Phoenix Court Series by Paul Magrs
Phoenix Court #1
![[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life](https://picture.graycity.net/img/paul-magrs/phoenix_court_01_-_marked_for_life_preview.jpg "[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life")
[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life
Paul Magrs
Marked For Life by Paul Magrs Welcome to Phoenix Court! It’s a weird mix of people round here on this housing scheme, but everyone’s reasonably friendly. Everyone’s got their secrets, though, and often there’s real magic waiting just around the corner. Meet Mark Kelly–a man tattooed with glorious designs over every inch of his body. He’s married to the slightly unhinged Sam and has a young daughter who’s about to be kidnapped at Christmas by an escaped convict and old flame of our hero’s. Over one snowy festive season the whole family sets off in perilous pursuit…accompanied by Sam’s mother, who’s become a nudist lesbian and her girlfriend, who claims to be a time-transcending novelist known as Iris Wildthyme…. Magrs first volume in the Phoenix Court series is a wild adventure and a classic of contemporary fantasy.
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Phoenix Court #2
![[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?](https://picture.graycity.net/img/paul-magrs/phoenix_court_02_-_does_it_show__preview.jpg "[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?")
[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?
Paul Magrs
Welcome to Phoenix Court! It’s a weird mix of Brits round here on this housing scheme, but everyone’s reasonably friendly. Everyone’s got their secrets, though, and sometimes there’s magic waiting just around the corner… Meet: Penny Robinson who’s a sixteen-year-old with witchy powers and an impossibly glamorous and overbearing mother called Liz. They’ve just moved into the neighbourhood and the friendships they make will start off a bizarre chain of events involving love affairs with hunky bus drivers, people dressing up as dogs, raucous nights out with the ladies and a very surprising revelation on the dance floor during Goth Night in Darlington in Paul Magrs' second book of his hilarious urban fantasy series, The Phoenix Court.This edition includes a new introduction by the author and two Phoenix Court short stories.
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Phoenix Court #3
![[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?](https://picture.graycity.net/img/paul-magrs/phoenix_court_03_-_could_it_be_magic__preview.jpg "[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?")
[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?
Paul Magrs
The ordinary inhabitants of a small-town council estate turn out to hold extraordinary secrets in Paul Magrs' strangely compelling novel, Could It Be Magic?. Set in the grey wastelands of the north-east, Magrs has looked beyond the ravages of boom and bust Britain--with its council ghettos and widespread unemployment--to reveal a community brimming with passions. At first glance, the leading characters are exceptional only in their mediocrity: Elsie, old before her time, weighed down by a crippled son and depressive husband, whose only solace lies in a bottle of gin; tattooed Mark, who spends his days bodybuilding and nights babysitting his ex-wife's new baby; Penny, who left school too soon and fills her house with students; Andy whose gay lover left him for a better life. But the arrival of Penny's Mam on New Year's Eve (with her own startling secret) sets off a chain of astonishing events. Fantasy mingles with the mundane until it's hard to know what to accept as commonplace and what to dismiss as trivial. A frisson of sexual energy sparks from council roof to satellite dish as Magrs' characters discover their innermost secrets and how to live life to the full. --Carey Green
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Phoenix Court #4
![[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man](https://picture.graycity.net/img/paul-magrs/phoenix_court_04_-_fancy_man_preview.jpg "[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man")
[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man
Paul Magrs
In print for the first time ever: Paul Magrs' 'lost' novel, Fancy Man, continuing in the same inimitable style of his queer magic realist Phoenix Court books. Meet: Wendy, who grows up the youngest of three brash sisters in Blackpool and who leaves home when her mother dies. She moves to Edinburgh under the wing of her vulgar Aunty Anne - whose sights are set on the millions her ex-husband has recently won on the lottery. Wendy spends a happy summer finding herself amongst her new family - Uncle Pat, frail cousin Colin, Captain Simon and Belinda, who believes herself to be an alien abductee. Wendy is intent on finding her elusive fancy man but gets drawn into a series of adventures involving amputees and death cults, Marlene Dietrich and doppelgangers in a city where everybody seems to be writing novels about everybody else in this queer relocating of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady to the apparently Cool Britannia of the 1990s.
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