Fay Weldon lets her incisive wit loose on a hot issue facing many modern families  child care, and what can happen when that involves having a nanny under your roof. Hattie and Martyn are the proud parents of newborn Kitty; both are in their early thirties, smart, handsome, and, for reasons of liberal principle, not married but partnered. All seems fine at first  healthy baby, happy couple  but when they have to decide who’ll look after little Kitty, things get complicated. Hattie’s dying to get back to work but Martyn fears employing foreign help might hurt his leftist political aspirations. Martyn capitulates when Agnieska arrives  a Polish nanny who happens to be both domestic goddess and first-rate belly dancer, the maker of a mean cup of cocoa who’s also educated in early childhood development. Having her in the house makes life livable again for the young couple, so when problems arise with her immigration papers Martyn and Hattie will do anything to keep her in the country. But will their decision to have Martyn marry her be the trouble-free solution they envision.

She May Not Leave

Literature & Fiction

Weldon,Fay

Contemporary

Fourth Estate

With inimitable wit and insight, this encouraging tome humorously leaps into what makes women happy and what women can do to lead more rounded and balanced lives. Women can learn how to tackle anxiety, envy, guilt, and other sources of female stress, while giving in to indulgences and desires like sex, food, friends, family, shopping, and chocolate. Chapters contain sassy morals, illustrative and sympathetic stories, and a lot of frank advice to show women how to stop obssessing and feeling bad about themselves. Later chapters confront the four horses of a woman's apocalypse: despair, depression, isolation, and self-doubt. 

What Makes Women Happy

Self-Help

The second volume of one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century. In 'Walking in the Shade' we move into the heyday of Lessing's career, sparked off by the international success of her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing'. A wonderful evocation of London's literary and political life during the 1950s and 1960s. Doris Lessing was at the very centre of the intellectual scene at that time, and knew many of its personalities and opinion-makers -- Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, EP Thompson, Bertrand Russell and many others. Perhaps the most frank and open book Doris Lessing has ever written. She writes about her involvement with communism, her love affairs, her depression at the ending of a relationship and her experience of bringing up a child on her own.

Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962

Biographies & Memoirs

LESSING, DORIS

Arts & Literature

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

Literary

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED Originally published in 1975, Tim O'Brien's debut novel demonstrates the emotional complexity and enthralling narrative tension that later earned him the National Book Award. At its core is the relationship between two brothers: one who went to Vietnam and one who stayed at home. As the two brothers struggle against an unexpected blizzard in Minnesota's remote north woods, what they discover about themselves and each other will change both of them for ever.

Northern Lights

Tim O'Brien

In her forties and recovering from a long battle against depression and alcoholism, Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis decided to trade in her landlubber life - a nice house in Cardiff and a sensible job at the BBC - for life aboard a small yacht with her husband Leighton, a former bosun with the Merchant Navy and now in his mid-sixties. "We bought our first sailing boat by accident! She was a twenty-three-foot Intro class racer called Nitro, had a yellow hull and was totally unsuitable for beginners, so we bought her and started to learn how to sail in the Bristol Channel. Not long afterwards we were talking about renting out the house and sailing around the world." After buying a yacht - Jameeleh - and teaching themselves to sail it (a process not without its fair share of disasters, from psychotic seas off St. Govan's Head to broken ribs off Ballycotton), Gwyneth and Leighton set out to cross the Atlantic. Unfortunately Gwyneth's incessant seasickness and Leighton's daily deterioration into a moody Captain Bastard were not the only catastrophes with which they had to contend. This strange, stirring and often hilarious account of their voyage is as much a beginner's guide to sailing as it is a portrait of a marriage under the pressure of depression, both medical and meteorological. Gwyneth Lewis's training as a poet and film-maker lends her prose a wonderfully visual quality, and her contagious optimism in the face of inconceivable adversity - not much more could possibly have gone wrong - makes this unique book both touchingly witty and incredibly wise.

Two in a Boat : A Marital Voyage

gwyneth-lewis

Relationships

Free World

Louis Menand

A book about the lengths people will go to nuzzle out some pleasure - and the scientific reasons that lie behind those impulses. The author looks at changing attitudes to pleasure over the centuries, including religious and philosophical lawgiving on the subject, before moving on to the science of all this human frenzy.

Sex, Drugs and Chocolate

Paul, Martin

Science & Math

A loving portrait of the other Majorca, and of a life there revolving around music and manana, that is as paradaisical as could be -- a book to savour, perfect for escaping those crowded beaches. 'I've used what's left of my eardrums to describe the culture I was born into, and to contrast it with the British culture I was educated in.' Tomas Graves was born in and belongs to Mallorca (even if he did go to boarding school in England as a teenager). His father, the great love poet Robert Graves, famously ended up in the beautiful Mediterranean island pretty much by accident, but it is the happiest accident of Tomas' life. His love and respect for the special beauties of Mallorcan culture shine on every page of this infectiously happy book. Not that there is any simplification or idealization. Graves looks at how the key elements of the island's history since the Spanish Civil War have had complicated consequences: the Francoists' retarding of growth which left the island a backward peasant economy until the 1960s; those same Francoists' sudden discovery that there was money in Majorca's beauty, resulting in the arrival of the holidaymakers, with all the construction and activity attending them; and the suppression, redirection and renaissance of the old, old native culture -- above all, its music. Music has always been important to all Spanish-speaking peoples. Under Franco's severe repressions, music was often the one form of public expression into which every restricted emotion could be poured. Once democracy was brought back to Spain, regional movements surged, taking their music with them. In this dancing, darting book, Graves traces the development and fusion of a host of styles, Spanish and imported -- flamenco, rock, jota, rumba, blues, salsa, punk. He is a musician himself, and his own musical escapades give the book its very individual architecture. A host of musical stars -- Jimi Hendrix, Kevin Ayers, Bob Geldof, Sinead O'Connor, Eurovision contestants, summer-anthem songwriters -- tarried in Majorca and provide the soundtrack to this rhythmic, irresistible tour around a magical island and its magical culture.

Tuning Up at Dawn : A Memoir of Music and Majorca

A magnificently ambitious and enthralling novel that confirms Moring’s place as one of the most significant European novelists now at work.
At the end of the Second World War, Jacob Noah emerges from the hole in the ground where he has been hiding for the past three years, and cycles madly back to his home town to find that his parents and brother have perished at the hands of the Nazis. Setting himself up as a shoemaker in the Dutch town of Assen, Noah patiently expands his business until he has become the most influential entrepreneur in the city.
But however wealthy he becomes, nothing can console him for the loss of his family and the tragedy of history.
In June 1980, on the eve of Assen's annual TT races, a despairing Noah sets off on a journey into the depths of his soul. Guided by a shabby, supernatural pedlar calling himself the 'Jew of Assen', he descends into the smoky heart of the town, a man-made hell modelled on Dis, the city in Dante's Inferno. In a rich and varied explosion of styles, fantasy and philosophical speculations, Marcel Möring leads us on a voyage through the dark heart of the twentieth century, and through a vivid exploration of loss and guilt.

In A Dark Wood

Möring, Marcel

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