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Have you read a review lately that you think the Bright Young Things might be interested in? or have you discovered a book by chance that would fit in with our period of interest (1900 - 1945)? why not share your new discoveries here?

I read a review of The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan this morning.

From Amazon:

In the summer of 1914, the Empress Alexandra, a magnificent ocean liner, suffers a mysterious explosion on its voyage from London to New York City. On board are Henry Winter, a rich banker, and his young new wife, Grace. Somehow, Henry manages to secure a place in a lifeboat for Grace. But the survivors quickly realize it is over capacity and could sink at any moment. For any to live, some must die.


As the castaways battle the elements, and each other, Grace watches and waits. She is a woman who has learned the value of patience - her journey to a life of glittering privilege has been far from straightforward. Now, she knows, it is in jeopardy, and her very survival is at stake.


Over the course of three perilous weeks, the passengers on the lifeboat plot, scheme, gossip and console one another while sitting inches apart. Their deepest beliefs about goodness, humanity and God are tested to the limit as they begin to discover what they will do in order to survive.


The Lifeboat is a page-turning story of moral dilemmas, and also the moving and haunting story of Grace, a woman as unforgettable and complicated as the story she recounts.

I'm reading The Sinking of the Lancastria: The Twentieth Century's Deadliest Naval Disaster and Churchill's Plot to Make It Disappear by Jonathan Fenby (which I nominated for June's group read!!). He also wrote another work on non-fiction that I would be interested to pick up at some point:

Chiang Kai Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

With a narrative as briskly paced and vividly detailed as an international thriller, this definitive biography of Chiang Kai-shek masterfully maps the tumultuous political career of Nationalist China's generalissimo as it reevaluates his brave but unfulfilled life. Chiang Kai-shek was one of the most influential world figures of the twentieth century. The leader of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist movement in China, by 1928 he had established himself as head of the government in Nanking. But while he managed to survive the political storms of the 1930s, Chiang's power was continually being undermined by the Japanese on one side and the Chinese Communists on the other. Drawing extensively on original Chinese sources and accounts by contemporaneous journalists, acclaimed author Jonathan Fenby explores little-known international connections in Chiang's story as he unfolds a story as fascinating in its conspiratorial intrigues as it is remarkable for its psychological insights. This is the definitive biography of the man who, despite his best intentions, helped create modern-day China.

from goodreads

Ooh! I just saw a goodreads ad for City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago by Gary Krist

The masterfully told story of twelve volatile days in the life of Chicago, when an aviation disaster, a race riot, a crippling transit strike, and a sensational child murder transfixed and roiled a city already on the brink of collapse.

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World." But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city's highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.

It began on a balmy Monday afternoon when a blimp in flames crashed through the roof of a busy downtown bank, incinerating those inside. Within days, a racial incident at a hot, crowded South Side beach spiraled into one of the worst urban riots in American history, followed by a transit strike that paralyzed the city. Then, when it seemed as if things could get no worse, police searching for a six-year-old girl discovered her body in a dark North Side basement.

Meticulously researched and expertly paced, City of Scoundrels captures the tumultuous birth of the modern American city, with all of its light and dark aspects in vivid relief.

from goodreads

I have been watching a channel 4 programme called 'The TV Book Club' and there's 3 of their choices that might be of interest to the Bright Young Things:

The Report. Jessica Francis Kane by Jessica Francis Kane

It is an early spring evening in 1943 when the air-raid sirens wail out over the East End of London. From every corner of Bethnal Green, people emerge from pubs, cinemas and houses and set off for the shelter of the tube station. But at the entrance steps, something goes badly wrong, the crowd panics, and 173 people are crushed to death. When an enquiry is called for, it falls to the local magistrate, Laurence Dunne, to find out what happened during those few, fatally confused minutes. But as Dunne gathers testimony from the guilt-stricken warden of the shelter, the priest struggling to bring comfort to his congregation, and the grieving mother who has lost her youngest daughter, the picture grows ever murkier. The more questions Dunne asks, the more difficult it becomes to disentangle truth from rumour �� and to decide just how much truth the damaged community can actually bear. It is only decades later, when the case is reopened by one of the children who survived, that the facts can finally be brought to light.

Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn

London. In the sweltering summer of 1911, the streets ring to the cheers for a new king's coronation, and to the cries of suffragist women marching for the vote. One of them is twenty-one-year-old Connie Callaway, daughter of a middle-class Islington family fallen on hard times since the death of her father. Forced to abandon her dream of a medical career, Connie is now faced with another hard choice - to maintain lawful protest against an intransigent government or to join the glass-breaking militants in 'the greatest cause the world has ever known'. Holidaying with her family on the South Coast, Connie is introduced to Will Maitland, cricketer and rising star of his county. Despite their mutual attraction, they part on unfriendly terms, she dismayed by his innate chauvinism, he astonished by her outspokenness. Yet they are destined to meet again, their lives inextricably entangled in the fate of Will's friend and idol Andrew Tamburlain, 'The Great Tam', a former Test batsman whose legendary big hitting was once the toast of the nation. Duty plays a commanding part in the life of these two young people, whose love for one another, in a different time, might have bound them in matrimony. But Connie, fired up by the possibilities of independence, wants more than the conventional comforts of marriage; and Will, a son of his age and class, is both attracted and appalled by her quest for self-fulfilment. Buffeted and spun by choice and chance, the two remain tied together, even as the outbreak of war drives them further apart. Combining national drama and private tragedy, Half of The Human Race is a book about men and women and their difficulties in understanding each other at a turning-point in history. It is a deeply affecting story of love, sacrifice, suffrage and county cricket, projected against a vivid backdrop of England in an extraordinary age of turmoil and violence.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn't afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew: the location of every old church in Manhattan how to sneak into the cinema how to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine million a year and that if you can still lose yourself in the first chapter of a Dickens novel then everything is probably going to be fine. By the end of the year she'd learned: how to launch a paper airplane high over Park Avenue how to live like a redhead how to insist upon the very best that the word 'yes' can be a poison and the Rules of Civility. That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weathervane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.

I read a review in my mum's newspaper yesterday of:

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor - and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels.


Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.


The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from number one bestseller Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author of The Outcast triumphs in this frightening yet sinister drama of dark surprises - where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety - and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

Tonight on Masterpiece is an adaptation of Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War which is part of three related titles by Sebastian Faulks including Charlotte Gray (which was a movie with Cate Blanchett) and The Girl at the Lion d'Or. They are all linked through location, history and several minor characters, says Wikipedia. I've seen Charlotte Gray and look forward to Birdsong tonight and would be interested in reading the books. They're all war and France related in one way or another and share a few characters. They sound interesting, and I like books that aren't necessarily part of a series but share characters, like some of Waugh's books and others'.

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation�� —The New York Times Book Review) and Natural Elements (“A magnum opus�� —The New Yorker), an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque, written in the grand tradition with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.

The novel opens in Amsterdam at the turn of the last century. It moves to New York at the time of the 1907 financial crisis and proceeds onboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town.

It is about a young man—Piet Barol—with an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Piet’s father is an austere administrator at Holland’s oldest university. His mother, a singing teacher, has died—but not before giving him a thorough grounding in the arts of charm.

Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe’s leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets—and soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him.

History of a Pleasure Seeker is a brilliantly written portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love. It is a book that will beguile and transport you—to another world, another time, another state of being.


I only just started this (and have three books going - how did I let this happen again?) but its really very well written and very sexy.

Ivan wrote: "History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation�� —The New York Times Book Review) and ..."

That sounds like a book I would enjoy. Thanks for posting that review Ivan.

Ally wrote: "I have been watching a channel 4 programme called 'The TV Book Club' and there's 3 of their choices that might be of interest to the Bright Young Things:

[bookcover:The Report. Jessica Francis K..."

