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One Summer's Grace
In the summer of 1988, Libby Purves set sail with her family on a voyage round the entire coastline of Britain, from the soft, sandy South-East, to the wilder shores of Orkney. They travelled in the wake of their literary-nautical forebears aboard their m
Home Leave
A perceptive novel from our favourite chronicler of the dilemmas of modern family life. Catherine and Caroline, Toby and Mark were globetrotting siblings: British 'diplo-brats', whose childhood homes lay in Italy or Israel, France or Washington DC – wherever their father was posted at the time. But all that was years ago. Now Catherine is approaching middle-age, married to a life of cheeseparing selflessness looking after young offenders on a chilly organic farm; Mark is a prim supermarket executive, Caroline a wealthy Kensington wife, and Toby – well, Toby is a problem. The joker in the pack. He always was. Amid growing tensions, marriage-fatigue and unspoken resentments, the apparent tragedy of Toby's disappearance jolts his sisters and brother into making angry, anxious journeys: from California to Flanders, back in time and into their own hearts.
Love Songs and Lies
A story about coming of age in 1970s Oxford. Politics and the Pill. Pot and poetry. Glamrock and groupies. The way we were. Love isn't always the answer. Have you ever fallen for the wrong man? Sally does. Handsome, clever Max Bellinger brings a whiff of sophistication into the shabby canalside house they share in that final year at Oxford. And Sally, so steeped in the Romantics that she confuses literature with real life, is content to be his adoring handmaiden. That blind devotion shapes Sally's life for many years. She writes lyrics for Max's wayward rock star brother and stays involved with his family. But the relationship is based on secrets and lies, and when Sally finally wakes up to reality, those deceptions come home to roost . . . Libby Purves perfectly capture what it means to be a woman in the last third of the twentieth century.
How Not to Be a Perfect Mother
A fresh new look brings this parenting classic up-to-date for a new generation of mothers and mothers-to-be. Taking an irreverent and humorous look at the trials and tribulations of motherhood, Radio 4’s Libby Purves has created an invaluable survival guide so that even the most unpromising madonna can cope with the baby years.
A Free Woman
Sarah Penn and Maggie Reave are sisters, as different as a tabby and a tiger. Sarah has married kind, reliable Leo and settled contentedly into small-town life. Maggie, light-hearted and footloose, has spent fifteen years drifting round the world with a backpack and a cheerful willingness to do any menial job as long as it has no future. But now Maggie has come home, pregnant, and undecided whether or not to keep the baby. And as she dicusses this with her sister, lets slip that she's had an abortion before, and that the father was Maggie's husband. This throws everything into confusion, but Christmas brings reconciliation and a new baby.
Passing Go
A funny, startling but ultimately hopeful novel of twenty-first century city lives. On the high ground above the great city, Roy and Helen live in brittle affluence inside a weary marriage. Of their four children, three have long vanished into the sprawling, sluttish metropolis beneath: Marcus the dotcom entrepreneur, Shona the shocking Britart princess, and Danny – the one nobody will talk about. But the last child Zack itches to know more about his lost brother; and gets his chance when the smooth surfaces of family life are abruptly blown apart. Roy is sacked on his fiftieth birthday, stages an unconventional protest in the office doorway and rapidly finds himself a homeless exile in the city's darkest streets. It is Zack's chance to escape down the hill in turn, whiile his mother Helen makes a bizarre decision of her own.
Holy Smoke
A fascinating personal memoir
A Long Walk in Wintertime
Alice McDonald has escaped all the obvious traps that lie in wait for women. She loves her job but enjoys her clever, spirited children too; her husband (Dan the New Man) does his share at home, and their London house is always full of friends. At her thirty-seventh birthday party, Alice reflects that their life has been a pretty successful production so far. But love can be treacherous, and children are never quite what they seem. Two months later, far from home and alone on a desperate quest through the bleak lanes of Norfolk, Alice wonders how it fell apart so quickly. Were things ever as good as they seemed? Had the McDonalds really been happy, or was it no more than a stage illusion?
Regatta
Sheila Harrison always looks forward to the descent of the summer visitors onto 'Seafret', her tall brick house right on the front at Blythney, in East Anglia. She loves the way her spare bedrooms are full, from June to September, with successive waves of children - schoolfriends of her own three and the waifs and strays sent by the Country Hosts' Association. But Sheila is not prepared for the upheaval caused by one young girl, Anansi, who arrives from a background that Sheila can only guess at. Urban, streetwise, knowing beyond her years, Anansi refuses to be patronised by Sheila's well-meaning attempts to make her feel at home. She looks at Sheila, her family and friends, with eyes unclouded by familiarity - and drops a bombshell. Even when the dust has settled, summers will never be the same again.
Shadow Child
A powerful novel from Radio 4 presenter and Times columnist Libby Purves, inspired by the loss of her own son. 'Family love is one of the most powerful elemental forces on earth, and at that moment, our last moment as a unit of three, we rode a great curling triumphant wave of it, all together. Death may have thought that he won, but I think otherwise.' There is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Marion and Tom are doing their dignified best, but their own relationship is taking a battering. So when a fierce, strange woman turns up and demands to see the dead boy, Marion is almost glad of the distraction. Against Tom's wishes, she determines to find out more about her son's life away from home. The quest takes her out of her comfortable, conventional world to a shabby office in East London, and a series of shocks. Tom, furious, finds his own solution, and amid scandal, sorrow and exaltation the quiet Middle-Englanders discover that there is more than one kind of family.
