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.

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Selina Hastings

Nancy Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of her novels, above all The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, she became a huge bestseller and a household name. 
 
An inspired letter writer, she wrote almost daily to a wide variety of correspondents, among them Evelyn Waugh, Harold Action, John Betjeman, Lord Berners, Lady Seafield, and, of course, her sisters. 
 
Selina Hastings captures equally the gaiety and frivolity and the unhappy truth of Nancy Mitford's life: her failed marriage and her long, unfulfilled relationship with 'the Colonel' contrasting sharply with literary celebrity and glittering social success. Selina Hastings has written a biography that is superbly entertaining and clear-eyed, of a life that Diana Mosley spoke of as being 'so sad one can hardly bear to contemplate it'.

Nancy Mitford

D J Taylor

Bright Young People/ Making the most of our youth/ They talk in the Press of our social success/ But quite the reverse is the truth. [Noel Coward] 
 
The Bright Young People were one of the most extraordinary youth cults in British history. A pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites, they romped through the 1920s gossip columns. Evelyn Waugh dramatised their antics in Vile Bodies and many of them, such as Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford,Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, later became household names. Their dealings with the media foreshadowed our modern celebrity culture and even today,we can detect their influence in our cultural life. 
 
 
But the quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the parties and practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow of war, whose relationships - with their parents and with each other - were prone to fracture. For many, their progress through the 'serious' Thirties, when the age of parties was over and another war hung over the horizon, led only to drink, drugs and disappointment, and in the case of Elizabeth Ponsonby - whose story forms a central strand of this book - to a family torn apart by tragedy. 
 
 
Moving from the Great War to the Blitz, Bright Young People is both a chronicle of England's 'lost generation' of the Jazz Age, and a panoramic portrait of a world that could accommodate both dizzying success and paralysing failure. Drawing on the writings and reminiscences of the Bright Young People themselves, D.J. Taylor has produced an enthralling social and cultural history, a definitive portrait of a vanished age.

Bright Young People

The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940

Diana Cooper

The glittering letters of British socialite Lady Diana Cooper to her son John Julius Norwich, from pre-World War Two London to post-Liberation Paris 
 
‘Please, darling monster, write as often as you can. It’s so sad waiting for letters that don’t come and are not even written. I love my darling boy. Don’t treat me so badly again or I’ll have your lights and liver when I get home.’ 19 November 1939 
 
 ‘I wish, I wish it was all over – Hitler defeated, the lights up again and the guns still.’ 2 October 1940 
 
Lady Diana Cooper was the Edwardian It Girl who inspired novelists from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford. Born Lady Diana Manners, she was an aristocrat, society darling and an actress. Married to political star Duff Cooper, they were the golden couple at the heart of 20th century British upper-class life. This extraordinary collection of letters written by Diana to her only son, John Julius Norwich, takes us from the rumblings of war, through the Blitz to rural Sussex to post-Liberation Paris. 
 
 Beyond all the glitz, Diana emerges in these letters as highly intelligent, funny and fiercely loyal: a woman who disliked extravagance and was often shy, who was happiest in the countryside and whose greatest love were her husband and son John, who would later become a leading historian and broadcaster. These illuminating letters document some of history’s most dramatic events, but they provide a vivid and touching portrait of the love between a mother and son, separated by war, oceans – and the constraints of the time they lived in. 
 
‘Diana Cooper is as vivid in literature and social legend as she was in life. Her letters are frank, witty and humorous’ The Times

Darling Monster

The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her Son John Julius Norwich 1939-1952

Katie Whitaker

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration.   As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess'. Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644.  In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the -migr- royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day, such as Descartes and Hobbes.   Margaret had always loved poetry and philosophy - and now she became a writer.   Plays, short fiction, fantasies, 'science fiction' and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises and one utopia -   She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific of female writers in an age when less than one per cent of published work was by women and society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name.

Mad Madge

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic

Edmund de Waal

**WINNER OF THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Edmund de Waal uncovers the history of a family through a turbulent century through 264 objects. 
 