I have been watching the tv book club too. I read The Rules of Civility recently and it was very enjoyable. The book was written very well and the characters are great.

Edel wrote: "Ivan wrote: "History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation�� —The New York Times Book..."

It seems like it would be a big hit with fans of "Downton Abbey" and "Upstairs/Downstairs" (which we both are Edel).

I saw a book at the library that looked good. Of course, I had to check it out!

Trapped! the Story of Floyd Collins by Robert K. Murray
When Floyd Collins became trapped in a cave in southern Kentucky in early 1925, the sensationalism and hysteria of the rescue attempt generated America's first true media spectacle, making Collins's story one of the seminal events of the century. The crowds that gathered outside Sand Cave turned the rescue site into a carnival. Collins's situation was front-page news throughout the country, hourly bulletins interrupted radio programs, and Congress recessed to hear the latest word. Trapped is both a tense adventure and a brilliant historical recreation of the past. This new edition includes a new epilogue revealing information about the Floyed Collins story that has come to light since the book was first published.

from goodreads

Jennifer W wrote: "I saw a book at the library that looked good. Of course, I had to check it out!

Trapped! the Story of Floyd Collins by Robert K. Murray
When Floyd Collins became trapped in a cave in southern Kent..."

Did you know that there's a musical called simply "Floyd Collins" - quite acclaimed.

I didn't know that, Ivan. I'd never heard of him or the incident. I'm always interested in news events that captivate a large number of people- what makes them so interesting to so many people? What about this guy appealed so much to people who never met him that they made a musical about him? Fascinating!

I've just come across...

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson

Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant, the artistic community in the first half of the twentieth century were ingaged in a grand experiment.

The Bohemians ate garlic and didn't always wash; they painted and danced and didn't care what people thought. They sent their children to co-ed schools; explored homosexuality and Free Love. They were often drunk, broke and hungry but they were rebels.


In this fascinating book Virginia Nicholson examines the way the Bohemians refashioned the way we live our lives.

Virginia Nicholson is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell. A freelance jouralist and researcher, she is Deputy Chairman of The Charleston Trust. Her first book was Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden. Virginia Nicholson lives in Sussex.

These are set a few miles from where I live so I'm very interested in reading them! - It's a trilogy and technically the third one is way out of our era but I just could leave it out!

The Hungry Hills by Janet MacLeod Trotter

With the Great War still raw in the memory and life in the 1920s mining village of Whitton Grange hard and dangerous, Louie Kirkup dreams of a better future. But with a sick mother and a large family of pitman brothers and father, the daily burdens fall heavily on her young shoulders. She fears becoming a spinster drudge until she sets eyes on 'Red' Sam Ritson - hard, muscled and a natural leader - climb into the boxing ring at the Durham Miners' Gala and determines to marry him. But Sam, wedded to his battle for his fellow miners against the ruthless mine owner Seward-Scott, is no ideal husband. As tensions increase and the General Strike looms, Louie's brother Eb begins an affair with Eleanor, the mine owner's wife. With the miners locked out of work, Louie fears for the fate of her village and her unborn child. As the strain takes its tragic toll, loving and loyal Louie must stay strong for them all. Written with compassion, humour and a vivid immediacy, The Hungry Hills is an unforgettable saga of two very different families living through the dramas of 1920s Britain. The Hungry Hills was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and is the first in the Durham Mining Trilogy.

