Fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and The Letter by Kathryn Hughes will be captivated. ‘Anna, I kept a diary during the war. I have so much to tell you… And now you have this box containing my scribblings. My memory pearls. This diary is my inheritance to you. Your loving Mamma.’ As World War Two shatters Europe, Ines is a young girl caught up in the Italian Resistance. With her brother and best friend sacrificing everything to fight the Nazis, Ines hides deep in the Tuscan mountains, tending the wounds of the fallen fighters – including an escaped British prisoner-of-war who captures her heart. Forty-five years later, an elderly lady in an English nursing home passes away, dreaming of Italy in her dying hours. To her youngest daughter Anna, she leaves a battered box of letters, their pages yellowed with age, and a promise that the truth about what really happened to her in the war lies within. Anna’s English father forbade her from learning her mother’s beautiful language. So to translate the handwritten diaries, she resolves to visit Tuscany for herself. As she explores the sun-kissed olive groves and stunning mountain landscapes of the homeland she’s never known, Anna uncovers a shocking secret about her mother’s past that will uproot everything she’s ever believed. In this small Tuscan community, some wartime secrets were never meant to be uncovered… Readers have fallen in love with The Tuscan Secret: ‘Fantastic read… I loved this book...I would highly recommend.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘Excellent book!... will grab you and hold onto you long after you put it down.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘A feast of a book… transports you to Tuscany.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘This beautifully woven story had me captivated from the start… I could not help but LOVE the descriptions of Tuscany, the countryside, the people and the food.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘I was gripped… The author weaves a magical tale… There is so much beautiful detail in the author's writing, one could almost taste the food, or feel the beauty of the surroundings.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘The story was beautifully told… a wonderful tale of self-discovery… A great read, with characters who will stay with you long after the book is closed.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘This is a beautifully written book… an ending that took me quite by surprise.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars This book was previously published as Tuscan Roots.

    Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

    I have fought with sword and bow, and struggled fiercely to bear my babes into this world. I have loved deeply and hated deeply, too. Lady Gruadh, called Rue, is the last female descendent of Scotland’s most royal line. Married to a powerful northern lord, she is widowed while still carrying his child and forced to marry her husband’s murderer: a rising war-lord named Macbeth. Encountering danger from Vikings, Saxons, and treacherous Scottish lords, Rue begins to respect the man she once despised–and then realizes that Macbeth’s complex ambitions extend beyond the borders of the vast northern region. Among the powerful warlords and their steel-games, only Macbeth can unite Scotland–and his wife’s royal blood is the key to his ultimate success.  Determined to protect her small son and a proud legacy of warrior kings and strong women, Rue invokes the ancient wisdom and secret practices of her female ancestors as she strives to hold her own in a warrior society. Finally, side by side as the last Celtic king and queen of Scotland, she and Macbeth must face the gathering storm brought on by their combined destiny.From towering crags to misted moors and formidable fortresses, Lady Macbeth transports readers to the heart of eleventh-century Scotland, painting a bold, vivid portrait of a woman much maligned by history. From the Hardcover edition.

    Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—and elegantly explains his work and its implications.

    Weaving through the book is its presiding spirit, the bee, symbolizing what we have left of grace in the world and what is most precious for us to protect. Winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award.

    Kathleen's son Sean has just been transferred to Belfast's most notorious prison - Long Kesh, recently renamed the Maze. Kathleen knows that he will join the other prisoners on their non-cooperation protest, known as the Blanket. Rumours of a hunger strike are beginning to circulate.John Dunn has finished twenty years in the British Army. After three tours of Belfast, he's found a girl and a house and a job as a prison guard. In the weeks before Christmas, both Kathleen and John will find themselves in impossible situations. Both will have to find a way to survive when everything they love is in danger of being destroyed.This Human Season is Louise Dean’s second novel set in Belfast, Ireland, during The Troubles of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. It was widely praised by critics internationally and described as ‘astonishing’ by reviewers from The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom to BookForum in the United States.‘Breathtaking…This Human Season is a novel that confirms the arrival of a significant voice in British fiction’. The Observer'Magnificent.' Arena.‘Not a wasted moment in this terrifying and terribly funny book.' Kirkus Starred Review.'This is a fine and thoughtful historical novel which manages to find humour and decency in the most awful of places.' The Sunday Times‘Dean is an audacious arrival in British fiction. She is unafraid to tackle unsexy or unsafe material, or to stray beyond the domestic sphere.’ The Guardian‘Dean is brave enough to offer the reader a glimpse of real hope…She is also an eloquent architect of the strengths and shapes of passion…Ranging across this desperate landscape is a novel which captures a community’s resilience and it’s humour full of broken glass.’ Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement'Louise Dean's pitch-perfect second novel, ''This Human Season,'' recreates the time of the troubles ... With remarkable evenhandedness, she evokes the day-to-day struggles of English and Irish, Protestant and Roman Catholic, as they try to get on with their lives while the world around them goes insane ...' New York Times'With clear-eyed compassion, and with all the resources of the novelist's art, Louise Dean leads us through those terrible days when for a while Belfast was a vortex for the worst of the world's cruelty and pain' J.M. Coetzee Click to purchase the print or e-book publicationClick to purchase the print or e-book publication'Audacious . . . remarkable. That an English woman born after the Troubles began should take one of its most grisly episodes—the 'dirty protests' in the Maze prison—as the focus of a compelling family drama is ambitious to say the least. That she should pull it off with such compassion and perceptive detail is nothing short of astonishing."The Telegraph'Dean mercilessly heightens the suspense while managing at the same time to confer complexity and even grace on her characters and on their forbidding city.' The Boston Globe'Dean's great achievement is showing us how ordinary people can go on with their lives in the midst of extraordinary brutality and how a few are able to do so with compassion and hope.' People'How everyday people become mortal enemies is both the central mystery and tragedy of this intelligent book.' Entertainment Weekly

    England is at war. Desperate to help in whatever way they can, Ivy and Louisa enlist as gardeners at Kew, the Royal Botanic Gardens, taking on the jobs of the men who have gone to fight. Under their care, the gardens begin to flourish and become a safe haven for those seeking solace–but not everyone wants women working at Kew.The pair begin to face challenges on the home front. When a tragedy overseas affects the people closest to them, can the women of Kew pull together to support themselves and their country through the darkest of times?