264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined. 
 
From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siecle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke's journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. 
 
'You have in your hands a masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
'The most brilliant book I've read for years... A rich tale of the pleasure and pains of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY*

The Hare With Amber Eyes

The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

Mya-Rose Craig

Discover Mya-Rose Craig's moving and life-affirming memoir about family, searching for rare birds, and the power of our natural world. 
 
'Lyrical, poignant and insightful' MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
'Filled with hope and energy' Guardian 
 
In her memoir, Mya-Rose Craig and her family travel the world in search of rare birds and astonishing landscapes. But a shadow moves with them, too - her mother's deepening mental health crisis. In the face of this struggle, the Craigs turn to nature again and again, and every time it offers joy and stillness. 
 
On these journeys, Mya-Rose also witnesses the inequality and destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And so, through the simple, mindful act of looking for birds, she becomes ever more determined to campaign for all our survival. 
 
'A delightful account of a young life devoted to birding - and the fight to save birds and the places they live' Stephen Moss 
 
* Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award * 
* Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing * 
* Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize *

Birdgirl

Discovering the Power of Our Natural World

From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes 
 
As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. 
 
 The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears. Like de Waal's family, they were part of belle époque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism. 
 
Count Moïse de Camondo created a spectacular house filled with art for his son to inherit. Over a century later, de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and, in a haunting series of letters addressed to Camondo, he tells us what happened next. 
 
'Illuminating... A wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea' Guardian 
 
'Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age... Dazzling' Financial Times

Letters to Camondo

Livia Manera Sambuy

A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War 
 
‘Remarkable and compelling’ Edmund de Waal 
 
‘Thoroughly engaging’ Kamila Shamsie 
 
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever. 
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year. 
 
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies. 
 
‘An ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes’ Jhumpa Lahiri 
 
‘A tantalizing true story . . . In Search of Amrit Kaur plunges into the glittery world of Indian royalty’ New York Times Book Review

In Search of Amrit Kaur

An Indian Princess in Wartime Paris

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson highly evocative, brilliant and comprehensive account of apocalyptic belief was a phenomenal critical success upon hardback publication. It brings together the massacre at Waco, the Solar Temple suicides, the Japanese subway gas attack, UFOs, angelic visitors and other apparently unrelated phenomena and places them in the context of the dawning of a new world at the time of the millennium. This is the revised, updated edition in which Damian Thompson tackles subjects such as the millennium dome and the millennium bug; rejacketed by Vintage for the lead-up to the year 2, 000.

The End Of Time

Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, in a family that includes twenty-four children born to four different mothers. He spent his 1930s childhood as the apple of his mother's eye, before attending school to slake what is considered a bizarre thirst for learning. 
 
As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya begin to impinge on the boy's life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through the story of his grandparents and parents, and his brothers' involvement in the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi deftly etches a tumultuous era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

Dreams in a Time of War

Edmund Gordon

WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 
 
NBCC AWARD FINALIST 
 
WINNER OF THE 2017 SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, Spectator and Observer 
 
Angela Carter’s life was as unconventional as anything in her fiction. Through her fearlessly original and inventive books, including The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus, she became an icon to a generation and one of the most acclaimed English writers of the last hundred years. This is her first full and authorised biography. 
 
Edmund Gordon uncovers Carter’s life story – from a young woman trying to write in a tiny bedsit in Tokyo, to one of the most important and daring writers of her day. From a life full of adventure sprang work so fantastic, dazzling and seductive that it permanently changed and reinvigorated British literature. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself. 
 
'An exemplary piece of work... Everyone should read it' Spectator

The Invention of Angela Carter

A Biography

Daniel Swift

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal 
 
In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. 
 
 At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. 
 
 Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.

The Bughouse

The poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound

Mark Garnett

In this groundbreaking new book, Mark Garnett charts the changes in British politics, society and culture since 1975. In the mid-1970s Britons spent much of their time complaining - and seemingly for good reason. A Labour government with a wafer-thin majority was struggling in vain against rampant inflation; the headlines were full of strikes, serial killers and sporting disasters; while in the streets anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with the racists of the National Front. 
 
Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century seems a very different and much quieter place, but is it as 'apathetic' as the political commentators argue? And were the 1970s really as 'angry' as people believed?

From Anger To Apathy

The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain since 1975

Rebecca Fraser

A Times History Book of the Year 
 
The voyage of the Mayflower is one of the seminal events in world history. But the story did not end with her arrival on the frozen coast of New England in 1620. In an epic history, Rebecca Fraser relates one ordinary family’s extraordinary response to the challenges of life in America. Despite the intense physical trials of living in the New World, Edward Winslow found America exotic and enticing. His remarkable friendship with Massasoit, the King of the Wampanoags, is part of the legend of Thanksgiving. Yet, fifty years later, Edward’s son Josiah was commanding the New England militias against Massasoit’s son in King Philip’s War. A fast-paced intensely human portrait, The Mayflower Generation reveals the contradictions between generations as they made the painful decisions that determined the future of America.

The Mayflower Generation

The Winslow Family and the Fight for the New World

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir begins half an hour before his release on 12 December 1978. 
 
A year earlier, he recalls, armed police arrived at his home and took him to Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, Ngugi lives in a block alongside other political prisoners, but he refuses to give in to the humiliation. He decides to write a novel in secret, on toilet paper – it is a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. 
 
Wrestling with the Devil is Ngugi’s unforgettable account of the drama and challenges of living under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the pain caused by his isolation from his family, but also the spirit of defiance and the imaginative endeavours that allowed him to survive.

Wrestling with the Devil

A Prison Memoir

Albert French

SOON TO BE FEATURED ON THE GRAHAM NORTON BOOK CLUB PODCAST ON AUDIBLE 
 
Discover Albert French's haunting first novel; a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking. 
 
The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression. 
 
'Billy is a book that will stay with me in my dreams', Tim O'Brien author of The Things They Carried

Billy

The gripping story of the lure of porcelain, or 'white gold', from the Number One bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. 
 
** A Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller ** 
 
 "Other things in the world are white but for me porcelain comes first" 
 
 A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white. 
 
 Acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times. 
 
 In these intimate and compelling encounters with the people and landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal enriches his understanding of this rare material, the 'white gold' he has worked with for decades. 
 
'This is a haunting book, a book that amasses itself piece by piece, gaining in weight.' Olivia Laing, New Statesman 
 
'A mighty achievement' Guardian

The White Road

A Journey Into Obsession

a pilgrimage of sorts

Stuart Neville

A German businessman is the third to die: murdered in a seaside guesthouse. 
 
A note pinned on his body is addressed to Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite commando and once the most dangerous man in Europe. It warns Skorzeny that they are coming for him next. 
 
Lieutenant Albert Ryan is ordered by the Irish Minister for Justice, Charles Haughey, to protect Skorzeny, but Ryan defied his parents and scandalised his home town to join the British Army and fight the Nazi regime. Can Ryan bring himself to protect a man who caused the deaths of thousands: a man who now lives safely in Ireland in the lap of luxury?

Ratlines

Damian Le Bas

'I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.' 
 
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places they worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. 
 
In a bid to better understand his heritage, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today. 
 
‘A beautiful writer who seems born to tell this fascinating story’ Amy Liptrot 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize

The Stopping Places

A Journey Through Gypsy Britain

Phoebe McIntosh

'A must-read... compulsively timely novel' Stylist 
 
When Layla and Andy first meet, they can't believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate… 
 
Sera, Layla’s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the couple fall deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery – could their families be linked in the worst possible way? 
 
What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed as Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined – or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. 
 
And now, she faces an impossible choice. 
 