The Darkening Skies by Janet MacLeod Trotter

A heartbreakingly moving story of loyalty and passion: second in the Durham Trilogy. When pretty Sara Pallister's father dies leaving his farm bankrupt, she is begrudgingly taken in by her narrow-minded uncle and aunt in the mining village of Whitton Grange. Made to pay her way, Sara is hired out to Dolly Sergeant's grocer's shop where she meets funny, bashful Raymond Kirkup and his warm-hearted aunt Louie. It is through Raymond that she meets the family that is to change her life: the exotic and extrovert Italian Dimarcos who own the popular ice-cream parlour, and finds herself irresistibly drawn to leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding Joe Dimarco. But neither of their families approves the love-match and they strive to keep them apart. As the shadows of the Second World War gather and the growing hostility to the Italians erupts into violence, Sara and Joe's passionate love seems doomed. With its vivid backdrop of a pit-town strained by the tensions of war, The Darkening Skies is a vibrant and moving story of conflicting loyalties, passions and cultures. The Darkening Skies follows the award-nominated The Hungry Hills in the Durham Mining Trilogy.

Never Stand Alone by Janet MacLeod Trotter

When Carol Shannon, the unruly daughter of Brassbank's pit manager, falls for young miner, Mick Todd, their defiant relationship causes a storm in the close-knit mining village. For the bitterness between their families runs as deep as the coal seams that are Brassbank's lifeblood. But the hardest battles are still to come for rebellious Carol. With 1984 dawns the year long Miner's Strike that divides the nation and sets communities at war. Hardship not only threatens Brassbank's survival, but pushes Carol and Mick's passionate union to breaking point, leaving tragedy in its wake. Set against the fascinatingly vivid backdrop of a momentous time, Never Stand Alone is an impassioned novel of a woman's fight for her community, her family and the man she loves.

I had a really spooky find today - in the free paper there was a review of a new book called The Innocents by Francesca Segal...I say this is spooky because it's a modern re-working of our June group read choice, Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Interesting stuff.

That is kind of spooky, Ally!

While browsing at the library today, I stumbled across Vita by Melania G. Mazzucco

In April 1903, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, are sent by their poor families in southern Italy to make a life for themselves in America. Theirs is an unforgettable love story, a riveting tale of immigrant survival and hope that takes them from the crime-ridden tenements of Little Italy to the brutal rail yards of the Midwest, on paths that cross with the Black Hand, Caruso, and Chaplin. It is a story that reaches across decades, to the son of Vita, who would travel as far as Italy to find his roots and the man who could have been his father.

In Vita, the author, Melania G. Mazzucco, also tells her own story of how she found Diamante and Vita in old photographs, documents, ship manifests, and the fading memories of her relatives, and from these fragments of the past imagined this gripping epic fiction of her family's history.

from goodreads

By the way, I love this thread!! I'm always finding books that I think would be good, and I like having a place to catologue them.

by Paula Byrne

Just ran across this book about one of England's greatest novelists and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched, and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited/. The author captures Evelyn Waugh through the friendships and loves that mattered most to him and uncovers a man who, far from the snobbish misanthrope of popular caricature, was as loving and complex as the family that inspired him. Sound interesting?........you bet it does.

This was one of our group reads not long ago. A great book, enjoy.

It looks like this one was just re-released in the UK on 10th May - it sounds right up our street:

The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water by Kate Summerscale

Born in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs realised very early on that she was not like most little girls. Liberated by war work in WWI, Marion reinvented herself as Joe, and quickly went on to establish herself as a leading light of the fashionable lesbian demi-monde. She dressed in men's clothes, smoked cigars and cheroots, tattooed her arms, and became Britain's most celebrated female speed-boat racer - the 'fastest woman on water'. Yet Joe tired of the lime-light in 1934, and retired to the Bahamian Island of Whale Cay. There she fashioned her own self-sufficient kingdom, where she hosted riotous parties which boasted Hollywood actresses and British royalty among their guests. Although her lovers included screen sirens such as Marlene Dietrich, the real love of Joe's life was a small boy-doll named Lord Tod Wadley, to whom she remained devoted throughout her remarkable life. She died, aged 93, in 1993.

Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty by Catherine Bailey

Wentworth is in Yorkshire and was surrounded by 70 collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain andbelonged to the Fitzwilliam family.


It is England's forgotten palace which belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. Black Diamonds tells the story of its demise: family feuds, forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth century British politics, lies at its heart.


