1955 London. Vivien Lowry's latest play, the only female-authored one in London's West End that winter, has opened to a rapturous reception from audiences. However, the critics' savage reviews soon force its closure and call into question her entire career. So, when the opportunity arises for her to work as a script doctor on a film shooting in Rome's Cinecittà Studios, a world populated with the likes of Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren, Vivien takes it. What she doesn't count on is the greatest ma...
An unforgettable and sweeping interwar love story, from the Costa-shortlisted and bestselling Irish author of Life Sentences'Imaginative, beautifully told... Superb'SPECTATOR'The best book yet by a truly gifted Irish writer'GABRIEL BYRNE, author of Walking with Ghosts1980s Cork. Jack Shine discovers a shoe box full of love letters in his mother's belongings. Rebekah came to Cork alone as a young Jewish refugee from Vienna when the Second World War broke out. She died soon after, and Jack never l...
'Great fun - Loretta is glorious!' Lucy Diamond'Sparkles with fun and wit' Libby Page'A fun, gossipy glimpse into Golden Era Hollywood' Julie Cohen-----You’re Loretta Darling now, welcome to your brand-new flipping life.Dreams don’t come true for girls like Loretta but she won’t let that stop her. With her sights set on becoming a make-up artist to the stars, Loretta wangles her way from Lancashire to the bright lights of Golden Age Hollywood.Only it turns out that Sunset Boulevard is less about...
The free-standing successor and next novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965—from the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign—and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history. Young...
At the end of the 1980s, a writer on a book tour, who very much resembles Grass, passes through East Germany and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor’s models to dinner—and they come, not as ghosts, but as they were when alive in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: a living statue. As he continues touring around E...
A gripping and beautiful tale of love, loss and secrets. Perfect for fans of Rachel Hore, Lorna Cook and Kathryn Hughes. 1963: When Clara Samuels buys Butterfly Cottage, she knows the scandal she’ll cause. A single woman buying property is not the ‘done thing’, especially not in a village like Carybrook. But Clara has been in love with Butterfly Cottage, and its garden, since she used to play there before the War. And when she reconnects with her childhood friend James, her decision feels seren...
Abandoned and alone, you'll do anything to survive… The dramatic novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author. ABANDONED On the cold stone steps of an orphanage, only a few hours old and clutching the object which was to give her name, Pearl Button had a hard start to life. ALONE Now 16, she's finally managed to escape the cruel confines of the orphanage. Finding work at a...
A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer. The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never piece it together again properly afterwards. Because a few of those who possessed a part of it are always already dead. Or lying, or their memories are bad. It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the you...
It is the summer of 1960. The times, they are a'changing. The social conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower is about to give way to the progressive ambitions of John F. Kennedy. And three brothers, brought up in a suburb community in upstate New York, are travelling across the Atlantic to Austria, which only 15 years earlier had been part of the German Reich, to spend part of the summer with one of their grandfathers for the first time. Michael Ladner's new novel is an exploration of changing cultura...
There was relief at Heathrow when the damaged British Airways 707 touched down safely. But something was wrong. The pilot wasn't answering the control tower's radio call - and the authorities soon found out why. An armed hijacker was on board the plane, together with five accomplices and a bomb. The hijackers wanted a terrorist returned in exchange for the lives of the aircraft's passengers and crew. The exchange could be made safely. Until the prisoner escaped...
The search for a missing artist draws Donald Langham and Ralph Ryland into London's criminal underworld, with deadly consequences. London. April, 1957. Private investigator Donald Langham is approached by retired businessman Vernon Lombard to find his missing son, Christopher. But what appears to be a simple case of a missing artist becomes far more alarming when Langham realizes there's more to Christopher's disappearance than meets the eye, and then makes a terrible discovery.Meanwhile, Langha...