What Was Promised

HILL, Tobias

Bloomsbury Circus

Growing up in 1970s Suffolk in a crumbling giant of a house with wild, tangled gardens, Alex Monroe was left to wreak havoc by invention. Without visible parental influence, but with sisters to love him and brothers to fight for him, he made nature into his world.
 Creation became a compulsion, whether it was go-karts and guns, crossbows and booby traps, boats, bikes, or scooters. And then, it was jewelry. 
 From full-out warfare waged against the local schoolboys to the freedom found in daredevil bike antics to the delicacies of dressmaking and the most intricate designs for jewelry, Two Turtle Doves traces the intimate journey of how an idea is transformed from a fleeting thought into an exquisite design. It is about where we find our creativity, how we remember, and why we make the things we do.

Two Turtle Doves

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Monroe, Alex

Antiques & Collectibles

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014'USA Today: 10 Books We Loved ReadingWashington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life―his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin―Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time. 80 photographs

Lahr, John.

Ben Watt's father, Tommy, was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician, a politicised left-wing bandleader and a composer. His heyday in the late fifties took him into the glittering heart of London's West End, where he broadcast live with his own orchestra from the Paris Theatre and played nightly with his quintet at the the glamorous Quaglino's. Ben's mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, schooled at Cheltenham Ladies' College, was a RADA-trained Shakespearian actress, who had triplets in her  first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz columnist in the.sixties and seventies. They were both divorcees from very different backgrounds who came together like  colliding trains in 1957. Both a personal journey and a  portrait of his parents, Romany and Tom is a vivid story  of the post-war years, ambition and stardom, family roots and secrets,  life in clubs and in care homes. It is also about who we are, where we  come from, and how we love and live with each other for a long time.

Romany and Tom: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Ben Watt

Memoirs

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine, and their friendship continued until the artist's death 30 years later. In this sparkling, indiscreet memoir, Peppiatt recalls Bacon's notorious hell-raising, his ferocious dedication to his painting, and their passionate conversations about life, art, love and death. The result is both a history of a vanished London Bohemia and an insight into one of the 20th century's greatest painters.

Francis Bacon in Your Blood

Arts & Photography

Michael Peppiatt

History & Criticism

The Sound of the Hours

A sweeping and romantic novel about love, loss, and conflict in an occupied Italian town during World War II.
Trapped in Tuscany as war rages along the Gothic Line, Vittoria Guidi doesn't understand where her allegiances should lie. With her Scots-Italian father or Facsist mother? With Mussolini, or her King? With the life she wants, or is told to live?
As Germans occupy the mountains round Barga, and US Buffalo soldiers draw near, loyalties are tested and families torn apart. Frank Chapel, a young, black soldier fighting for a country that refuses him the vote, is unlike anyone Vita has met. In the chaos, they find each other--but can their growing love defy prejudice and war?
The Sound of the Hours is an all-consuming tale of romance and loss. It is at once an intimate and tender portrait of first love and a sweeping evocation of an extraordinary, devastating moment in history.

Literature & Fiction

Campbell, Karen

United States

Girl in the Dark

Anna Lyndsey

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2015 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016 Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east. A long, straight road runs between sleeping fields to the little village of Lodeshill, and on it two cars lie wrecked and ravished, violence gathered about them in the silent air. One wheel, upturned, still spins. Howard and Kitty have recently moved to Lodeshill after a life spent in London; now, their marriage is wordlessly falling apart. Custom car enthusiast Jamie has lived in the village for all of his nineteen years and dreams of leaving it behind, while Jack, a vagrant farm-worker and mystic in flight from a bail hostel, arrives in the village on foot one spring morning, bringing change. All four of them are struggling to find a life in the modern countryside; all are trying to find ways to belong. Building to an extraordinary climax over the course of one spring month, At Hawthorn Time is both a clear-eyed picture of rural Britain, and a heartbreaking exploration of love, land and loss.

At Hawthorn Time

Harrison, Melissa

Genre Fiction

The Kindness

Polly Samson

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins... There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed. Broken bodies, still wrapped in tattered bed linen, hang among the twitching leaves. Adrien Thomas has never been much of a hero. But when he realises that no help is coming, he ventures out into this unrecognisable world. Michelle, his wife, is across the sea in Ireland and he has no way of knowing whether the trees have come for her too. Then Adrien meets green-fingered Hannah and her teenage son Seb. Together, they set out to find Hannah's forester brother, to reunite Adrien with his wife - and to discover just how deep the forest goes. Their journey will take them to a place of terrible beauty and violence, to the dark heart of nature and the darkness inside themselves.

The Trees

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Books by Bloomsbury Circus