**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024** 
 
‘A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy’ MARIAN KEYES 
 
'I loved this book' JACQUELINE CROOKS, author of Fire Rush 
 
'So kind and smart and clear-eyed' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of The Husbands 
 
READERS LOVE DOMINOES: 
‘Tender, thought-provoking and hard-hitting’ 
‘Kept me second guessing how things would turn out until the very end’ 
‘Incredibly thought-provoking’ 
‘Such an important novel’ 
‘I laughed, I cried, I learned A LOT’ 
‘So much more than a love story’

Dominoes

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE.* 'One of the greatest writers of our time' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
The Perfect Nine is a glorious epic about the founding of Kenya's Gikuyu people and the ideals of beauty, courage and unity. 
 
Gikuyu and Mumbi settled on the peaceful and bounteous foot of Mount Kenya after fleeing war and hunger. When ninety-nine suitors arrive on their land, seeking to marry their famously beautiful daughters, called The Perfect Nine, the parents ask their daughters to choose for themselves, but to choose wisely. 
 
First the young women must embark on a treacherous quest with the suitors, to find a magical cure for their youngest sister, Warigia, who cannot walk. As they journey up the mountain, the number of suitors diminishes and the sisters put their sharp minds and bold hearts to the test, conquering fear, doubt, hunger and many menacing ogres, as they attempt to return home. But it is perhaps Warigia's unexpected adventure that will be most challenging of all. 
 
Blending folklore, mythology and allegory, Ngugi wa Thiong'o chronicles the adventures of Gikuyu and Mumbi, and how their brave daughters became the matriarchs of the Gikuyu clans, in stunning verse, with all the epic elements of danger, humour and suspense. 
 
'A tremendous writer... it's hard to doubt the power of the written word when you hear the story of Ngugi wa Thiong'o' Guardian

The Perfect Nine

The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi

Jehanne Wake

The Caton sisters were Southern belles descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and were expected to 'marry a Plantation'. But they were independent, fascinated by politics, clever with money, romantic in mood. Arriving In London in 1816 the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice, against both Americans and Catholics. The widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington's wayward elder brother, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and appearing as a 'Catholic Yankee' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish. Louisa eventually became Duchess of Leeds, and a friend of Queen Victoria, while the sphere in which Bess shone was the stockmarket, as queen of speculators. 
 
Based on intimate unpublished letters, Sisters of Fortune is a brilliant portrait of love between sisters, a most unusual story of money and power and a fascinating glimpse of how these extraordinary women influenced the social and international relations of their time.

Sisters of Fortune

The First American Heiresses to Take England by Storm

‘Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Guardian 
 
When Ngugi wa Thiong’o arrives at the prestigious Makerere University, it embodies all the potential and excitement of the early 1960s. Campus is a haven of opportunity for the brightest African students, a meeting place for thinkers and writers from all over the world, and its alumni are filling Africa’s emerging political and cultural positions. 
 
 Despite the challenges he faces as a young black man in a British colony, it is here that Ngugi begins to find his voice as a playwright, journalist and novelist, writing his first, pivotal works just as the countries of East Africa enter the final stages of their independence struggles.

Birth of a Dream Weaver

A Writer’s Awakening

Kerry Hudson

‘I've just literally devoured Newborn and absolutely loved it’ Giovanna Fletcher, Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast 
 
The new memoir from Kerry Hudson about her struggle to build a safe, loving home for her baby – the very opposite of the home she grew up in... 
 
‘Absorbing’ Irish Times 
‘Filled with colour’ Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun 
‘A rallying cry’ Herald 
 
How do you build a family without a blueprint to work from? 
 
Kerry Hudson grew up in poverty. Always on the move, shuttled between the care system and her chaotic mother, she left school at 15 without qualifications. Now a prize-winning writer, she looks back and asks: how do you create a different life for yourself and your family? 
 
In Newborn we see how Kerry found love, what it took to decide to start a family of her own and how fragile every step of the journey towards parenthood was. All along the way, she faces obstacles that would test the strongest foundations, from struggles with fertility to being locked down in a Prague maternity hospital to a marriage in crisis. But over and over again, her love, hope, fight – and determination to break patterns and give her son a different life – win through and light her path. 
 
