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£25.00
Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of the best loved and most recognisable English novelists of her generation. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and her critically acclaimed novels ‘The Dressmaker’ (1973), ‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ (1974), ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ (1990), ‘Every Man For Himself’ (1996) and ‘Master Georgie’ (1998) confirmed her status as one of the major literary figures of the last fifty years. A unique voice in fiction, and unforgettable in person, Beryl Bainbridge was famous for her gregarious drinking habits and her unconventional lifestyle. Yet underneath the public image of a quirky eccentric lay a complex and sometimes traumatic private life that she rarely talked about and which was often only hinted at in her novels. In this biography, Brendan King draws on a mass of unpublished letters and diaries to reveal the real woman behind the popular image.
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£9.99
‘M Train’ begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation.
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£7.99
When the brilliant young painter Marianne Glass is found dead in her snow-covered Oxford garden, Rowan Winter, once her closest friend, knows it wasn’t an accident. Rowan’s pursuit of the truth takes her into every corner of her old friend’s life, from Bohemian East London to the professional art world in which Marianne made her name. The deeper she goes, the more she is convinced that something is terribly wrong. Is someone breaking in to Marianne’s house? Who is the man who watches at night? And what is the involvement of Michael Cory, the intense American painter with at least one other dead woman in his past?
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£8.99
In 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find the lock picked and a gold pocketwatch on his pillow. But he has worse fears than generous burglars; he is a telegraphist at the Home Office, which has just received a threat for what could be the largest-scale Fenian bombing in history.When the watch saves Thaniel’s life in a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori – a kind, lonely immigrant who sweeps him into a new world of clockwork and music. Although Mori seems harmless at first, a chain of slips soon proves that he must be hiding something.
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£25.00
James, Duke of Monmouth, the adored illegitimate son of Charles II, was born in exile the very year that his grandfather was executed and the English monarchy abolished. Snatched from his mother on his father’s orders, James emerged from a childhood in the boarding houses of Rotterdam to command the ballrooms of London, the brothels of Covent Garden and the battlefields of Flanders. For 36 years he would light up the firmament. He inspired delight and disgust, adulation and abhorrence and, in time, love and loyalty almost beyond fathoming. Anna Keay brings to life the warm, courageous and handsome Duke of Monmouth, a man who by his own admission ‘lived a very dissolute and irregular life’, but who was prepared to risk everything for honour and justice.
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£16.99
Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord’s. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents’ valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the ‘penny dreadful’ novels that Robert loved to read. Kate Summerscale uncovers a true story of murder and morality.
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£16.99
In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given ‘two or three’ years to live. She didn’t know how to react. All responses felt scripted, laden with cliché. Being a writer, she decided to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this), and also tell a story she has not yet told: that of being taken in, aged 15, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent 50 years of their complex relationship.
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£9.99
Annie McDee, alone after the disintegration of her long-term relationship and trapped in a dead-end job, is searching for a present for her unsuitable lover in a neglected second-hand shop. Within the jumble of junk and tack, a grimy painting catches her eye. Leaving the store with the picture after spending her meagre savings, she prepares an elaborate dinner for two, only to be stood up, the gift gathering dust on her mantelpiece. But every painting has a story – and if it could speak, what would it tell us? For Annie has stumbled across ‘The Improbability of Love’, a lost masterpiece by Antoine Watteau, one of the most influential French painters of the 18th century.
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£7.99
Under the heartless vault of the Greenland’s artic sky the body of a girl is discovered. Half-naked and tied up, buried hundreds of miles from any signs of life, she has lain alone, hidden in the ice cap, for twenty-five years. Now an ice melt has revealed her. When Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen is flown in to investigate this horrific murder and he sees how she was attacked, it triggers a dark memory and he realises this was not the killer’s only victim.
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£16.99
‘In Other Words’ is at heart a love story – of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. And although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery had always eluded her. So in 2012, seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for ‘a trial by fire, a sort of baptism’ into a new language and world.
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£7.99
Theresa is desperate for a change. Forced into early retirement, fed up with babysitting her bossy daughter’s obnoxious children, she sells her Highgate house and moves to the picture-perfect town of Bellevue-sur-Mer, just outside Nice. With its beautiful villas, its bustling cafés and shimmering cerulean sea, the village sparkles like a diamond on the French Mediterranean coast. Once the hideaway of artists and writers, it is now home to the odd rock icon and Hollywood movie star, and, as Theresa soon discovers, a close-knit set of expats. There’s Carol, the infinitely glamorous American and her doting husband David; the erstwhile British TV star Sally; the ferocious Sian and her wayward Australian poet husband; the sharply witty Zoe with her strangely youthful face and penchant for white wine – and the suave Brian who catches Theresa’s eye.
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£20.00
Richard III is an obsession with a vast number of people. The Richard III Society has a huge membership. Shakespeare has helped. Now with the discovery of Richard III’s bones under a car park in Leicester the obsession has been even further ignited. Horspool is as concerned to examine the legend as well as the man, which is every bit as interesting. Have we subsequently considered ‘Crook Back Dick’ to be the personification of evil and if so how far is this justified? And consequently, where should his remains now be buried. In a Cathedral, a churchyard or burned and scattered to the wind on some blasted heath?