This is the extraordinary story of how the fabric of English society shifted beyond recognition in fifty turbulent years in the twentieth century. (from Amazon)

This one begins in 1902 when the Fitzwilliam's were at the height of their power so it fits for our time period and sounds quite interesting.

I've just come across Frances Brody's Kate Sheckleton Mysteries set in the 1920s - they look like fun and seem to get good reviews and I know that some of our members really like mysteries...

Dying In the Wool

Take one quiet Yorkshire Village, add a measure of mystery, a sprinkling of scandal and Kate Shackleton - amateur sleuth extraordinaire! Bridgestead is a quiet village: a babbling brook, rolling hills and a working mill at its heart. Pretty and remote, nothing exceptional happens, except for the day when Joshua Braithwaite, goes missing in dramatic circumstances, never to be heard of again. Now Joshua's daughter is getting married and wants one last attempt at finding her father. Has he run off with his mistress, or was he murdered for his mounting coffers? Kate Shackleton has always loved solving puzzles. So who better to get to the bottom of Joshua's mysterious disappearance? But as Kate taps into the lives of the Bridgestead dwellers, she opens cracks that some would kill to keep closed . . .



A Medal For Murder

A pawn-shop robbery- It's no rest for the wicked as Kate Shackleton picks up her second professional sleuthing case. But exposing the culprit of a pawn-shop robbery turns sinister when her investigation takes her to Harrogate - and murder is only one step behind . . . A fatal stabbing- A night at the theatre should have been just what the doctor ordered, until Kate stumbles across a body in the doorway. The knife sticking out of its chest definitely suggests a killer in the theatre's midst. A ransom demand- Kate likes nothing better than a mystery - and nothing better than solving them. So when a ransom note demands £1,000 for the safe return of the play's leading lady, the refined streets of Harrogate play host to Kate's skills in piecing together clues - and luring criminals out of their lairs . . .

Murder In The Afternoon

DEAD ONE MINUTE Young Harriet and her brother Austin have always been scared of the quarry where their stone mason father works. So when they find him dead on the cold ground, they scarper quick smart and look for some help. ALIVE THE NEXT? When help arrives, however, the quarry is deserted and there is no sign of the body. Were the children mistaken? Is their father not dead? Did he simply get up and run away? A SINISTER DISAPPEARING ACT It seems like another unusual case requiring the expertise of Kate Shackleton. But for Kate this is one case where surprising family ties makes it her most dangerous - and delicate - yet . . .

There's an article in my Sunday supplements about..

Lucky Bunny by Jill Dawson

'Crime's a man's business. So they say. Who was that small figure then, slender enough to trot along the moonlit track, swift and low, virtually invisible? Who was it that covered the green signal with a glove to stop the train, while the two others took care of the driver and his mate? Could it have been one Queenie Dove, survivor of the Depression and the Blitz, not to mention any number of scrapes with the law?'

Queenie Dove is a self-proclaimed genius when it comes to thieving and escape. Daring, clever and sexy, she ducked and dived through the streets of London from the East End through Soho to Mayfair, graduating from childhood shop-lifting to more glamorous crimes in the post-war decades. So was she wicked through and through, or more sinned against than sinning? Here she tells a vivacious tale of trickery and adventure, but one with more pain and heartbreak than its heroine cares to admit. Yes, luck often favoured her, but that is only part of the story. (From Amazon)


I really enjoyed Jill Dawson's The Great Lover about Rupert Brooke when I read it a couple of years ago but I wasn't so impressed with Fred & Edie which I started and never finished so I have mixed feelings about Dawson's writing style. But Lucky Bunny does sound very interesting.

Ally wrote: "It looks like this one was just re-released in the UK on 10th May - it sounds right up our street:

[bookcover:The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water..."

It must be a re-issue because it's been out for quite a number of years. It is a classic. Rich in history and very funny.

Ally wrote: "It looks like this one was just re-released in the UK on 10th May - it sounds right up our street:

[bookcover:The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water..."

