When an overworked architect helps to restore the house where J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, she discovers a Neverland of her own in this charming debut novel about female friendship across generations. When Joey Rubin stumbles upon a group of elderly women swimming in a lake one freezing January morning, she thinks they must be mad. But then they dare her to come in… Joey, an overworked New York architect, is in the Cotswolds to oversee the restoration of Stanway House – the stately home that inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. It hasn’t been easy. The local residents aren’t exactly welcoming, and then there’s the problem of the brooding caretaker, a man who seems to take every opportunity to undermine her plans. She soon begins to feel that she can’t do anything right. Until, that is, she discovers the J.M. Barrie Ladies’ Swimming Society and begins to take a daily dip with them in their own private Neverland. For Joey, meeting Aggie, Gala, Lilia and co. is a life-changing experience, the beginning of a friendship that will transform her in the most remarkable of ways…

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society

Literature & Fiction

Zitwer, Barbara J.

United States

Atria Books/Marble Arch Press

When a terrible accident threatens to end their relationship, a husband and wife ultimately discover the true nature of love in this beautiful, poignant, debut novel. You think you’re the perfect couple. And then the unthinkable happens. Kit and Alice are enjoying a luxurious weekend abroad when their car spins off a mountain road and into a desert valley. Their lives are changed in an instant. In the aftermath of the accident, their faith in each other is shattered. Suddenly it is as if they hardly know each other at all. The Trouble with Alice is a love story told backwards – a touching, surprising novel about two people who have to fall apart in order to learn how to love…

The Trouble with Alice

Glazebrook, Olivia

Contemporary

This “fiercely absorbing, passionate novel” (The Guardian), a bestseller in the UK, tells the epic tale of two sisters in the war-torn streets of Nazi-occupied Athens. In 2008 Antigone Perifanis returns to her old family home in Athens after 60 years in exile. She has come to attend the funeral of her only son, Nikitas, who was born in prison, and whom she has not seen since she left him as a baby. At the same time, Nikitas’s English widow Maud – disturbed by her husband’s strange behaviour in the days before his death – starts to investigate his complicated past. She soon finds herself reigniting a bitter family feud, and discovers a heartbreaking story of a young mother caught up in the political tides of the Greek Civil War, forced to make a terrible decision that will blight not only her life but that of future generations...

The House on Paradise Street

ZINOVIEFF, Sofka

British & Irish

Richly entertaining and beautifully written, here is a passionate case for the value of old-fashioned letter writing in a technology-obsessed world, along with a collection of some of history’s greatest letters. Remember letters? They were good, weren’t they? The thrill of receiving that battered envelope, all the better for the wait . . . In this richly entertaining book, paper geek John O’Connell puts forward a passionate case for the value of letter-writing in a distracted, technology-obsessed world. Drawing on great examples from the past, he shows that the best letters have much to teach us – Samuel Richardson’s ‘familiar letters’; Wilfred Owen’s outpourings to his mother; the sly observational charms of Jane Austen. And in doing so he reminds us of the kind of letters we would all write if we had the time – the perfect thank-you letter, a truly empathetic condolence letter, and of course the heartfelt declaration of love. Was there a Golden Age of Letters? Why is handwriting so important? Can we ever regain the hallowed slowness of the pre-Twitter era? In answering these questions O’Connell shows how a proper letter is an object to be cherished, its crafting an act of exposure which gives shape and meaning to the chaos of life. *** ‘The nib touches the paper. And instinctively I follow the old formula: address in top right-hand corner; date just beneath it on the left-hand side. My writing looks weird. I hand-write so infrequently these days that I’ve developed a graphic stammer - my brain’s way of registering its impatience and bemusement. What are you doing? Just send an email! I haven’t got all night . . .’

For the Love of Letters: The Joy of Slow Communication

O'Connell, John

Essays & Correspondence

An educational and idiosyncratic account of the ten absolutely worst years in human history and what made them such stinkers. They say that history is written by the winners. Not according to Derek Wilson. In this fascinating, revelatory book, Wilson tells the story from the point of view of the losers – collating a catalogue of calamities and catastrophes that have shaped our world more than historians tend to let on. In ten lucid and entertaining chapters, the author identifies the very worst years of human history, from the destruction of the Roman Empire in 541 to the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War in 1865, from the march on Leningrad in 1942 to the Vietnam War of 1968. Condensing two thousand years of war, plague, misrule and political villainy, he identifies the traitors, scumbags and villains, whose lust for power – and sometimes, sheer incompetence – brought such terror to their times. He delves into the natural forces beyond human control that have wiped out whole peoples. And, most of all, he shows how history has a horrible habit of repeating itself.

