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In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn't stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration, and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends, and a man - Charles Norton - who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell's life, though they would never be together. In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her Ph.D. - about the community of artists and writers living in...
LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 'Wildly seductive' SARAH WATERS - 'Exquisite' NEW YORK TIMES - 'Deeply enjoyable' DAILY TELEGRAPH Blanca has been dead for a few centuries when she falls in love – instantly and devotedly – with celebrated novelist George Sand. George is unlike anyone Blanca has encountered in hundreds of years of haunting: a woman dressed in men’s clothes, a ferocious writer, a passionate lover of men and women alike and an ambivalent mother. It is 1838, and George has come to the island of Mallorca with her ailing lover, Frédéric Chopin. As the weather and the locals turn against this strange couple, can the love of a teenage ghost keep them from disaster? Brie...
History meets memoir in two irresistible true-life romances--one set in 19th century Rome, one in present-day Paris and London--linked by a bond between women writers a hundred years apart. In 2013, graduate student Nell Stevens toils away on a dissertation about artistic and literary circles in nineteenth-century Rome. Bored with academia and thrown off after falling for a soulful American screenwriter living in Paris, she finds herself drawn to the biography of English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who, in 1857, left her dull minister husband behind in England and set off with her daughters on a transformative trip to Rome. There she met a dazzling group of artists and writers, including the ...
Now a major TV series. Read the hilarious rom-com that inspired the hit sitcom Not Dead Yet starring Gina Rogriguez. As recommended on Davina McCall's Making the Cut podcast, and perfect for fans of Dolly Alderton, Ruth Jones and Marian Keyes. 'The new Bridget Jones' – Celia Walden, Telegraph 'Funny but layered . . . this is a perfect and inspiring new year read' – Red A novel for any woman who wonders how the hell she got here, and why life isn't quite how she imagined it was going to be. And who is desperately trying to figure it all out when everyone around them is making gluten-free brownies. Meet Nell. Her life is a mess. In a world of perfect Instagram lives, she feels like a disas...
Hung-over and grief-stricken, a man contemplated suicide at the edge of a cliff, until he is unexpectedly distracted by the sight of a woman emerging from the water below... A group of art students protesting the demolition of a housing block decide to turn its destruction into a creative act... Waiting in her car for the rain to pass after her mother's funeral, a woman nurses her child and reflects on a world outside that remains headless of her sorrow... The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University 2018 pivot around the theme of loss, and the different ways that individuals, and communities, respond to it. From the son caring for his estranged father, to the widow going out for her first meal alone, the characters in these stories are trying to find ways to repair themselves, looking ahead to a time when grief will eventually soften and sooth. Above all, these stories explore the importance of human connection, and salutary effect of companionship and friendship when all else seems lost.
WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT HISTORICAL PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2020 WINNER OF THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARD FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR, 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS, 2019 An Irish Independent and Irish Times Book of the Year, 2019 From the author of Tatty, the Dublin: One City One Book 2020 choice ________________________ 'It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much.' Irish Times 1950: late summer season on Cape Cod. Michael, a ten-year-old boy, is spending the summer with Richie and his glamorous but troubled mother. Left to their own devices, the boys meet a couple living nearby - the artists Jo and Edward Hopper - and an unlikely friendshi...
Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favourite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth's story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us towards a new vision of Woolf's most demanding and rewarding novel - and crafts an elegant reminder of literature's ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.
A WINNER OF THE 2021 BETTY TRASK AWARDS SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2021 __________________________ 'Joyous' SPECTATOR 'Remarkable' SUNDAY TIMES 'A playful delight... A glorious novel' OBSERVER Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is riddled with fictitious entries known as mountweazels penned by Peter Winceworth, a man wishing to make his lasting mark back in 1899. It's up to young intern Mallory to uncover these mountweazels before the dictionary can be digitised for modern readers. Lost in Winceworth's imagination - a world full of meaningless words - will Mallory finally discover the secret to living a meaningful life? __________________________ 'Made me almost tearful wi...
“A riveting memoir that takes readers on a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success.”—Dave Pelzer, author of A Child Called “It” Michelle Stevens has a photo of the exact moment her childhood was stolen from her: She’s only eight years old, posing for her mother’s boyfriend, Gary Lundquist—an elementary school teacher, neighborhood stalwart, and brutal pedophile. Later that night, Gary locks Michelle in a cage, tortures her repeatedly, and uses her to quench his voracious and deviant sexual whims. Little does she know that this will become her new reality for the next six years. Michelle can also pinpoint the moment she reconstituted the splintered pi...
'this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand' The year is eighteen hundred and thirty one when fifteen-year-old Mary begins the difficult task of telling her story. A scrap of a thing with a sharp tongue and hair the colour of milk, Mary leads a harsh life working on her father's farm alongside her three sisters. In the summer she is sent to work for the local vicar's invalid wife, where the reasons why she must record the truth of what happens to her - and the need to record it so urgently - are gradually revealed. Through an entirely unforgettable voice, and reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervillesand Margaret Atwood'sAlias Grace, Nell Leyshon's powerful The Colour of Milkshows how even a powerless, uneducated girl can alter her own fate.