PRAISE FOR KERRY HUDSON: 
 
‘It’s not just Kerry Hudson’s writing that is vibrant, authentic and true, it’s the person herself, it’s where the writing comes from; a wise and generous heart’ KIT DE WAAL 
 
'Hudson’s resilience, grace and humility are staggering. She’s an absolute inspiration’ DOUGLAS STUART 
 
‘Kerry Hudson blew me away, opened my eyes’ PHILIPPA PERRY

Newborn

Running Away, Breaking with the Past, Building a New Family

John Campbell

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary. 
 
At the beginning of 1913 they became lovers, on terms spelt out by Lloyd George with ruthless clarity. Their secret relationship was to last for thirty years until his wife's death finally allowed Lloyd George to marry her in 1943. 
 
Combining sex, romance, family feuds and high politics- based on letters, diaries and a vast range of material, published and unpublished - If Love Were All... is the first detailed study of this extraordinary relationship, one that was known about by everyone in politics but never revealed in the press, and the strains that it placed on both parties.

If Love Were All...

The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George

Marie-Elsa R. Bragg

A unique, intimate and beautiful exploration of grief, loss, healing and faith 
 
'This is a beautiful book, a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance. You have to read it' EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
We sat in the kitchen across the small wooden table from each other. She cried like banks bursting, then silence; like winds blowing through her shoulders, chest bouncing, then long shallow breaths. She ruptured and I watched, still, emotionless. 'You must stop crying.' 
 
When Marie-Elsa was just six years old, her mother took her own life. Now, many years later, she returns to that night. Going back to that moment, inhabiting this defining tragedy, allows for an exploration of the grief but also brings healing. 
 
Written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa&rsquo;s own faith. It is an unforgettable book, with a luminous sense of a daughter&rsquo;s loss. 
 
With a Foreword by Rowan Williams 
 
&lsquo;Truly remarkable... This book carries its readers to a place where inhibitions and fears about loss and death give way to something more hopeful and, in their own way, real&rsquo; Daily Telegraph

Sleeping Letters

On Grief, Loss, Healing and Faith

Juliet Nicolson

One woman’s investigation into the nature of memory, the past, and above all, love. 
 
All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson’s was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother’s Tory-conventional background. 
 
A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from

A House Full of Daughters

Laura Freeman

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism 
 
'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it' 
EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for' 
OBSERVER 
 
The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. 
 
Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Frances Leviston

'Superbly written and fearlessly imagined fiction' Sarah Hall 
 
Ten women, all called Claire, are tangled up in complex power dynamics with their families, friends, and lovers. Though all are different ages, and leading different lives, each is haunted by the difficulty of living on her own terms. 
 
Claire is a teenaged babysitter left alone with a strange little girl and her imaginary friend. Claire is a woman trying to escape her elderly mother by employing an android carer. Claire is a young TV journalist wrecking her first big interview. Claire's boyfriend discovers more than he bargains for when he begins to read her diary. 
 
And whatever she does, Claire is always living in the shadow of a monstrous mother. 
 
'Leviston is a mistress of precision and emotional insight' Hilary Mantel, TLS

The Voice in My Ear

Helen Rappaport

A TRUE STORY OF LIES, BEAUTY AND BLACKMAIL IN VICTORIAN LONDON 
_________________________ 
Madame Rachel had everything. 
 
A Mayfair address; the title of 'purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen'; a shop full of exotic, expensive creams and potions; and a clientele of the aristocratic, the rich - and the gullible. 
 
Little did they suspect that Madame Rachel had once been a poor fish-fryer in a disease-ridden, grubby corner of Victorian London. Her shop in New Bond Street lured her wealthy clients in their droves, enticed by the promise of eternal beauty. What they found there was a con-woman and fraudster who made a career out of lies, treachery and the desperate hopes of women wanting to be 'beautiful for ever'. 
 
Beautiful For Ever is a thrilling tale of love affairs, scandal, blackmail, high-profile court cases, suicide and fraud, with the extraordinary Madame Rachel right at the centre of it all.

Beautiful For Ever

Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer

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Beyond Brideshead: why Evelyn Waugh needs to be reclaimed as our funniest writer

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