Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Jane Miller

In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life and the illuminations that come from the last days of parents. Relations describes a record-keeping kinship and offers portraits of her parents' long marriage, its mysteries and incompatibilities, of her grandfather, the scientist Redcliffe Salaman, and of her great-aunt Clara Collet, one of the first women civil servants. It is a story in which Karl Marx and George Gissing have parts to play. 
 
Here are the tensions of belonging and yet not belonging to an English middle-class at once hospitable to difference and internally divided. More than two hundred years of English history are present in these portraits, which show the dawning emancipation of women and the effects of empire on family life. It is the story of an evolution, of a move out of trade towards public service and the professions, and towards the dramas and family romance of recent times.

Relations

Monika Maron

Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it. 
 
Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile. 
 
Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.

Pavel's Letters

Nicholas Shakespeare

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France. 
 
For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. 
 
But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation. 
 
Over half a century later, her nephew, Nicholas Shakespeare, found a box of Priscilla's notebooks and journals. He began investigating the rumours that she had escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Resistance - and he finally unearthed the truth behind suspicions of disreputable love affairs and far darker secrets.

Priscilla

The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

Jack Sheffield

____________________________________________________________ 
Ragley, 1952. 
 
Lily has just arrived, ready to begin her first year as a teacher at the village school. There to welcome her is John Pruett, who, after his years in the war, has settled into the role of headmaster. Tom, the local bobby, is also on hand to make her feel at home up north. But Lily has a secret lurking in her past that threatens the new life she’s trying to build. 
 
Can she move forward and begin to love again? 
 
In his new novel, Jack Sheffield invites you to travel back in time. Back to the days when owning 
a television made you the envy of the neighbours, Woolworth’s still had pride of place on the 
high street and the village panto was the height of entertainment.

Starting Over

Laura Cumming

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian 
 
Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. 
 
Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 
 
'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times 
 
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

Eugenie Fraser

The House by the Dvina is the riveting story of two families separated in culture and geography but bound together by a Russian-Scottish marriage. It includes episodes as romantic and dramatic as any in fiction: the purchase by the author's great-grandfather of a peasant girl with whom he had fallen in love; the desperate sledge journey in the depths of winter made by her grandmother to intercede with Tsar Aleksandr II for her husband; the extraordinary courtship of her parents; and her Scottish granny being caught up in the abortive revolution of 1905. 
 
 Eugenie Fraser herself was brought up in Russia but was taken on visits to Scotland. She marvellously evokes a child's reactions to two totally different environments, sets of customs and family backgrounds, while the characters are beautifully drawn and splendidly memorable. 
 
 With the events of 1914 to 1920 - the war with Germany, the Revolution, the murder of the Tsar and the withdrawal of the Allied Intervention in the north - came the disintegration of Russia and of family life. The stark realities of hunger, deprivation and fear are sharply contrasted with the adventures of childhood. The reader shares the family's suspense and concern about the fates of its members and relives with Eugenie her final escape to Scotland. 
 
 In The House by the Dvina, Eugenie Fraser has vividly and poignantly portrayed a way of life that finally disappeared in violence and tragedy.

The House by the Dvina

A Russian Childhood

Angela Findlay

'Fascinating ... an extremely courageous work.' The Lady 
'Absolutely extraordinary ... Findlay reveals a vast, hidden European story that few nations have ever been brave enough to confront' Keith Lowe' 
'Beautifully written, poignant and acutely perceptive' Sinclair McKay 
'Moving and powerful' Julia Samuel 
 
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In My Grandfather's Shadow is an unflinching, thought-provoking fusion of memoir and history, and an exploration of the hidden scars left across generations by the conflict and horrors of the Second World War. 
 
In a quest to discover the truth about her German grandfather, first a proud Wehrmacht General serving on the Eastern front, then a broken POW on trial for Nazi war crimes, Angela Findlay travels across Europe and Russia to uncover the untold story of millions of Germans long buried not only in guilt and shame but also trauma. 
 
