Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Anne Tyler

The glorious Sunday Times bestseller follows one family's joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today 
 
When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. 
 
All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. 
 
But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it's in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a holiday to a cabin by a lake. It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations 
 
 
'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES 
 
'A perfect work of fiction' MEG MASON 
 
'She is and always will be my favourite author' LIANE MORIARTY 
 
'Exquisitely crafted, tender, hilarious, devastatingly precise, I loved this powerful meditation on the small and often unvoiced moments that can make up a life' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'Anne Tyler really is the best... Her sheer brilliance makes it all seems so effortless' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound. I read it in two sittings, totally immersed' VICTORIA HISLOP 
 
 
 
 
French Braid appeared in the Sunday Times bestseller list on on 03.04.2022, 10.04.2022 and 17.04.2022

French Braid

Elizabeth McCracken

‘A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga…is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith’ 
Marie Claire 
 
Read the sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s House 
 
Bertha is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts – ever since she was discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery with nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person. She has no past to speak of, and her mysterious origin scandalises the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. 
 
But Bertha is plucky and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark. As she changes the town forever, her singular spirit resonating through every board and brick and bone, an epic family saga unfolds, set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America.

Bowlaway

Elaine Feeney

THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF AUTHOR OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 
 
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. She spends her days getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business. 
 
But Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby, stirring up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE** 
 
'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' 
 
This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. 
 
From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home... 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

A Spool of Blue Thread

Simi Bedford

Abiola is raised as an aristocratic African warrior in a highly developed civilisation, but when he is betrayed and sold into slavery in America he is forcibly transformed into the property of a French immigrant. Renamed Cornelius, he and fellow slave Delilah begin a relationship which culminates in the birth of their daughter, Epiphany, and the new family plan to escape their servitude and find a better life for themselves... 
 
But can they return to Africa and find true freedom?

Not With Silver

Ingrid Hill

A dangerous rescue attempt in Michigan has captured the attention of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. Ursula Wong is the only child of a poor family and referred to by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the expense. 
 
But Ursula is the last of her family line and her story explodes into a gorgeous saga of culture, history and heredity. Ursula's forebears include a second-century BC Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a Swedish queen; and Ursula's great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a miner who died in a cave-in aged twenty-nine. 
 
Ursula's fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle.

Ursula Under

Jennie Rooney

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.

Inside the Whale

Lawrence Norfolk

In February 1516, a Portugese ship sank with the loss of all hands a mile off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora da Adjuda had sailed 14000 miles from the Indian kingdom Gujarat: her mission, to deliver a rhinoceros to the Pope. The Pope's Rhinoceros tells the stories which culminate in this bizarre incident. Ranging from the Baltic Sea to a flyblown colony in India, from a tribe hidden in the African rain forest to atrocities committed in an obscure town in Tuscany, Norfolk's brilliant novel holds up the true history of the rhinoceros as a mirror to the fantasies and obsessions of the Renaissance.

The Pope's Rhinoceros

Alice Hoffman

This haunting, poignant and addictive story travels effortlessly across time, telling the tale of three generations of women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the consequences. 
 
It opens in London in the present day, when an envious sibling comes to her sister's wedding. Back in the Swinging Sixties, the bridegroom's conventional English mother, Freida, behaves in a wholly unconventional way while working in a Knightsbridge hotel. Even before that, the seeds of tragedy are sown in the Fifties, when twelve-year-old Lucy first visits London and the same hotel. Precocious, impatient, wise beyond her years, Lucy becomes a go-between for two star-crossed lovers and then holds herself agonisingly responsible for what happens...

The Third Angel

Regina Porter

When the boy was four, he asked his father why people needed sleep. His father said, ‘So God could unfuck all the things people fuck up.’ 
 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020* 
 
As America recovers from the Second World War, two families’ journeys begin. James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish-American family, escapes his parents’ turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx. 
 
Illuminating more than six decades of sweeping change – from the struggle for civil rights and the chaos of Vietnam to Obama’s first year as President – James and Agnes’s families will come together in unexpected, intimate and profoundly human ways. 
 
'Regina Porter’s sprawling, sparkling debut novel… is an exhilarating ride. Porter is a wickedly astute chronicler of human foibles. In her hands, this series of glimpses feels something like life itself.' Guardian

The Travelers

Marina Warner

Like Visconti's film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. 
 
According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother's background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the early 1920's. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

The Lost Father

Rose Tremain

'A hell of a read' Sunday Times 
 
'Triumphant, and beautifully told...one of the best novelists writing today' Sara Collins, Guardian 
 
All must gamble with their fate. But not all can win... 
 
In the city of Bath, in the year 1865 Jane Adeane, renowned for her restorative skills, is convinced that some other destiny will one day show itself to her. 
 
But when she finds herself torn between a dangerous affair with a female lover and the promise of a conventional marriage to an apparently respectable doctor, her desires begin to lead her towards a future she had never imagined... 
 
Discover the ultimate historical read. 
 
