Eight years ago, her brother disappeared while fighting alongside Gypsy partisans in Spain. From his letters, Rose has just two clues to his whereabouts—his descriptions of the spectacular south slopes of the Sierra Nevada and his love for a woman who was carrying his child.In Spain, it has been eight years since Lola Aragon’s family was massacred. Eight years since she rescued a newborn girl from the arms of her dying mother and ran for her life. She has always believed that nothing could make her return…until a plea for help comes from a desperate stranger.Now, Rose, Lola, and the child set out on a journey from the wild marshes of the Camargue to the dazzling peaks of Spain’s ancient mountain communities. As they come face-to-face with war’s darkest truths, their lives will be changed forever by memories, secrets, and friendships.

    It stars Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an ageing London barrister who defends any and all clients. The original show has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.Contents:“Rumpole and the Younger Generation”;“Rumpole and the Alternative Society”;“Rumpole and the Honourable Member”;“Rumpole and the Married Lady”;“Rumpole and the Learned Friends”;“Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade”

    He needs to sort himself out fast, but how? Biscuit and Coffin Head hustle on the front line for Nunchaks. He wants to give it up but he also needs to support his family – his mother, his sister Denise and his brother, Royston. He knows he should be looking for a job, Carlo tells him that every time they meet. Perhaps he should listen to Jah Nelson, who tells him that education is the key. But Biscuit has chosen a bad time to sort himself out: Brixton is angry – temperatures are high and ready to burst and, worst of all, Denise has caught the eye of Nunchaks. As the riots begin, Biscuit has to make a choice, whatever the consequences, that will change his life forever.Set in 1981, the year of the Brixton riots, this thriller is set in a society on the edge of explosion. Biscuit lives with his mother, brother and sister. As the patience of the community breaks and the riots begin to erupt, Biscuit has to make a choice that could change his life forever.

    But now for the first time - suddenly, shockingly, horribly - the balance of power had shifted and the rats began to prey on the human population.

    His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul. Taking its title from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Evelyn Waugh's first, funniest novel immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingénu abroad in the decadent confusion of 1920s high society.

    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times

     A captivating blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction, Above All Things moves seamlessly back and forth between the epic story of Mallory's legendary final expedition and a heartbreaking account of a day in the life of Ruth Mallory. Through George's perspective, and that of the newest member of the climbing team, Sandy Irvine, we get an astonishing picture of the terrible risks taken by the men on the treacherous terrain of the Himalaya. But it is through Ruth's eyes that a complex portrait of a marriage emerges, one forged on the eve of the First World War, shadowed by its losses, and haunted by the ever-present possibility that George might not come home. Drawing on years of research, this powerful and beautifully written novel is a timeless story of desire, redemption, and the lengths we are willing to go for honour, glory, and love.

    With Adam playing Santa while draped in Mrs. Starkadders's shawls, the family shares their traditional "Christmas pudding"-a mélange containing random objects of doom foretelling the coming year: a coffin nail for death, a bad sixpence for financial ruin, and a menthol cone to indicate that the lucky recipient will go "blind wi' headache." These lively tales will delight anyone who loves Stella Gibbons and her signature wit.

    This short novel about a wedding was written in 1932 by a niece of Lytton Strachey and first published by The Hogarth Press.

    She’s one of life’s successes: an award-winning playwright living in a beautiful house with an equally celebrated writer. But she isn’t happy. Life is too easy. It’s becoming stultifying, negating her creative force.She decides upon a spell of sleazy living to give both her work and her soul a spring-clean – and elopes with her typewriter in search of just a hint of degradation. She finds it in Bayswater, and safe in bedsit land she immediately sets about getting to know her neighbours. However, her careless plotting of their lives leads to consequences both tragic and deliciously entertaining.

    H recalls when he himself was sixteen—his godson’s age—as they search for the site of H’s life-altering friendship with a boy named Finn. Finn lives alone on an isolated slip of land and follows no rules: he spends his days swimming, fishing, and collecting driftwood for his tiny beach hut. H, on the other hand, is an upper-class boarding school boy stifled by monotony and endless rules. They meet by chance on the beach, and H is immediately awed by (and jealous of) Finn’s way of life. They strike up an unlikely friendship but the gap between their lives becomes difficult to bridge, and before long the idyll that nurtured their relationship is shattered by heart-wrenching scandal. Meg Rosoff was formerly a YA author, but her work transcends categorization and we are delighted to bring it to adult readers for the first time. What I Was is a timeless, enthralling story destined to become a classic.

    Confused and unhappy, she discovers the wrecked and flowering wastes around St Paul's, where she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.

    Julia Dunstan knew she was more fortunate than most widows, not merely because she was prosperous—as widows go—but because she had always taken an interest in other people. And from the moment Julia moves to Goatstock, where she has inherited a house, there are plenty of people for her to take an interest in. For a start, there’s cousin Dora, who might just as easily been left the house herself and who instead becomes Julia’s companion.Then there’s Lady Finch, the local expert on Fresh Food and the victim of a deception so dastardly that even her attractive but irreverent niece, Harriet, is indignant. This distracts Harriet for a while from the rather thankless task of planning the futures of her friends, Marian and Robert. And all are concerned with news that the village will be made into a “New Town”. However the old values, at least those of Elizabeth Fair’s fiction, remain: wit, charm, and romance.Furrowed Middlebrow is delighted to make available, for the first time in over half a century, all six of Elizabeth Fair’s irresistible comedies of domestic life. These new editions all feature an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.“Where she breaks with the Thirkell school is in her total absence of sentimentality and her detached and witty observation of her characters.”--The Sphere“Miss Fair makes writing look very easy, and that is the measure of her creative ability.”--Compton Mackenzie

    I guess it depends on what I do next."American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune. Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows. The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.Which is how she gets into trouble.Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing.

    Together they forge an unlikely friendship, but their nascent hopes for a brighter future are tested when they are chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime honor: taking part in the creation of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown.Toronto, 2016: More than half a century later, Heather Mackenzie seeks to unravel the mystery of a set of embroidered flowers, a legacy from her late grandmother. How did her beloved Nan, a woman who never spoke of her old life in Britain, come to possess the priceless embroideries that so closely resemble the motifs on the stunning gown worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her wedding almost seventy years before? And what was her Nan’s connection to the celebrated textile artist and holocaust survivor Miriam Dassin?With The Gown, Jennifer Robson takes us inside the workrooms where one of the most famous wedding gowns in history was created. Balancing behind-the-scenes details with a sweeping portrait of a society left reeling by the calamitous costs of victory, she introduces readers to three unforgettable heroines, their points of view alternating and intersecting throughout its pages, whose lives are woven together by the pain of survival, the bonds of friendship, and the redemptive power of love.