Carefully breaking the silence surrounding so many of World War Two's perpetrators, she challenges widespread binary narratives and offers a way forward that allows the intergenerational wounds to heal and us all to grasp the urgent lessons of the darkest episode in modern history. 
 
Brave, profoundly insightful and moving, In My Grandfather's Shadow is a courageous look at a taboo subject and raises important questions about how and why we should remember the past.

In My Grandfather’s Shadow

A story of war, trauma and the legacy of silence

Shelley Klein

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times 
 
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. 
 
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 
 
'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 
 
'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 
 
'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

The See-Through House

My Father in Full Colour

Helen Batten

‘Oh my goodness – another girl Mrs Swain!’ 
 Clara’s normal iron composure broke and she screamed, ‘No! That’s not the bloody deal!’ 
And that is how my nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world. 
 
When Helen Batten’s marriage breaks down, she starts on a journey of discovery into her family’s past and the mysteries surrounding her enigmatic nanna’s early life. 
 
 What she unearths is a tale of five feisty red heads struggling to climb out of poverty and find love through two world wars. It’s a story full of surprises and scandal – a death in a workhouse, a son kept in a box, a shameful war record, a clandestine marriage and children taken far too soon. It’s as if there is a family curse. 
 
 But Helen also finds love, resilience and hope – crazy wagers, late night Charlestons and stolen kisses. As she unravels the story of Nanna and her scarlet sisters, Helen starts to break the spell of the past, and sees a way she might herself find love again.

The Scarlet Sisters

My nanna’s story of secrets and heartache on the banks of the River Thames

Rosemary Ashton

142 Strand was the home of the brilliant, unconventional young publisher John Chapman. All the daring and avant-garde writers and thinkers of Victorian London gathered here, among them Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray; Americans like Emerson and refugees from revolutionary Europe like Mazzini. In 1851 Chapman brought Marian Evans - the future George Eliot - to London where her arrival caused rows in the household, which included Chapman's wife and also his mistress. 
 
The Strand was packed with booksellers, magazine publishers, theatres, clubs, and quack doctors. Only a short distance away were Westminster, the Houses of Parliament and the disreputable pornographers of Holywell street. Chapman's circle touched all these worlds, and the vivid story of these unconventional lives and unorthodox views - marvellously told by Rosemary Ashton - takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, uncovering its surprising energy, its doubts and arguments, and, above all, its passionate reforming spirit.

142 Strand

A Radical Address in Victorian London

Harry Bernstein

Harry Bernstein was born into a world of hardship and suffering in a northern mill town, in the shadow of the First World War. 
 
His brutish father spends what little he earns at the tailoring shop on drink, while his devoted mother survives on her dreams - that new shoes might secure Harry's admission to a fancy school, that her daughter might marry well, and that one day they might all escape this grinding poverty for the paradise of America. 
 
But as the years go by, life for the Bernsteins on their narrow cobbled street remains a daily struggle to make ends meet. For young Harry though, most distressing are his fears for his adored elder sister Lily, who is risking all by pursuing a forbidden love...

The Invisible Wall

Blake Morrison

In his masterpiece of family literature, And When Did you Last See Your Father?, Blake Morrison's mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story - and a son's search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post-war family life. At the heart of the book there's a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. From the obstacles the lovers faced, to their moments of hilarity and joy Things My Mother Never Told Me is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war, and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically from the shadows, a determined heroine for our times.

Things My Mother Never Told Me

Claire Ratinon

A powerful work of memoir and storytelling that will change the way we think about the natural world. 
 
Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire Ratinon grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, reluctant to be outdoors and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. 
 
But a chance encounter with a rooftop farm was the start of a journey that caused her to rethink the life she'd been creating and her beliefs about who she ought to be. Enlivened, she turned her hand to growing food in London before finding herself yearning for a small parcel of land to call her own. 
 
Unearthed tells the story of her leaving the city for the English countryside - and her first garden - in the hope of forging a pathway towards the embrace of the natural world and a sense of belonging cultivated on her own terms. 
 
