Abacus Love In Idleness Craig Amanda

This gripping, moving and hiliarious novel introduces seven characters, each of whom has a profound effect on each other s lives. Each must choose between probity and self-interest in love and work. Some compromise themselves completely; others oscillate between vice and virtue. Others are redeemed by twists of fate. For in a vicious circle, nothing is certain except change • For five years timid Mary Quinn has supported her lover, Mark Crawley, in his rise to one of London s most savage political journalists. Now Mark has started a calculated affair with Amelia, daughter of a newspaper magnate. Mary s translation from jilted lover to a figure of power and vengeance is mirrored by Amelia s change from vain, snobbish socialite to exhausted mother

Knotshead is a school catering for the children of the rich, famous, liberal - and deluded. With its progressive curriculum, complacent staff and beautiful grounds, it looks like Paradise. But the clever, the odd and the bookish are relentlessly persecuted as pupils make their own rules in a bubble of privilege and prejudice. When Alice, the Headmaster's intellectual step-daughter, and the much-expelled American millionaire Winthrop T Sheen join forces against the school bully, Grub Viner, a gifted pianist and school ''joker'', has to choose between love and loyalty, and black comedy escalates to murder

When Hannah is invited into the First-Class carriage of the London to Penzance train by Jinni, she walks into a spider's web. Now a poor young single mother, Hannah once escaped Cornwall to go to university. But once she married Jake and had his child, her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter, and in the course of their journey the two women agree to murder each other's husbands. After all, they are strangers on a train - who could possibly connect them? • But when Hannah goes to Jinni's husband's home the next night, she finds Stan, a huge, hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems - not least the care of a half-ruined house and garden

The latest in the hugely popular 44 Scotland Street series from the worldwide bestselling author, Alexander McCall Smith • Life for Bertie seems to be moving at a pace that is rather out of his control. Upstairs, at 44 Scotland Street, his father Stuart is powerless to stop over-bearing Irene and her determination that Bertie will travel to deepest, coldest Aberdeen on a three-month sojourn. Can his friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson save the day? And can the boys execute a great escape? Meanwhile, further up in the New Town, Bruce Anderson's property development plans are thwarted by a sudden crisis of conscience that leads to a shocking revelation. And, in Big Lou's cafe, it seems that love might blossom at last • Warm hearted, humorous and always wonderfully wise, Love in the Time of Bertie offers philosophical insight as well as sartorial elegance

In a smart Parisian suburb, in the wake of the Paris 2015 terrorist attacks, an au pair is arrested after the sudden and suspicious death of her nine-year-old charge • The truth behind what happened is unravelled through six women: Geraldine, a heartbroken French teacher who struggles to connect with her vulnerable students; Lou, an incompetent au pair fired by the family next door; Charlotte, a chilly socialite and reluctant mother; Holly, an anxious au pair who yearns to feel at home in Paris; Nathalie, an isolated French teenager desperate for her mother's attention; and finally, Alena, the au pair accused of killing a child • All of them play a part in nine-year-old Julien's death • For fans of Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies, The Caretakers is a compulsive and gripping read about who takes care of children, the yearning for belonging that extends beyond the homes left behind, and issues of identity, privilege, and class in both American and French culture

LOVE IN WRITTEN Between the lines 60 Женская парфюмерия

At eighteen, Emma Kenward runs away from her dull Sloane home to try her luck as a painter in Tuscany. Waspish, idealistic and far too clever for her own good, she is at the awkward age when women choose their futures - and their identities • Once in Italy, Emma blossoms and is taken up by a a mixture of characters including the local Contessa; Sylvia, her volatile American mentor; Dr Evenlode, an Oxford don she'd hoped never to see again; and Lucio, a seductive and anarchic young Italian, as interested in Emma's body as in her mind. Santorno, however, is not merely a picturesque town set in the golden landscape of the Tuscan countryside. Hidden among the malicious tongues of the provincial gossips and the walls of the mysterious Palazzo Felici lie secrets, long buried, but not forgotten

Quentin and Lottie Bredin, like many modern couples, can't afford to divorce. Having lost their jobs in the recession, they can't afford to go on living in London; instead, they must downsize and move their three children to a house in a remote part of Devon. Arrogant and adulterous, Quentin can't understand why Lottie is so angry; devastated and humiliated, Lottie feels herself to have been intolerably wounded • Mud, mice and quarrels are one thing - but why is their rent so low? What is the mystery surrounding their unappealing new home? The beauty of the landscape is ravishing, yet it conceals a dark side involving poverty, revenge, abuse and violence which will rise up to threaten them • Sally Verity, happily married but unhappily childless knows a different side to country life, as both a Health Visitor and a sheep farmer's wife; and when Lottie's innocent teenage son Xan gets a zero-hours contract at a local pie factory, he sees yet another

The third novel in Alexander McCall Smith's irresistibly charming series about the residents of 44 Scotland Street • Love Over Scotland is the third in this series and revolves around the many colourful characters that come and go at No. 44 Scotland Street. McCall Smith handles the characters with his customary charm and deftness: the stalwart Tory chartered surveyor, the pushy mother and, most importantly in this novel, the Italian-speaking prodigy, Bertie

Sir Alfred Munnings, retiring President of the Royal Academy, chooses the 1949 Annual Banquet to launch a savage attack on Modern Art. The effect of his diatribe is doubly shocking, leaving not only his distinguished audience gasping but also many people tuning in to the BBC's live radio broadcast. But as he approaches the end of his assault, the speech suddenly dissolves into incoherence when he stumbles over a name - a name he normally takes such pains to avoid - that takes him back forty years to a special time and a special place • Summer in February is a disturbing and moving re-creation of a celebrated Edwardian artistic community enjoying the last days of a golden age soon to be shattered by war. As resonant and understated as The Go-Between, it is a love story of beauty, deprivation and tragedy

Impromptu in Moribundia is a satirical fable about one (nameless) man's trespass (through a fantastical machine called the 'Asteradio') into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the 'miserably dull affairs of England' are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination • Moribundia is the 'physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness.' Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterised by 'cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it . . . cruelty and blood-thirstiness

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