'Terrific' The Times 
 
'One of our most accomplished novelists' Observer 
 
'One of my favourite writers' Nina Stibbe

Islands of Mercy

From the bestselling author of The Gustav Sonata

Barbara Keating

Stephanie Keating

During their childhood years in the Kenya Highlands of the 1950s, three girls from vastly different backgrounds become blood sisters, promising that nothing will ever destroy the bond between them. But as they grow up love rivalries, broken promises and the tensions and violence of a newly independent Kenya threaten to tear their childhood dreams apart.

Blood Sisters

Damon Galgut

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
 
One family. One promise. One chance to tell a new story. 
 
'A moving, brilliantly told family epic' Elizabeth Day 
 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land...yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored. 
 
As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise? 
 
 
'A tour de force... A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh' Booker Judges, 2021 
 
'Astonishing' Colm Tóibín 
 
'Utterly compelling' Patrick Gale

The Promise

Namwali Serpell

**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020** 
 
 'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater 
 
 On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. 
 
 In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. 
 
 So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. 
 
 'Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling' Salman Rushdie 
 
 'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' Sunday Times 
 
 'Charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

The Old Drift

Fourteen years after independence, the enduring childhood friendship of three women has carried them through times of violence and loss in Kenya, their chosen homeland. 
 
Hannah Olsen and her husband Lars own Langani Farm and Safari Lodge where they struggle to protect their wildlife and land from poachers and corrupt officials. But the developing relationship between their daughter and a young African boy with a terrifying legacy tests the strength of their family. 
 
Sarah Singh, wildlife researcher and renowned photographer, is married to an Indian journalist. However, their inability to have children puts Sarah's relationship with her husband and his family under increasing pressure. 
 
And Camilla Broughton Smith, international model and fashion designer, has given up a sparkling career to work with the charismatic safari guide Anthony Chapman, who has been injured in a tragic accident. Yet his bitterness and fear of commitment threaten to shatter her dreams. 
 
The final part of the Langani trilogy is an unforgettable story of courage and fortitude, of loyalty and murderous deceit, of friendship and betrayal, set against the backdrop of the beauty and wilderness of Kenya.

In Borrowed Light

Fannie Flagg

The time is 1946-2000. The Place is Elmwood Springs, Missouri. World War II has ended. Neighbour Dorothy broadcasts daily from her front room - to an audience across the state - the antics of her wayward son Bobby and adolescent Anna Lee. It's hard to keep secrets in a community like theirs, but life isn't perfect, and even Neighbour Dorothy has a tragedy as well hidden as it can be. 
 
Into their midst comes the Oatman Family, white Southern Gospel singers who arrive for a pharmaceutical convention, and blow the place away. And then there's Hamm Sparks, a super-salesman everyone likes and trusts; and Charlie Fowler, the poultry king who can see the future in a bucket-to-go; and a wealth of other unforgettable residents. Not to mention the brand new Three Little Pigs Cafeteria, with its pink neon pig casting a glow over the high street and pointing the way to the future...

Standing In The Rainbow

Andrew Ridker

'Reading Andrew Ridker’s debut novel, you soon realise you’re in the presence of a new talent.' The Times 
 
Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his new girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him. And then there's the money – the small fortune his late wife Francine kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children. 
 
Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate; and Maggie, a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a noble life of self-imposed poverty. On the verge of losing the family home, Arthur invites his children back to St. Louis under the guise of a reconciliation. But in doing so, he unwittingly unleashes a Pandora's Box of age-old resentments and long-buried memories.

The Altruists

Janette Jenkins

It is January, 1914 and Jonathan Crane returns home from his travels with a new American bride, former Coney Island showgirl Beatrice. In the remote Lancashire village Beatrice is the focus of attention, the men captivated by her beauty, the women initially charmed by tales of her upbringing in Normal, Illinois with her father, an amateur taxidermist, and her brother, a preacher, although she will take the story of how she became the Angel of Brooklyn to her grave. 
 
But when the men head off to fight in the Great War the glamorous newcomer slowly becomes an object of suspicion and jealousy for the women who are left behind and as the years pass, and their resentment grows, Beatrice's secret proves to be her undoing. 
 
Beautifully observed, tragic, funny and so evocative that you can taste the candy floss at Coney Island and feel the chill of wartime England, Angel of Brooklyn is an extraordinary, heartbreaking story.

Angel of Brooklyn

K-Ming Chang

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut of one family's queer desires, violent impulses and buried secrets. 
 
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. Her name was Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; a ghost bird shimmers in an ancient birdcage. 
 
All the while, Daughter is falling for a neighbourhood girl named Ben with mysterious stories of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies an old Taiwanese myth, and fears the power of the tiger spirit bristling within her to cause pain. She will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to derail their destiny. 
 
'What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K-Ming Chang's Bestiary' Raven Leilani, author of Luster

Bestiary

The blazing debut novel about queer desire and buried secrets

Salman Rushdie

**New York Times bestseller** 
A Guardian / Observer Book of the Year 
 
When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. 
 