This came out originally in 1999.

Here's my review:

I saw this slim volume in the store and was fascinated by the picture on the cover - a woman dressed as a man with a little battered doll on her shoulder - "what in the world is this?" So, I started to read. What a surprise. This is the story of Marion "Joe" Carstairs, a Standard Oil heiress, a champion speed boat driver, friend to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, an unrepentant lesbian, owner of the Caribbean isalnd Whale Cay, and the constant companion of Lord Todd Wadley (yes, a funny little doll). This is one of the most immediately engaging books I've ever read. What a character she was, and what a life she led. "The Queen of Whale Cay" is an absolute charmer from start to finish. Looking for a little slice of forgotten history to while a way some time? This is the book for you.

Ivan wrote: "Ally wrote: "It looks like this one was just re-released in the UK on 10th May - it sounds right up our street:

[bookcover:The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest W..."

Thanks Ivan - I'm really interested in reading this one!

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Simon Mawer (also published under the title 'Trapeze')

This book was given a 5 star review in my paper this morning and I have to say I'm intrigued...

Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause.


Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France, her official mission to act as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must seek out family friend Clément Pelletier, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon, he is of urgent significance to her superiors. As she struggles through the strange, lethal landscape of the Occupation towards this reunion, what completes her training is the understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted.


The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love. (from Amazon)

Abdication: A Novel by Juliet Nicolson (...she also wrote our recent non-fiction group read The Great Silence)

England, 1936. After the recent death of George V, the nation has a new king, Edward VIII. But for all the confident pomp and ceremony of the accession, it is a turbulent time. Terrible poverty and unemployment affect many, but trouble few among the ruling elite; for others, Oswald Mosley's New Party, which offers a version of the fascism on the rise in Germany, seems to offer the vision of the future. Nineteen-year-old May Thomas has just disembarked at Liverpool Docks after making the long journey by steamer from Barbados to escape the constraints of her sugar-plantation childhood. Her first job as a secretary and chauffeuse to Sir Philip Blunt, Chief Whip in Baldwin's Conservative government, will open her eyes to the upper echelons of British society...The unlikely friendship she forms with Evangeline Nettlefold, American god-daughter of the Chief Whip's wife and an old school friend of Wallis Simpson, will see her through family upheavals including the shocking, sudden loss of her mother; but more significant for May, the Blunts' son Rupert has an Oxford University friend, Julian, a young man of conscience for whom, despite all barriers of class, she cannot help but fall. Secrets, hidden truths, undeclared loves, unspoken sympathies and covert complicities are everywhere - biggest and most dangerous of them all, the truth about the new King's relationship with a married woman, and the silent horror that few in Britain dare voice: the increasing inevitability of another world war...

The Second World War by Antony Beevor

The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, and writing with clarity and compassion, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert, to the Burmese jungle, SS Einsatzgruppen in the borderlands, Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions, and to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War. Moral choice forms the basis of all human drama, and no other period in history has presented greater dilemmas both for leaders and ordinary people, nor offered such examples of individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable kindness. Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.

Park Lane by Frances Osborne

'Bea treads carefully on the thick carpet, quite deliberately like a servant. Her elder sister, Clemmie, tells her that it is "not done" to worry about being heard but Bea enjoys this oh-so-silent rebellion against convention. She teases back, "This is the twentieth century, Clem, things are about to change."'


London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty.


Below stairs, housemaid Grace Campbell is struggling. Her family in Carlisle believes she is a high earning secretary, but she has barely managed to get work in service - something she keeps even from her adored brother. Asked to send home more money than she earns, Grace is in trouble.


As third housemaid she waits on Miss Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the house, who, fatigued with the social season, is increasingly drawn into Mrs Pankhurst's captivating underground world of militant suffragettes. Soon Bea is playing a dangerous game that will throw her in the path of a man her mother wouldn't let through the front door.