    There is a dominant father and a socially ambitious mother who adores her son Dennis. When he arrives it is at once clear to the reader why he does not fit in with his smugly conventional family. Then, with the outbreak of war, the tone of the book changes: it focuses on Dennis’s refusal to fight, indeed on his abhorrence of violence; his falling in love with Alan; and his close friendship with Antoinette, who has not realised she is lesbian but is unabashed when she does. Dennis, however, is in agony about being ‘a musical man’ (slang for being gay): ‘Abnormal – perverted – against nature – he could hear the epithets that would be hurled against him. But what had nature been about, in giving him the soul of a woman in the body of a man?’Running through all this is the background of the war. At first everyone thought it would be over by Christmas. Then there were the horrors of 1915. And then conscription started. Month by month one sees what happens to Dennis and the other COs (conscientious objectors) he knows.The book was published by C.W. Daniel, a pacifist publisher, in May 1918. In September the book was banned for being ‘likely to prejudice the recruiting, training, and discipline of persons in his Majesty’s forces.’ Unsold copies were seized and the publisher was fined.

    England is at war. As Evie Elliott watches her brother, Will, and his best friend, Thomas Harding, depart for the front, she believes—as everyone does—that it will be over by Christmas, when the trio plan to celebrate the holiday among the romantic cafes of Paris.But as history tells us, it all happened so differently…Evie and Thomas experience a very different war. Frustrated by life as a privileged young lady, Evie longs to play a greater part in the conflict—but how?—and as Thomas struggles with the unimaginable realities of war he also faces personal battles back home where War Office regulations on press reporting cause trouble at his father’s newspaper business. Through their letters, Evie and Thomas share their greatest hopes and fears—and grow ever fonder from afar. Can love flourish amid the horror of the First World War, or will fate intervene?Christmas 1968. With failing health, Thomas returns to Paris—a cherished packet of letters in hand—determined to lay to rest the ghosts of his past. But one final letter is waiting for him…

    He certainly has no love for Alfred, whom he considers a pious weakling and no match for Viking savagery, yet when Alfred unexpectedly defeats the Danes and the Danes themselves turn on Uhtred, he is finally forced to choose sides. By now he is a young man, in love, trained to fight and ready to take his place in the dreaded shield wall. Above all, though, he wishes to recover his father’s land, the enchanting fort of Bebbanburg by the wild northern sea.This thrilling adventure—based on existing records of Bernard Cornwell’s ancestors—depicts a time when law and order were ripped violently apart by a pagan assault on Christian England, an assault that came very close to destroying England.

    His dream of a united kingdom of all England will stand or fall on one field—on the passage of a single day.At his side is the priest Dunstan of Glastonbury, full of ambition and wit (perhaps enough to damn his soul). His talents will take him from the villages of Wessex to the royal court, to the hills of Rome—from exile to exaltation. Through Dunstan's vision, by his guiding hand, England will either come together as one great country or fall back into anarchy and misrule . . .From one of our finest historical writers, The Abbott’s Tale is an intimate portrait of a priest and performer, a visionary, a traitor and confessor to kings—the man who can change the fate of England.

    But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Inspector Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.

    Evocative and vivid descriptions of the early stages of the conflict populate these pages, from which the reader can gain lessons of the conditions of the stagnant front.Originally published in 1915, the set of tales within this book offer sobering accounts from various battlefields which took place during the early stages of the war. Although the war was not even halfway over by the time these stories found publication, the horrors of the conflict were already a fact of life, with casualties rapidly mounting on both sides.At that time public opinion hadn’t yet fully turned against the war, and in Britain – the nationality of all the soldiers here – the need for showing progress was essential to sustain civilian and military morale. All of the soldiers in these pages were already serving in their regiments, or had volunteered for service, when the war commenced. They were commonly professional soldiers, possessed of a natural – even ingrained - patriotism, and more accepting of the official narrative than the increasingly sceptical and fearful citizenry back home. There is however no doubt that many were already disillusioned, and that the stories here are taken from an already thinning group of soldiers still possessed of some shred of belief in the war as a noble, or even glorious, conflict.Despite the mood which underpins the pages here, one can read between the lines for a picture. The stories are honest: thing got worse between those elated first weeks wherein the French welcomed their allies so gladly, and the war that was to be over by Christmas 1914 was nowhere near ending, and it is in these stories that we witness the germinal seeds of disillusion and hatred of conflict. The majority of the illustrations which originally accompanied these accounts prioritise the heroism of their subjects, while a few offer a toned down presentation of the horrific battlefields. In this modern edition, we include a number of relevant photographic illustrations alongside the original drawings which accompanied the stories when they were first published. While the imagery of World War I is generally quite ingrained in our minds, these supplementary pictures are designed as on-the-spot reminders of how war was more than a century ago, as well as to provide demonstration of the weapons and technology of the era.

    Fewer than one-hundred survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.

    Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past—the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, and her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help.Restless is a brilliant espionage book and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is fiction at its finest.