The year is 1972. Britain is confronting economic disaster. The cultural cold war continues, the country is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism, and faces its fifth state of emergency. Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year as a student at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of...

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

On February 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a call from a journalist informing him that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the first time Rushdie heard the word fatwa. His crime? Writing a novel, The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran." So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground for more than nine years, moving from house to house, with...

Many people know Beatrix Potter simply as the writer and illustrator of some of our best-loved children's stories. Fewer know about her struggle to escape the overbearing influence of her parents. Elizabeth Battrick was inspired to recreate this crucial period in Beatrix's life in the form of a novel. Seamlessly blending fact and fiction, it opens when Beatrix was thirty and ends when she was in her midforties, a time filled with dramatic conflict,...

Six decades after Virginia Woolf's death, landscape designer Jo Bellamy has come to Sissinghurst Castle for two reasons: to study the celebrated White Garden created by Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West and to recover from the terrible wound of her grandfather's unexplained suicide. In the shadow of one of England's most famous castles, Jo makes a shocking find that will lead her on a perilous journey into the tumultuous inner life of a literary icon....

"Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers. Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a...

Relates the story of nineteenth-century English poet Caroline Norton, who was denied access to her children by her husband after a sensational trial for adultery, and fought tirelessly for the rights of married women and mothers, resulting in the passage of the Infant Custody Act of 1839.

This authorized biography, written by a BBC producer and director who knew Dahl and worked with the cooperation of the author's adult children and both wives--one of whom was film star Patricia Neal--covers the man and his reputation.

Working-class wife Janet Shirley provides details of her life of newfound luxury thanks to her husband's run on a high-stakes television quiz show which he won with the help of his quirky photographic memory.

"In the early twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square, a hidden architectural gem in the heart of London, was a radical address. On the outskirts of Bloomsbury known for the eponymous group who "lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles, " the square was home to students, struggling artists, and revolutionaries. In the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined at this one address: modernist...