Then war comes and it is not just their secrets - now on a collision course - that will change their lives for good


Brilliantly capturing a deeply fascinating period of British life in which the normal boundaries of behaviour were overturned and the social hierarchy could no longer be taken for granted, Park Lane is as gripping and intense as Frances Osborne's number one bestselling The Bolter.

Dam Busters: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on the Ruhr by James Holland

The night of 16 May 1943. Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge 9,000lb cylindrical bomb strapped underneath it. Their mission: to destroy three dams deep within the German heartland, which provide the lifeblood to the industries supplying the Third Reich's war machine.


From the outset it was an almost impossible task, a suicide mission: to fly low and at night in formationover many miles of enemy-occupied territory at the very limit of the Lancasters' capacity, and drop a new weapon that had never been tried operationally before from a precise height of just sixty feet from the water at some of the most heavily defended targets in Germany.


More than that, the entire operation had to be put together in less than ten weeks. When visionary aviation engineer Barnes Wallis's concept of the bouncing bomb was green lighted, he hadn't even drawn up his plans for the weapon that was to smash the dams. What followed was an incredible race against time, which, despite numerous setbacks and against huge odds, became one of the most successful and game-changing bombing raids of all time.


In this new book, Sunday Times bestselling historian James Holland brings exhaustive new research and perspectives to provide a fresh account of this exhilarating story.

Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table by Cita Stelzer

A friend once said of Churchill, He is a man of simple tastes; he is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.
But dinners for Churchill were about more than good food, excellent champagnes and Havana cigars. Everything included the opportunity to use the dinnertable as a stage on which to display his brilliant conversational talents, and an intimate setting in which to glean diplomatic insights, and argue for the many policies he espoused over a long life.
In this riveting book, Cita Stelzer draws
on previously untapped archival material to tell of some of the key dinners at which Churchill presided during WWII including the important conferences at which he used his considerable skills to persuade his allies to fight the war according to his strategic vision.
With original menus, seating plans and unpublished photographs, Dinner with Churchill is a sumptuous treat. The next best thing to being there yourself.

A brand new book (so new it is not yet listed here at GoodReads!) is...

A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes by Louise Millar

The only woman to serve as a soldier in the First World War, the Englishwoman Flora Sandes became a hero and media sensation when she fought for the Serbian Army and pursued a distinguished career in its ranks as officer. This account charts her incredible story, from her tomboyish childhood in genteel Victorian England, her mission to Serbia as a Red Cross volunteer and subsequent military enrolment, her celebrity lecture tours of Europe, her marriage to a fellow officer and her survival of a Gestapo prison during the Second World War to her final years in Suffolk. A fascinating character of her times and an inspiration to women the world over, Flora Sandes is brought to life and restored to her rightful place in history by this authorized biography - compiled with the help of her family, and using hitherto unused private papers and photographs.

Ally wrote: "[bookcover:Dam Busters: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on the Ruhr] Dam Busters: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on the Ruhr by James Holland

The night of 16 May 1943. Nineteen speciall..."

Have you seen the film "The Dam Busters" with Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallace, and Richard Todd as one of the Lancaster pilots? It was made in 1955 and often can be seen on tv.....I really like it.

Secondhand Daylight. D.J. Taylor by D. J. Taylor

Autumn 1933, and for once struggling writer James Ross seems to have fallen on his feet. Not only has the Labour Exchange fixed him up with a day-job collecting rents in Soho, but friendly Mr Samuelson is employing him front-of-house in the Toreador night-club. Even his melancholy love-life is looking up, thanks to a chance encounter with the alluring Gladys, enigmatic inhabitant of the Meard Street second-floor back. On the other hand, Soho looks an increasingly dangerous place in which to be at large. Not only are Mosley's Blackshirts on the prowl, but somebody is raiding the dirty bookshops and smashing night-club windows in a quest for moral decency. Fetched up in a police-cell in West End Central after an unfortunate incident outside the Toreador, and coerced into undercover work by the mysterious Inspector Haversham, James finds himself infiltrating the Blackshirts' Chelsea HQ , leafleting passers-by in the King's Road and spying on a top-secret dinner party attended by a highly important Royal guest. Meanwhile, the emotional consequences of this deception are set to come as a nasty shock.

