In a beautiful house in the wilds of Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier is on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Tangled in a self-destructive love affair that threatens to unravel her marriage, she is also distracted by worry for the family friend whose shadow looms over her childhood: JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Daphne […]
Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne
As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackout, people are understandably jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, who’s been working in Vienna for a Jewish family, returns home with no job and a broken heart. She answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript […]
Scandalous Women by Gill Paul
1966: in London, Jackie Collins’s racy The World is Full of Married Men hits bookshops and launches her career. In New York, Jacqueline Susann’s debut novel Valley of the Dolls is published, and she’s desperate for it to be a bestseller. But both are about to discover the price they will pay for being women […]
How bestsellers through the ages mirrored their times
Gill Paul, herself a bestselling author, looks at how top-selling books mirrored the times they were published in. They weren’t only contemporary, either; historical fiction and fantasy are high on the list, perhaps not surprisingly to those who know the genres. Gill’s latest novel, Scandalous Women, is about the authors of two of these bestsellers. […]
Leaving Fatherland by Matt Graydon
Growing up a misfit in Nazi Germany, a victim of his father’s beatings, Oskar finds his love of books is a constant comfort in a world turned upside-down by violence. As a student, as a pilot in the brutal Luftwaffe during the Second World War, in an unhappy marriage to an English bride, he finds […]
The Artist’s War by Clare Flynn
Hampshire, 1916: Alice traces her hand over the cold glass of the window as the pale morning light slips into the empty room. The pain of loss is worse than a physical one. Reminders of Edmund are all around her. The coldness of the sheet on the other half of the bed. The unrelenting silence […]
Hungary’s vanished village Jews
Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country. In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in […]
Banquet of Beggars by Chris Lloyd
In Paris 1940, survival means sacrifice. Like most in the city, Detective Eddie Giral has already lost so much under Occupation: the people he once loved, the job he once believed in. And his latest investigation into the murder of a black-marketeer has made it clearer than ever: Eddie is no longer just catching criminals. […]