'Ratinon's story will change hearts and minds' Alice Vincent 
 
'A beautiful book about nature...I recommend it' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

Unearthed

On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong

Colm Tóibín

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses 
 
In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family. This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

Astrid Goldsmith

'Rich, moving and wryly funny... a delight' Observer *Graphic Novel of the Month* 
 
'Brilliant, witty and endlessly inventive' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 
 
A road-trip across Europe and back in time: the debut graphic memoir from the prize-winning author of A Funeral In Freiburg. 
 
When her imperious, chain-smoking German Jewish grandmother dies, it falls to Astrid and her father to drive a hire van to the Black Forest and collect the family heirlooms from Gisela's nicotine-stained apartment. 
 
In Freiburg, they are faced with several lifetimes’ worth of belongings to sort through - infested Persian rugs, mysterious photographs, a toy monkey that started a marriage - and a grasping landlord, impatient to renovate. 
 
As the list of demands from uncles, sisters and cousins grows longer, the rabbit-holes of history and memory grow deeper. Long-buried secrets and tales of survival are revealed - from Nazi Germany to colonial Africa - and old feuds are reignited, as father and daughter struggle with the responsibility of preserving the family legacy. More importantly, will they be able to fit everything into a medium wheel-base transit van? 
 
Funny, bittersweet and beautifully drawn, The Crystal Vase is an odyssey of family arguments, identity crises, and late discoveries.

The Crystal Vase

Margaret Forster

23 February 
Results rolling in! Algebra, 6th = 74%. Not bad. Latin = 55% Thrilled! History top = 85% smashing! Geography, disgusting, 2nd = 67%. 
 
In 1954 in Carlisle lived an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl called Margaret. She would go on to become an acclaimed writer, the author of the novels Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman as well as biographies and memoirs. But this is her diary from that year; her life. Hers might be a lost world, but her daily observations bring it back in vivid, irresistible detail. 
 
7 May 
Wonderful feat accomplished yesterday by Roger Bannister! At last, the 4 minute mile. Glad an Englishman got it before anyone else. 
 
24 July 
Bought a pair of shorts – white, very short with two pockets. Super but rather daring! 
 
2 September 
Mum’s coming back on Saturday. Miss her every minute! I'll never marry and have a family -- housekeeping for two for a week is bad enough -- but for life!

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

Darran Anderson

‘Astonishing… A marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind’ Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places 
 
 A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson’s grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality. His father survived the height of the political violence in Northern Ireland and Darran himself came of age during the final years of the Troubles before leaving his hometown to find a way to exist in the world. 
 
 But when another young man in his family disappears, Darran is brought back to Derry. Walking the banks of the River Foyle, he starts on a search for what has been lost. A portrait of a city, a biography of a family, a record of the objects that make up a life, Inventory offers a vital new perspective on a troubled history.

Inventory

A Family Portrait of Derry’s Troubled Past

A River, A City, A Family

Marilyn Hardy

The former mining town of Stanley lies only twenty minutes drive from the beautiful cathedral city of Durham. Yet the two are worlds apart. 
 
Marilyn Hardy recounts in touching detail the trials of growing up in this impoverished mining town and her life-long struggle to find happiness, from her troubled relationship with her undemonstrative mother, an early suicide attempt and the death of her much-loved father to her violent relationship with her second husband and her long-term struggles with serious health problems. Her journey from troubled childhood and early adulthood to her current happy marriage and eleven grandchildren is shared with candour and grace in this heartfelt memoir, and gives a fascinating insight into a time gone by.

Worthless

The inspirational story of one woman's triumph over tragedy

Michelle Orange

'Rich and moving' New York Times 
 
'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. 
 
A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter 
 
During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. 
 
So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. 
 
A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called 'the great unwritten story': that of the mother-daughter bond. 
 
Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.

Pure Flame

On Mothers and Daughters

Nora Krug

Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. 
 
Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and lyrically told, Heimat is a powerful meditation on the search for cultural identity, and the meaning of history and home.