The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, René, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. René chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work. 
 
Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, and, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up and with coloured hair. 
 
In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies. A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.

The Golden House

David Grossman

An epic, deeply moving novel about the power of love and loving with courage - from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of A Horse Walks into a Bar 
 
 On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. 
 
 Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. 
 
 More Than I Love My Life is a sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. 
 
 'Grossman's work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth' Irish Times

More Than I Love My Life

Anouk Markovits

I Am Forbidden is a powerful portrayal of family, faith and history which sweeps the reader across continents and generations, from pre-war Transylvania to present-day New York, via Paris and England. Immersive, beautiful, moving, it explores in devastating detail what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law and centuries of tradition collide.

I Am Forbidden

Lars Saabye Christensen

Growing up in sixties Oslo, Barnum lives with an extended, eccentric family and his older half-brother, Fred, who was conceived after the rape of their mother in the dying days of World War II. Barnum seems to have stopped growing and Fred, implicated in a tragedy that leaves a family member dead, becomes mute - only roused when he hears 'Living Doll' one time too many. The two half-brothers embark on their seperate courses, Fred becoming a boxer and Barnum a scriptwriter, and it is twenty-seven years before a fax from their dying mother offers Barnum the chance to see his brother again. 
 
This literary marvel tells the story of an ordinary Norwegian family, set apart by extraordinary family members, with unsentimental charm, exuberant comedy and devastating tragedy.

The Half Brother

Billy O'Callaghan

*THE #3 IRISH BESTSELLER* 
 
'Momentous and epic' BERNARD MACLAVERTY 
'Superb and moving' JOHN BANVILLE 
'A lovely, piercing book' SEBASTIAN BARRY 
 
Three generations. More than a century of famine, war, violence and love. 
 
At sixteen Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life. 
 
In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be. 
 
And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house, moments away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies in store for those who will survive her. 
 
'Brilliantly immerses us in its respective time periods' SUNDAY TIMES

Life Sentences

David Adams Richards

Janie McCleary runs one of the first movie theatres in New Brunswick. A successful woman in a world of men, she is ostracized, a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. She trusts no one outside her family. 
 
Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life of this formidable woman, a pioneer before the age of feminism, and her legacy as it unfolds tragically in the lives of her son and grandchildren. Written with aching compassion and masterful sophistication, River of the Brokenhearted muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of these extraordinary characters. 
 
By the author of Mercy Among the Children.

River of the Brokenhearted

Janika Oza

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
A SARAH JESSICA PARKER BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
Four generations. Three sisters. One impossible choice. 
 
Tricked aboard a boat to East Africa, Pirbhai is only thirteen when he is forced by the British into labouring on the railway. Under sweltering heat, hungry and frightened, he commits a terrible act just to survive. 
 
He will never tell a soul, even when he meets Sonal, a fierce, loving woman with whom he starts a family in Uganda, in hope of a better life. But their granddaughters come of age in a divided nation. 
 
Finally forced to flee, the family scatters across the world. They take with them a steel pot, a handful of photos, and a secret &ndash; that one day, will help them find each other again. 
 
A History of Burning is a gorgeous family portrait of love, survival, inheritance - and the eternal search for home. 
 
One family's search for a better life, for fans of Half of a Yellow Sun, Homegoing and Pachinko 
 
'A remarkable debut . . . haunting, symphonic' New York Times 
 
'Vast and intricate, alight with love and contained fury . . . A book I want to press into readers' hands and discuss for hours' Megha Majumdar, author of A BURNING 
 
Shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award

A History of Burning

Meira Chand

Singapore - a trading post where different lives jostle and mix. It is 1927, and three young people are starting to question whether this inbetween island can ever truly be their home. Mei Lan comes from a famous Chinese dynasty but yearns to free herself from its stifling traditions; ten-year-old Howard seethes at the indignities heaped on his fellow Eurasians by the colonial British; Raj, fresh off the boat from India, wants only to work hard and become a successful businessman. As the years pass, and the Second World War sweeps through the east, with the Japanese occupying Singapore, the three are thrown together in unexpected ways, and tested to breaking point. 
 
Richly evocative, A Different Sky paints a scintillating panorama of thirty tumultuous years in Singapore's history through the passions and struggles of characters the reader will find it hard to forget.

A Different Sky

Neel Mukherjee

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 
 
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 
 
Winner of the Encore Award 
 
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 
 
Longlisted for the IMPAC Prize 
 
 
Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note. 
 
At home, his family slowly begins to unravel. Poisonous rivalries grow, the once-thriving family business implodes and destructive secrets are unearthed. And all around them the sands are shifting as society fractures, for this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change. 
 
‘Deeply moving’ Amitav Ghosh 
 
‘Terrifies and delights’ A S Byatt, Guardian 
 
‘Unforgettable’ Daily Telegraph

The Lives of Others

Margaret Forster

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. 
 
It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room. 
 
Then there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting. 
 
Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.

Keeping the World Away

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