Calamities & Catastrophes: The Ten Absolutely Worst Years in History

History

WILSON, Derek

Asia

Combining stories, quotes, and tips from couples of all ages, this charmingly illustrated compendium gives sage advice for married couples. Does he habitually leave his socks on the bathroom floor? Does she insist on interrupting your favourite programme to make you explain the plot (when she’s clearly not interested in it anyway)? Never fear. For, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall shows, a good marriage is all in the detail. Happily Ever After takes a humorous look at the ups and downs of marriage, offering sage advice on everything from backseat driving to dealing with the in-laws. It combines stories and tips collected from couples of all ages with the wise and witty musings of generations of writers who have experienced the same joys and pains – from George Bernard Shaw to Jane Austen, and Nancy Mitford to Groucho Marx. Whether you are about to be married, or celebrating your fiftieth wedding anniversary, this charming, funny book will keep you and your other half entertained til death do you part...

Happily Ever After: A Light-hearted Guide to Wedded Bliss

Humor & Entertainment

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL, JANE

Humor

Based on true events in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this darkly thrilling tale of friendship, rivalry, and ambition tells the backstory of how one of the world’s most celebrated mysteries came to be written. Dartmoor, 1900. Two friends are roaming the moors: Arthur Conan Doyle – the most famous novelist of his age – who has recently killed off his most popular creation, Sherlock Holmes; and Bertram Fletcher Robinson – Holmes aficionado and editor of the Daily Express. They are researching a detective novel, a collaboration starring a new hero, set in the eerie stillness of ancient West Country moorland, and featuring a monstrous dog. They already have a title… London, 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles is published, featuring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead. Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson have not spoken for two years and the book is credited to just one author. It will become one of the most famous stories ever written. But who really wrote it? And what really happened on those moors, to drive the two friends apart?

Baskerville: The Mysterious Tale of Sherlock's Return

In this inspiring, delightful memoir, a young woman decides to escape the daily grind and turn her “what if” fantasy into a reality, only to find work—and a man—she loves in one fell swoop, all in a secondhand bookstore in a quaint Scottish town. Jessica Fox was living in Hollywood, an ambitious 26-year-old film-maker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she was seized by a moment of inspiration and tapped “second hand bookshop Scotland” into Google. She clicked the first link she saw. A month later, she arrived 2,000 miles across the Atlantic in Wigtown, on the west coast of Scotland, and knocked on the door of the bookshop she would be living in for the next month . . . The rollercoaster journey that ensued—taking in Scottish Hanukkah, yoga on Galloway’s west coast, and a waxing that she will never forget—would both break and mend her heart. It would also teach her that sometimes we must have the courage to travel the path less taken. Only then can we truly become the writers of our own stories.

Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets: A Real-Life Scottish Fairy Tale

Biographies & Memoirs

Fox, Jessica A.

Arts & Literature

The remarkable account of an extraordinary family of explorers who spurred innovation and accomplished incredible feats—even when the popular consensus was against them. On May 27, 1931, Auguste Piccard became the first human to enter the stratosphere, flying an experimental balloon he invented himself. Thirty years later, his son Jacques went to the bottom of the earth, descending to the Mariana Trench in a submarine built by him and Auguste. To this day, no one has gone deeper. Bertrand, the third generation, was the first person to fly around the world non-stop in a balloon. Now, he’s building his own craft: a solar-powered plane to circumnavigate the globe. In The Explorer Gene, Tom Cheshire asks how three generations of one family achieved such extraordinary feats, often with the consensus against them. None of the Piccards set out to explore: Auguste was a physicist, Jacques an economist and Bertrand a psychiatrist. Was it fate, a famous family name – or their explorer gene?

The Explorer Gene: How Three Generations of One Family Went Higher, Deeper, and Further Than Any Before

Cheshire, Tom

Professionals & Academics

Set in the bleakness and confusion of post-WWII London, this gripping psychological thriller unravels the double life of a seemingly proper middle-class woman found strangled to death. On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman’s body in a bomb site in north London. The woman is identified as Lillian Frobisher, a wife and mother who lived in a war-damaged terrace a few streets away. The police assume that Lil must have been the victim of a vicious sexual assault; but the autopsy finds no evidence of rape, and Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper turns his attention to her private life. How did Lil come to be in the bomb site – a well-known lovers’ haunt? If she had consensual sex, why was she strangled? Why was her husband seemingly unaware that she had failed to come home on the night she was killed? In this gripping murder story, Siân Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain.

A Commonplace Killing: A Novel

Busby, Siân

Genre Fiction

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