the frame work of Emile Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide and it also brings out the prominence of communication and a sociable environment. The present paper also brings outthe significance of quality family time and also the importance of good parental relationship.

Ishiguro’s novel, A Pale View of Hills, the study of seclusion as a catalyst for self-annihilation takes centre stage, offering readers a deep glimpse into the workings of human solitude. The narrative disclosesa post-war Nagasaki, where the protagonist, Etsuko, wrestles with her own isolation and the haunting memories of the past.This article deals with the psychological dismays of Etsuko which remains mysterious throughout the narrative. Her fears and anguishes remain intact as she tries to connect with others. The present paper is analysed within the frame work of Emile Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide and it also brings out the prominence of communication and a sociable environment. The present paper also brings outthe significance of quality family time and also the importance of good parental relationship.