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Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London), and the BBC An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results. "The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch." --Hilary Mantel Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experime...
'Unsettling and strange, Sea Change, cements Nathan's reputation as one of our most interesting historical novelists.' The Times AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 'I'll be back soon, my love. Tonight, I hope.' The last Eve saw of her mother was a wave from the basket of a rising balloon. A wilful, lonely orphan in the house of her erratic artist guardian, Eve struggles to retain the image of her missing mother and the father she never knew. In a London beset by pageantry, incipient riot and the fear of Napoleonic invasion, Eve must grow into a young woman with no one to guide her through its perils. Far away, in a Norfolk fishing village, the Rev Snead preaches hellfire and damnation to his impoverished parishioners and oppressed wife. Snead illustrates his sermons with the example of a mute woman pulled from the sea, over whom he keeps a very close watch indeed.
Born in her father's coffee house in Change Alley, London, Sarah Battle is raised in an atmosphere of coffee, alcohol and intrigue. After witnessing the destruction and chaos of the Gordon Riots, she longs to escape her surroundings for a better life but is trapped in a marriage to James Wintrige, a member of the Corresponding Society but also a government spy. She meets the radical thinker, printer and bookseller Thomas Cranch who offers her an escape to the New World. Sarah finds solace in her new love and the thriving, democratic world of Philadelphia. But fate may yet deliver her back to London. She has never secured a divorce from her husband and the Change Alley coffee house is still hers. The Flight of Sarah Battle is set in the turbulent last decade of the eighteenth century in a London where riot constantly rumbles and Bartholomew Fair entertains, and against the promises and excitement of Philadelphia, where new building, hope and a democracy not quite fully realised are shadowed by the terrible threat of fever and war.
Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower; the labourer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador. A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gemlike stories.
Inspired by the Mappa Mundi of Hereford Cathedral, this final book in The Arrowsmith Trilogy follows Illesa Arrowsmith into its world of marvels and monsters, heights and depths, redemption and damnation.
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
Very good friends, her poetry notebooks, and a mysterious "ninja of nice" give 17-year-old Rae the strength to face her mother's neglect, her stepfather's increasing abuse, and a new boyfriend's obsessiveness.
Jane is a young New York woman who can never seem to find the right man-perhaps because of her secret obsession with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. When a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-obsessed women, however, Jane's fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become more real than she ever could have imagined. Is this total immersion in a fake Austenland enough to make Jane kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. Darcy of her own?In this addictive, charming and compassionate story, Shannon Hale brings out the Jane Austen obsessive in all of us.
Thirteen glittering, surprising, and darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives, from two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Alix Ohlin. In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men li...
From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali Smith Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?