Heimat

A German Family Album

Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin reflects on Britain's customs, attitudes and social and supernatural phenomena in these six BBC Radio series 
 
Drawn from Radio 3's The Essay strand and presented by journalist and award-winning author Andrew Martin, this beguiling collection brings together his witty, Alan Bennett-esque observations on England's disappearing pastimes, rituals and beliefs. 
 
Yorkshire sees him musing on the county of his birth and upbringing, as he considers his 'Tyke' identity and the ancient rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire; chews over questions of class in 'God's Own County'; ponders its past and future; and recalls the coastal jaunts of his youth. In Hanging On, Martin celebrates five aspects of British life that are still with us - just, as he raises a toast to the boating pond; the ventriloquist's doll; the telephone; the milkman and sex shops. 
 
The Lost Hours memorialises the staging posts of the day that are gradually fading away, such as elevenses and the cocktail hour; while England Ejects explores the inclinations and habits that no longer seem so vital nowadays, including modesty, gentility and Sunday church-going. The Further Realm sees Martin contemplating whether he believes in ghosts; reflecting on mediaeval and modern sightings and telling tales of the undead from resonant times of the year. Finally, in The Sound and the Fury, he discusses the noises that annoy us, from piped music to public transport announcements, asking 'how do we cope with jarring sounds in our world today, and could we live without the daily cacophony?' 
 
Quirky and engaging, these delightfully entertaining essays will give you a whole new perspective on the modern world - and the world beyond. 
 
Production credits 
Produced by Duncan Minshull (Yorkshire, Hanging On, England Ejects, The Further Realm, The Sound and the Fury) and Karen Holden (The Lost Hours) 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the following dates: 23-27 January 2012 (The Sound and the Fury), 27-31 January 2014 (England Ejects), 26-30 October 2015 (The Further Realm), 17-21 April 2017 (Hanging On), 21-25 January 2019 (Yorkshire), 25-29 October 2021 (The Lost Hours) 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

On the World Around Us

25 Explorations of Britain, Past and Present

Jennifer Craig

'What is your name?' she asks, staring at me. 
'Jennifer Ross.' 
'Jennifer Ross, Sister. Well, Nurse Ross, you are dressed in the uniform of a nurse from the Leeds General Infirmary. Such a uniform is not worn with a cardigan. Take it off at once.' 
'Yes Sister.' I can feel my face turn red. 
 
A trainee nurse in the 1950s had a lot to bear. In Jennifer Craig's enchanting memoir, we meet these warm-hearted yet naïve young girls as they get to grips with strict discipline, long hours and bodily fluids. But we also see the camaraderie that develops in evening study sessions, sneaked trips to the cinema and mischievous escapades with the young trainee doctors. 
 
The harsh conditions prove too much for some girls, but the opportunity to help her patients in their time of need is too much of a pull for Jenny. As she commits to her vocation and knuckles down to her exams, she is determined that when she reaches the heights of Ward Sister herself she will not become the frightening matron that struck fear into her student heart ... 
 
Rich in period detail, and told with a good dose of Yorkshire humour, Yes Sister, No Sister is a life-affirming true story of a life long past.

Yes Sister, No Sister

My Life as a Trainee Nurse in 1950s Yorkshire

Lucy Mangan

'Beautiful and moving... It will kickstart a cascade of nostalgia for countless people' Marian Keyes 
 
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one. 
 
She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library. 
 
In Bookworm, Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and disinters a few forgotten treasures poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm. 
 
'Passionate, witty, informed, and gloriously opinionated' Jacqueline Wilson

Bookworm

A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Charlotte Moore

Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore grew up, and where she lives today. It's been in the family since her ancestor Milicent Ludlow, young, single and an orphan, took it on in 1891 and began to enlarge the house and manage the farm. Hancox tells the story of the house and the family over the following thirty years, in the long run-up to the First World War. 
In one sense it's a rural idyll: the arrival of the car disturbs this peaceful agrarian world, but apart from that the rhythms of the countryside go on as they had for centuries before. But all was not quite as it seemed: Milicent made a distinguished marriage but her husband harboured a secret. Milicent herself gradually succumbed to religious fanaticism. And the death of the youngest boy at Ypres devastated the family, bringing the idyll to a painful end. 
Using extraordinary archive material held at Hancox today, Charlotte Moore weaves an Edwardian tale of madness and jealousy, love and loss, heroism and tragedy.

