Told from Gretel Samuelson's sly and knowing perspective, Local Girls charts her progress as she navigates from childhood to the brink of womanhood, picking her way though the tragedies and absurdities of everyday life in a family which is rocked by divorce and disaster, bad judgement and fierce attachments.
One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village.
Sixteen-year-old Grace has dreams, and she knows how to make them come true: a little silicone and surgery here and there nose, breasts, lips, hair, teeth, nails.
Angela Bradbury's 'Poor Mother' : delicate, humble, permanently disappointed, has made endless sacrifices for her family, for which they can never quite be grateful enough.
A train screeches to a halt in the middle of the English countryside and, observed by her fascinated fellow travellers, a woman climbs down and rushes to the aid of a sheep, stranded on its back and unable to rise.
Henry Tillotson, a generous, genial man who inherited his father's philanthropic attitude along with his beautiful house, rescues Margaret from a disastrous marriage in Egypt and brings her home to the West Country as his new wife.
Seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe has just waved off to war the two young men she has loved for the best part of her life when the air raid sirens begin to wail out across London.
Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India.
When, on the night of their wedding, Ned asks his new wife Rose to promise that she will never leave him, Rose is quick to give her aristocratic husband her word: keeping it, however, proves harder.
Antietam (Andy) Brown - named for the great-great-grandfather who died on that Civil War battleground - was ten years old when he killed his abusive foster father.
At a loose end after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and takes a job as a reconstructionist investigating and recreating the details of fatal car accidents.
Eleven stories to which Patrick White brings his immense understanding of the urges which lie just beneath the facade of ordinary human relationships, especially those between men and women.
When Georgiana Gregory and her maid, Kitty, make the long sea journey from their native Hull for New York, they hope to begin a new life in the freedom of the newly-formed United States of America.
A chilling portrait of life under Communist rule by Albania's most important writerIt's the 1970s and cracks are starting to appear in the alliance between China and its Communist cohort Albania.
