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This is a story told by a boy in his thirteenth year, recorded in his secret diary. His life is about to change; his world, about to open.  He lives in Montedidio—God’s Mountain—a cluster of alleys in the heart of Naples. He brings a paycheck home every Saturday from Mast’Errico’s carpentry workshop where he sweeps the floor. He is on his way to becoming a man—his boy’s voice is abandoning him. His wooden boomerang is neither toy nor tool, but something in between. Then there is Maria, the thir...

Behind this rather prim title lies the hilarious fictional diary of a disaster-prone lady of the 1930s, and her attempts to keep her somewhat ramshackle household from falling into chaos: there's her husband Robert, who, when he's not snoozing behind The Times, does everything with grumbling recluctance; her gleefully troublesome children; and a succession of tricky sevants who invariably seem to gain the upper hand. And if her domestic trials are not enough, she must keep up appearances. Partic...

Jerusha Abbott, an orphan, does not know the identity of the mysterious "Daddy-Long-Legs" who is paying her way through college. But although she is told to expect no reply to the many letters she sends him, some things are just irresistible.

Fanny Burney's Evelina was written in secret and published anonymously in 1778. The story of a young woman entering a society that is seemingly designed to threaten her success, Evelina is an example of the epistolary genre popular in the 18th Century.

This takes the form of Tom's battered homework diary - crammed with his doodles and stories. "Back to school, but it's not all bad. We're entering Rooster in a dog show, the School Disco and my birthday are coming up so this term's going to be amazing! Mostly because Delia's not invited to any of these. There's only one small problem with my birthday, Granny Mavis says she's going to cook . . . uh oh!"

Set in the early nineteenth century, Brams fiction The Lady of the Shroud is full of mystical and super-natural elements. A brilliant presentation of a lady who appears always in a shroud, this work engrosses the readers. The Balkan lands are presented and a slight political touch is also given towards the end. Mesmerizing!

In BOLT FROM THE BLUE, Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enroll at Saint Martin’s School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their only form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her...

With the unflinching candour and sympathy for which Joyce Carol Oates is celebrated, the 14 stories of "Dear Husband", examine the intimate lives of contemporary: the tangled ties between generations, the desperation - and the covert, radiant happiness - of loving more than one is loved in return. A passionate bond between an adolescent son and mother has unexpected consequences. A woman is forced to realise, decades later, her childhood role in the destruction of a famous, beloved grandfather's...

‘Bridget Jones meets menopause…sharp, funny and real’ Cecelia Ahern Lay on the couch for a brief nap. Woke up an hour later, the witch trials book I’m reading stuck to one side of my face. Pretending not to be menopausal is exhausting. When fifty-year-old Agatha Doyle starts keeping a diary, it records only the ways she doesn’t know who she is any more. Her glorious empty nest is full of people. And her head is full of brain fog. All it take...

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA In such critically acclaimed plays as The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour, A. R. Gurney has wittily captured the manners of upper-middle-class WASP America, but never as gracefully or with such dazzling economy as in Love Letters. Tracing the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner, the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written—...

"Oh thou savage-hearted monster! What work hast thou made in one guilty hour, for a whole age of repentance!" Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Claris...

'What an emotional, twisty, rollercoaster of a novel! It kept me guessing all the way through.' Alice Hunter, author of The Serial Killer's Wife Sometimes the past is best left buried Since the birth of baby Joe five weeks ago, Ali Baker has been struggling to cope. Starved of sleep and haunted by painful memories from the past, she's a million miles away from the polished, professional barrister she has worked so hard to become. Then her mother tragically and unexpectedly dies, leaving Ali a...