Welcome to Linen Press
Linen Press is a small, independent publisher run by women, for women. Our policy is to encourage and promote women writers and to give voice to a wide range of perspectives and themes that are relevant to women. We display and rejoice in the differences in female creative voices, rather than defining them in terms of a simplistic and one-dimensional genre.
Sailing Through Byzantium
Maureen Freely
It’s one minute to midnight on 27th October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis is entering its final countdown as the world prepares for nuclear winter. But in Istanbul’s old bohemian quarter, a confederacy of free spirits has gathered around a baby grand to see the night out in style. The moment is captured in a legendary photograph. Behind them, dark ships pass along the Bosphorus. Some could be Soviet tankers, smuggling missiles to Cuba, but tonight no one is looking. ...
Shooting Stars are the Flying Fish of the Night
Lynn Michell & Stefan Gregory
We dreamed for years of crossing an ocean. Then we did it in a blue boat called Scarlet.
This is a book of many voyages.
There is the meandering trail that leads to the right boat for crossing an ocean. There is the preparation – stalled in a sweltering American boatyard while arguments about equipment and finance combine with the narrowing of the hurricane window. There is the crossing itself which starts with the wrong weather, broken boat parts, torn sails, serious ...
Nothing is Heavy
Vicki Jarrett
The Deep Sea chippy and the Fantasy Island bar face each other across the neon glow of Junction Street. Beth shovels chips on one side and Amber spins naked around a pole on the other. Their work is mundane and predictable, each night much like any other, until a sudden, dramatic death forces them to choose between relative safety and risk.
Into this situation wanders George, lost and broken-hearted and dressed in a monkey costume.
Nothing is Heavy follows these three characters ...
The Making of Her
Susie Nott-Bower
Set in the pressure-cooker world of television, this is a blackly funny retort to a society which values youth over age and appearance over experience.
The Making of Her is the makeover programme that Clara never wanted to produce, featuring the one person she never would have chosen. Add to the mix an errant husband, a barefoot counsellor and a reclusive rock star and change is inevitable. Will transformation come from the inside out, or from the outside in?
And will ...
The Henry Experiment
Sophie Radice
When Anna finds a little barefoot boy in a yellow mac on Hampstead Heath, she offers to walk him home. Expecting gratitude from his parents, she is surprised to be met with hostility.
So begins an escalating battle of wills between Henry’s academic father who believes that today’s children are bubble-wrapped and that boys must be trained for physical freedom and splendour, and maternal Anna who becomes increasingly worried by Henry’s plight as his trials begin. Anna, who was always a ...
James with a Silent C
Kerry McPhail
Jim McPhail is a survivor. His childhood is one of soul-numbing poverty; his adolescence lived amongst drug dealers on the mean streets of Glasgow. But at his lowest ebb, he turns his life around. He enters rehab, kicks his addiction and finds his soul-mate. Fate then deals its cruelest card. Jim is diagnosed with advanced Hepatitis C.
The story of Jim’s roller coaster life, told here by his wife Kerry, is a tribute to the power of love and the will ...
Blue Eyes
Hema Macherla
Set in Gandhi’s volatile India, the story opens with Anjali, aged eighteen, about to be burnt alive on her husband’s funeral pyre – the conventional widow’s fate.
After a dramatic escape, things go badly wrong and she embarks on an extraordinary, often terrifying, journey
of discovery.
Saleem, Anjali’s childhood friend, is entwined in her destiny. As he searches for her, he is caught up in the violence surrounding India’s struggle for freedom.
At the heart of this fast-moving narrative is the love of ...
White Lies
Lynn Michell
By 1950, Kenya was on the verge of one of the bloodiest wars of decolonisation fought in Britain’s twentieth century empire.’ Britain’s Gulag.
Eve is dutifully typing her father’s dictated memoirs of his time as a soldier in WWII and in Nairobi during the Mau Mau uprising. With growing unease, she questions his account of what really happened in Kenya.
A different story – of love and adultery – written by Eve’s mother, comes to light after her death. The two young ...
Under an Emerald Sky
Olukemi Amala
Two babies are born five minutes apart in a UK hospital.
Immersed in her rich Nigerian heritage, Yewande grows up able to hear her ancestors’ voices – a double edged sword that heightens her spiritual awareness, but alienates her sister and brings horrifying revelations about her family’s past. Mary is rejected at birth by her mother who has abandoned her African roots as she tries to blend into a small town in suburban Britain.
How will each girl survive these legacies on ...
The Missing
Juliet Bates
In the spring of 1958, journalist Frances Daye is persuaded to follow the trail of yet another woman thought to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. While she searches for Ania through the avenues and boulevards of Paris, she is haunted by memories of her past and begins a poignant tale of her own. The labyrinth of the beautiful city mirrors the twists and turns of the narrative as Frances wanders the streets searching for Ania and trying to make sense ...
The Device, The Devil and Me
Stephanie Taylor
Lauren Walker has been keeping one hell of secret: she thinks she is possessed by the Devil. Fear of discovery forces her to wear the mask of a model citizen with strict, self-imposed rules. In her twenties, she succumbs to the pressure of living so many lies and finds release in self-harm and bulimia. When this gets out of control, she braces herself to tell her family and seek help, but at this very moment her mother discloses a tragic ...
Breeze from the River Manjeera
Hema Macherla
Breeze from the River Manjeera tells the story of the engaging Neela who arrives in England as a bride for the brutal Ajay. The life that awaits Neela is a far cry from her hopes and expectations. Treated worse than a servant by her in-laws, and unwanted by her husband, she finally escapes in search of independence and freedom. The novel explores in a personal, moving way the issues around the deep-rooted traditions of arranged marriages and the struggle for ...
Linen Press is unique in offering a close collaboration between author and publisher. As director and editor, I adopt a rigorous, hands-on editing process and work closely with authors, chapter by chapter, from manuscript to finished book, involving them in all decisions down to the details of the book cover. My personal joy and skill is editing a manuscript to turn a good book into a superb one.
I ask authors to work with me help market their books. Linen Press is moving towards a co-operative model of publishing which may prove the only way forward for small independent presses. We can’t compete with the Big Guy Publishers or Amazon but we can be creative in reaching women who like very good books.
Most of our books are now available in paperback and digital format. You can buy them on Amazon but Amazon takes a very large cut, so if you want to support us, please order from our website.
Publications 2013
We’re delighted to publish ‘s seventh novel, Sailing Through Byzantium. Set in Istanbul on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis and told from the viewpoint of a young girl with a fertile imagination, it is a magical, multi-layered novel about history and memory, and how we interpret reality.
Published October 2013.
Shooting Stars are the Flying Fish of the Night by Lynn Michell and Stefan Gregory
This is a book of many voyages: male and female narratives and internal and external journeys criss-cross as Scarlet sails across 3000 miles of Atlantic ocean with a family of three on board.
Published June 2013
Publications 2012
The Henry Experiment by
A novel about mothering in a society which sometimes seems hostile and over-ready to criticise parents. It raises issues about whether outsiders should step in when they see a child who is perhaps in danger.
The Making of Her by
A blackly funny novel about women who feel unwanted and irrelevant when they reach fifty. Set in the pressure-cooker world of television studios, it is love story that will make you laugh and cry.
Nothing is Heavy by
About the extraordinary events that unfold on one ordinary Saturday night. Three characters – a pole dancer, a chip-shop worker and a man in a monkey suit – collide and collude in a fast-paced caper that includes drugs, sex and angels.