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Inspired by the true story of a female spy, this is “an infectious page-turner, as crafty and nuanced and impassioned as any classic thriller” (The National). Inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, unmasked as the KGB’s longest-serving British spy in 1999, at age eighty-seven, Red Joan centers on the deeply conflicted life of a young physicist during the Second World War. Talented and impressionable, Cambridge undergraduate Joan Stanley befriends the worldly Sonya, whose daring history is at odds with Joan’s provincial upbringing. Joan also feels a growing attraction toward Leo, Sonya’s mysterious and charismatic cousin. Sonya and Leo, known communist sympathizers with ties ...
Stephanie Stanford, recently widowed, must tell her family the truth. But the past is complicated and difficult to untangle. Meanwhile, Michael's memories are squashed into a shoebox (along with Queen Mathilda's Dickin Medal for Bravery - for pigeons) ready for his move to hospital. Michael has never been good at putting things into words; he's more comfortable with the click of Morse code. But Anna, a young healthcare assistant, has the patience - and rare tenderness - to eke out his story. And so he begins.
Costa-shortlisted author Jennie Rooney takes her readers back to the first giddying days of human flight in her much-anticipated follow-up to bittersweet wartime love story Inside the Whale. At Niagara Falls, one of the attractions is a red and blue striped hot air balloon offering rides over the rushing water. The balloon is a day job for Toby O'Hara, a young man whose night work is to continue to perfect his father's design for a flying machine. On the other side of the Atlantic, Ursula Bridgewater, an independent woman from Liverpool, is ungraciously dumped by her fiancé, Henry Springton. Ursula turns to the thrill of travel as an escape, and her sights are soon set on thomas Cook's famo...
When Tom is sent to stay at his aunt and uncle's house for the summer, he resigns himself to endless weeks of boredom. As he lies awake in his bed he hears the grandfather clock downstairs strike . . .eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . Thirteen! Tom races down the stairs and out the back door, into a garden everyone told him wasn't there. In this enchanted thirteenth hour, the garden comes alive - but Tom is never sure whether the children he meets there are real or ghosts . . . This entrancing and magical story is one of the best-loved children's books ever written.
Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG FICTION READERS AWARD An obligatory note of hope, in a world going to hell Lizzie Benson, a part-time librarian, is already overwhelmed with the crises of daily life when an old mentor offers her a job answering mail from the listeners of her apocalyptic podcast, Hell and High Water. Soon questions begin pouring in from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of Western civilization. Entering this polarized world, Lizzie is forced to consider who she is and what she can do to help: as a mother, as a wife, as a sister, and as a citizen of this doomed planet. "This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy" - Ocean Vuong
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
"Artist Edwina Spinner lives alone in a house that has grown too big for her. She has decided to sell it. As Edwina takes the estate agent from room to room, she finds herself transported back to her life as a young mother. Back to her twins, Rowena and Charlie, and a stepson she cannot bring herself to mention by name. As the house reveals its secrets, Edwina is forced to confront her family's past, and a devastating betrayal that changed everything. But Edwina doesn't know the whole story. To discover the truth, she will have to face the one person she vowed never to see again."--Publisher description.
A story of wartime intelligence, super-power relations and spies and their handlers - seen through the experience of Melita Norwood.
In April 1946 Michael returns from war and finds he cannot face the life that awaits him at home. Impulsively he leaps on a train to the western tip of Cornwall, and in doing so changes his destiny. He finds himself in a bohemian colony of artists gathered on the Cornish coast, and his fate is shaped by his heart, his new environment, and the fragmented Britain to which he has returned. More than fifty years later, a man arrives in Norfolk to claim-reluctantly-his inheritance: an abandoned lighthouse, half hidden in the shadows of the past, now ready to cast its beam forward. Kit, a successful businessman, is fairly certain he wants no part in this legacy. In a farmhouse, a woman falters in ...