"Growing up the middle child of transatlantic parents -- her English Rose mother and cowboy boot-loving father -- Bella Pollen never quite figured out how to belong. Restlessly crossing back and forth between the boundaries of family and freedom, England and America, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living. When she awakes one morning in an existential panic, Pollen...

"1938: She was one of the six sparkling Mitford sisters, known for her stinging quips, stylish dress, and bright green eyes. But Nancy Mitford's seemingly sparkling life was really one of turmoil: with a perpetually unfaithful and broke husband, two Nazi sympathizer sisters, and her hopes of motherhood dashed forever. With war imminent, Nancy finds respite by taking a job at the Heywood Hill Bookshop in Mayfair, hoping to make ends meet, and discovers...

This new biography explores the forces that shaped the interior life of one of the most beloved novelists in the English language. Each chapter begins by evoking an object that conjures up a key moment or theme in Austen's life and work. The woman who emerges is far tougher, more socially and politically aware, and altogether more modern that the conventional picture. The book looks at the biographical influence on her work, as well as her boundless...

Nancy Mitford was, in the words of her sister Lady Diana Mosley, "very complex." Her highly autobiographical early work, the biographies and novels of her more mature French period, her journalism, and the vast body of letters to her family, to friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, Gaston Palewski, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, as well as conversations with Mitford's two surviving sisters, acquaintances,...

Nora is a reclusive crime writer, content with the routine of life in her apartment in London. She hasn't seen her friend Clare in years - not since Nora walked out of school one day and never went back. So she's surprised to receive an invitation to Clare's hen do. Perhaps it's a chance to reconnect with her best friend. But something goes terribly wrong in the eerie glass house deep in the English countryside. Then Nora wakes up with her head bandaged...

"Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world's most celebrated and beloved authors: two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel"-- Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane are time travelers, sent to the England of 1815 from a technologically advanced future, trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics....

Jane Austen loved the theatre. She learned much of her art from a long tradition of English comic drama and took joyous participation in amateur theatricals and her visits to the theatre in London and Bath. Her juvenilia, then 'Sense and Sensibility', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Mansfield Park' and 'Emma' were shaped by the arts of theatrical comedy. Her admiration for drama's dialogue, characterisation, plotting, exits and entrances is why she has been...

"It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year -- more than thirty years after her death -- and it shows no signs of slowing. But who was the woman behind these mystifying,...