From the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of HAMNET and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter.  Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.
Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?

1938: Lady Vita Goldsborough lives in the menacing shadow of her controlling older brother, Aubrey. But when she meets local artist Dodie Blakeney, the two women form a close bond, and Vita finally glimpses a chance to be free.
1997: Following the death of her mother, Eve Blakeney returns to the coast where she spent childhood summers with her beloved grandmother, Dodie. Eve hopes that the visit will help make sense of her grief. The last thing she expects to find is a bundle of letters that hint at the heart-breaking story of Dodie’s relationship with a woman named Vita, and a shattering secret that echoes through the decades.

What she discovers will overturn everything she thought she knew about her family – and change her life forever. 

A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics.  Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

​Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April's decision to change their lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy.

It’s 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer’s block. But when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey – a total stranger living halfway across the Channel, who has come across her name written in a second hand book – she enters into a correspondence with him, and in time with all the members of the extraordinary Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Through their letters, the society tells Juliet about life on the island, their love of books – and the long shadow cast by their time living under German occupation. Drawn into their irresistible world, Juliet sets sail for the island, changing her life forever.

Four women spark a revolution on a Caribbean island – the electrifying new novel from the Costa-winning author of The Mermaid of Black Conch. 

Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel-pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island. As the days pass, this shocking event draws together four women. There’s Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, a pink-haired, straight-talking local activist. Gigi, the ‘notorious’ founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago. In a community in which women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked time after time, the group soon find themselves compelled to speak out – and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage…

A beautiful, stunningly written novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II ‘Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.’ For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History.  The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

2nd March 1975 In Asmara, Eritrea, Yonas Kelati is born into a world of turmoil. At the same time, on the same day, Jude Munroe takes her first breath in London, England. Thirty Years Later Blacklisted in his war-ravaged country, Yonas has no option but to flee his home.  After a terrible journey, he arrives on a bleak English coast. By a twist of fate, Yonas’ asylum case lands on Jude’s desk. Opening the file, she finds a patchwork of witness statements from those who met Yonas along his journey: a lifetime the same length of hers, reduced to a few scraps of paper.  Soon, Jude will stand up in court and tell Yonas’ story. How she tells it will change his life forever. Fearless, uplifting and compelling, The Invisible Crowd is a powerful debut novel about loyalty, kindness – and the brief moments which define our lives.

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, Nellie Bly was renowned as America's first 'girl stunt reporter'. She was a pioneer of investigative journalism, including an exposé of patient treatment at a mental asylum and a travelogue from her record-breaking race around the world in emulation of Phileas Fogg. This volume, the only printed and edited collection of Bly's writings, includes her best-known works as well as many lesser-known pieces that capture the breadth of her career from her fierce opinion pieces to her remarkable World War I reporting.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty is a powerful, triumphant, Pulitzer-Winning tribute to the American WestImmerse yourself in the gritty realism of the American Frontier in this masterful epic from the screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of a group of audacious cowboys on a perilous cattle drive across the sprawling wilderness, from Texas to Montana. Bound by duty and hardened by the relentless frontier, their shared journey embodies the enduring spirit of the West.  An iconic creation by the accomplished author of The Last Picture Show and Texasville, Lonesome Dove transcends boundaries – more than an adventure, beyond any love story. The saga paints the American West with a palette of nuanced characters, from heroes to outlaws, in a narrative that is as unflinching as it is captivating. This novel, the third in McMurtry’s esteemed Lonesome Dove quartet, depicts an enduring American experience.  A must-read for fans of evocative Western Americana, Lonesome Dove propels you into the heart of 19th-century America, its triumphs and betrayals bound together in a dance of heightened drama and human spirit.

The moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence. 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there...'  When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

TO BE DISCUSSED AT OUR CHRISTMAS PARTY Wednesday 10th December, 6pm THE STABLE BAR, ANGEL HOTEL, HALESWORTH

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​It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life.  And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found.  Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy.