Pauline McLynn

Drawing together the work of ten leading playwrights - a mixture of established and emerging writers - this National Theatre Connections anthology is published to coincide with the 2014 festival, which takes place across the UK and finishes up at the National Theatre in London. It offers young performers between the ages of thirteen and nineteen everywhere an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study. Each play is specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department with the young performer in mind. The plays are performed by approximately 200 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional regional theatres where the works are showcased. As with previous anthologies, the volume will feature an introduction by Anthony Banks, Associate Director of the National Theatre Discover Programme, and each play includes notes from the writer and director addressing the themes and ideas behind the play, as well as production notes and exercises. The National Theatre Connections series has been running for nineteen years and the anthology that accompanies it, published for the last three years by Methuen Drama, is gaining a greater profile by the year. Some iconic plays have grown out of the Connections programme including Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill, Burn by Deborah Gearing, Chatroom by Enda Walsh, Baby Girl by Roy Williams, DNA by Dennis Kelly, and The Miracle by Lin Coghlan. The series has a recognisable brand and the anthologies continue to be an extremely useful resource, their value extending well beyond their year of publication. This year's anthology includes plays by Sabrina Mahfouz, Simon Vinnicombe, Catherine Johnson, Pauline McLynn, Dafydd James, Luke Norris and Sam Holcroft.

Take a year in Soho and a house like no other.... From a woman grieving on New Year's Day to a Victorian maid's passion for poetry, from a wartime widower picking up the pieces of his life to a young musician with a dream, one magical house has witnessed the drama of people's lives for generations. Meet the unforgettable residents of Claxton Court and discover the remarkable ties that bind them together.'The past, present and future all bleed into one another like watercolours on a canvas... time becomes irrelevant. The Time is Now is not Mrs Doyle... it is something very different from what has gone before, but it hints at a bright new direction for McLynn, the writer' Irish Independent

A heartbreaking novel of integrity, honesty and raw emotion. At a remote railway station in Norfolk, Kitty Fulton runs the ticket office and her pet project is the lost and found. Nothing gives her more pleasure than to reunite possessions with their rightful owners. It is an experience that remains elusive in her own world as her mother's Alzheimer's pulls them further and further apart and, on top of this, she must endure the disintegration of a close relationship with a childhood friend. Just when Kitty feels her life can't get more complicated a series of extraordinary events challenges her notions of duty and fidelity. And in struggling to find the answers Kitty embarks on a journey that questions the importance of life and the way we must all live...

It's not easy being the mother of a twelve-year-old boy who's in love with his babysitter and having trouble at school. Nor are matters helped by the unexpected arrival of an elderly mother who's suddenly footloose and fancy free. At least Susie Vine feels secure at Arland & Shaw, London's leading theatrical agency, where her clients love her almost as much as they love themselves. Then the man who broke her heart comes back into her life and she's forced to ask herself whether she was right to leave him all those years ago. Or is someone else waiting in the wings...?

Lucy White can't quite believe what's happened to her happy, ordinary life. Ending up homeless - not to mention husbandless - has come as an almighty shock. All she wants to do is lie low for a while, but when she arrives in a quiet street in South London she's in for a surprise. The residents of Farewell Square are anything but quiet. There's a housewife with a secret that needs to be shared, a publicist whose behaviour outside office hours would shock his clients and an artist who can't seem to control her lodgers. They're as intrigued by Lucy as she is by them, and as she's drawn into their midst, she realises that life can be kind as well as cruel. And that no one has to be lonely if they don't want to be.

It's a typical Tuesday evening in Kilbrody. Cathy Long is on her way to collect her drunken father from the pub. Ozzy O'Reilly is in the graveyard, watching the Dublin bus through his binoculars. Charlie Finn is pulling pints, when suddenly it hits him: he's bored. And that's when the woman from the bus walks through his door and drinks herself into oblivion. Now the whole village wants to know, who is the woman on the bus? The question is, will she tell them?

When private investigator Leo Street is sent to County Kildare to spy on the wife of a loathsome client, she's delighted to be getting away from rainy Dublin and her hopeless, permanently resting actor boyfriend Barry. The one catch is she has to masquerade as a member of a cookery course and the only piece of culinary equipment Leo can handle is a tin opener - Weekend Entertaining Part 1 is daunting to say the least. As she strips away layers of marital infidelity - not to mention several other scandalous secrets - she battles with bread-making and brûlée. But where will it all end - in triumph or tragedy?