Time period: 20th century

This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Poli...

This volume unbuttons the multi-layered, hundred-year-history of women's lives through fashion and beauty from 1860 to 1960. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than...

In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner's report: natural causes. Ida's husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed. What real...

Taking in old age, the context of one's life and times, memory, reading and writing, and the identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others - this is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved...

A bestseller translated into several languages and the inspiration for a whole genre of confessional memoirs, this book is an extraordinary portrait of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement.

Writer, artist, and filmmaker, Chris Shepherd's debut graphic novel depicts a coming of age story centred around growing up in the working-class dynamics of Merseyside in the late eighties. As Conor Sterling is about to turn 18, he wrestles with the tough choice to go to art college or look after...

In the early sixties, Victor 'Lucky' Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill - then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman. Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in L...

Between 1941 and 1945, more than 800 shiploads of supplies were delivered to the Soviet Union protected by allied naval forces. Each journey was a battle against the elements, with turbulent seas, extreme cold, and the constant dread of torpedoes. These Arctic convoys have been mythologized as de...

Provence, 1920. Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuf...

Written by Dermot Healy, this memoir recollects his childhood in Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. He is the acclaimed author of A Goat's Song, which won the Encore Award for the best second novel of 1994.

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the condit...

In 1939 there were more than ten million children living in Britain. Their childhoods were about to beshattered by events they could neither control nor comprehend. The Second World War not only tore two million children away from their homes as evacuees, it also called on boy scouts and girl gui...

Ronald Blythe (1922-2023), author of the inimitable 'Akenfield', was a prolific and poetic chronicler of rural and spiritual life, nature and literature. He spent a joyful century close to his Suffolk roots, time travelling in his imagination and publishing forty books and thousands of essays. Hi...

It's 1959 and eighteen-year-old Sophie is determined that now is the time for her real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds diversion and excitement in a...

Here is the captivating true story of an underdog business - a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher's Britain - from a woman at the heart of the women's liberation movement. What was it like to start a feminist bookshop, in an industry dominated by men? How could a lesbian thrive in Thatcher's t...

Looking for a new start after her father's death, Lara Hope arrives in Lisbon in search of a family she's never met. As war storms across Europe, Lara finds solace and belonging in her landlady's tranquil bookshop in one of the most beautiful corners of the city. But when she witnesses a customer...

1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades. But when mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours - a poised English beauty, a...

1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades. But when mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours - a poised English beauty, a...

Hampshire, 1938. Victor Silvius is confined in a private sanatorium after attacking prominent judge Sir Giles Drury. When Sir Giles starts receiving sinister threatening letters, his wife suspects Silvius. Meanwhile, Silvius' sister Caroline is convinced her brother is about to be murdered - by n...

Berkshire Constabulary in the 1950s was scarcely a place for women. But WPC Crockford and her team soon changed that. When Gwendoline Crockford began her service in the Berkshire Constabulary, she scarcely believed that she would one day end up chasing a zebra around Cranbourne. But she quickly l...