Hancox

Frances Stonor Saunders

*Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022* 
 
'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday Times 
 
If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again. 
 
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. 
 
So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

The Suitcase

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Adam Mars-Jones

'Brims with humour ... each sentence is a delight' Independent 
 
Shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016 
 
When his widowed father - once a high court judge and always a formidable figure - drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. 
 
In the aftermath of an unlooked-for intimacy, Mars-Jones has written a book devoted to particular emotions and events. Kid Gloves is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself - and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation, taking the homophobic bull by the horns. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O'Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.

Kid Gloves

A Voyage Round My Father

Gilda O'Neill

'Every page is a delight. Every chapter made vivid by a writer who has poured heart and soul into her book'. Val Hennessy, Daily Mail 
 
The East End of London - cockneys, criminals, street markets, pub singalongs, dog racing, jellied eels ... it is a place at once appealing and unruly, comforting and incomprehensible. Gilda O'Neill, an East Ender herself shows there is more to this fascinating area than a collection of cliched images. Using oral history and more traditional sources she builds up a powerful image of this community - bringing to us, with wit and honesty, the real story of London's East End

My East End

Memories of Life in Cockney London

Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Jarred McGinnis

There is no meant to be but the love I’ve known has made it hard to believe that. 
 
Jarred McGinnis was born to a Southern US clan where masculinity, resilience and physical violence were intertwined. In There Is No Meant to Be he unearths the legends, secrets and scars that have shaped his family line, from his outlaw Irish ancestors to his mother Momo’s gift of foresight, and the ghosts – both real and remembered – that follow him into adulthood.Two decades on from the near-fatal accident that left him in a wheelchair, McGinnis is married and the father of two girls, living first in East London and now Marseille. He writes about love within the context of care and of the particular vulnerability that comes from being a parent with a disability. In a daring imaginative leap, he writes of the end of life too, reaching beyond his own death to look at what truly makes a life.Inventive, funny and deeply moving, this is a family epic unlike any other: part love story, part elegy, part reminder that even in the mess of family and memory there is something to laugh about.

There Is No Meant to Be

A Family Story

Malcolm Gaskill

Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail… 
 
What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War. 
 
Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it’s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle’s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

The Glass Mountain

Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy

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Virginia Woolf’s (not so) secret lesbian relationship – in her own words

Lifestyle shot of Love Letters: Vita and Virginia, standing on a white marble base against a pale pink wall. A green fabric ribbon is draped across the front of the shot, and a mug and pink flowers stand to the left of the book.

14 romantic quotes from the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Weekly Penguin quiz: How well do you know Watership Down?

Quizzes

Weekly quiz: Are you a Virginia Woolf expert?

A black-and-white photograph of Jeanette Winterson's head and shoulders

Interviews

Jeanette Winterson on the books that changed her life

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

Six Vintage Books Every Aspiring Writer Should Read

An illustration of a group of people celebrating a giant exclamation mark

In defence of the exclamation mark!

Defending The Well of Loneliness

The humble picnic has proved a memorable literary backdrop

The best picnic scenes in literature

10 literary ways to explore London | Curiocity

10 literary hot spots to visit in London

Brilliant LGBTQ+ books you may not have discovered yet

Three copies of Mrs Dalloway on a background that replicates the cover's vivid watercolour splotches.

Why Mrs Dalloway is the perfect novel for our times

Books that defined the 1920s

Deborah Levy on the art of living

Queer classics to read during LGBTQ+ History Month

Life according to Jilly Cooper

From Jane Austen's Chawton to Bram Stoker's Whitby, this is the definitive literary tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Showing results for: ‘virginia woolf’

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