Ignorance by Michèle Roberts

After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the colour of an undelivered letter.

Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Angèle Baudry grow up, side by side yet apart, in the village of Ste Madeleine. Marie-Angèle is the daughter of the grocer, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Angèle does not grasp; she aspires to a future of comfort and influence.

When war falls out of the sky, along with it tumbles a new, grown-up world. The village must think on its feet, play its part in a game for which no one knows the rules. Not even the dubious hero with 'business contacts' who sweeps Marie-Angèle off her feet. Not even the reclusive artist living alone with his sensual, red canvases. In these uncertain times, the enemy may be hiding in your garden shed and the truth is all too easily buried under a pyramid of recriminations.

Michèle Roberts's new novel is a mesmerising exploration of guilt, faith, desire and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.

Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina by Virginia Rounding

There are few characters in history about whom opinion has been more divided than the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his wife the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. On one hand, they are venerated as saints, innocent victims of Bolshevik assassins, and on the other they are impugned as the unwitting harbingers of revolution and imperial collapse, blamed for all the ills that befell the Russian people in the 20th century.

Theirs was also a tragic love story; for whatever else can be said of them, there can be no doubt that Alix and Nicky adored one another. Soon after their engagement, Alix wrote in her fiancé s diary: Ever true and ever loving, faithful, pure and strong as death words which met their fulfilment twenty-four years later in a blood-spattered cellar in Ekaterinburg.

Through the letters and diaries written by the couple and by those around them, Virginia Rounding presents an intimate, penetrating, and fresh portrayal of these two complex figures and of their passion their love and their suffering. She explores the nature and possible causes of the Empress's ill health, and examines in depth the enigmatic triangular relationship between Nicky, Alix and their favourite, Ania Vyrubova, protégée of the infamous Rasputin, extracting the meaning from words left unsaid, from hints and innuendoes.

The story of Alix and Nicky, of their four daughters known collectively as OTMA and of their haemophiliac little boy Alexei, is endlessly fascinating, and Rounding makes these characters come alive, presenting them in all their human dimensions and expertly leading the reader into their vanished world.

Blooms of Darkness: A Novel by Aharon Appelfeld

WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2012 The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood. Multi-award-winning writer Aharon Appelfeld once again crafts out of the depths of unfathomable tragedy a renewal of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

We'll have to look out for this one, which is not due to be released until March 2013...

SOS Lusitania by Kevin Kiely

In May 1915 the huge ocean liner, the Lusitania, sank off the Cork coast near the Old Head of Kinsale with the loss of thousands of lives. This happened during the First World War. But it was no accident. The ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Rumour has it that there were spies on board. These rumours were true and thirteen-year-old Finbar Kennedy finds himself caught in the middle of it all.

This story mingles fact and fiction in the setting of one of the most dramatic seafaring tragedies ever.

The Absolutist by John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas).

A masterfully told tale of passion, jealousy, heroism and betrayal set in the gruesome trenches of World War I.

It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War.

But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will--from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain.

The Absolutist is a masterful tale of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in one of the most gruesome trenches of France during World War I. This novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats until its most extraordinary and unexpected conclusion, and will stay with them long after they've turned the last page.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity. Ernest and Hadley's marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition - not least from a woman intent on making him her own . . .

Jill: thanks for the recommendation concerning Waugh. Authors are usually much more complex and real than the stereotypes we're handed down about them.

Shelley
Rain: A Dust Bowl Story

Ivan, I've seen that one advertised here on goodreads, but I don't think I would have guessed the plot. Glad you investigated!

Ally, I've heard good things about that one.

My recommendations' shelves gave me this one:

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden's first novel is the story of two Cree friends, Xavier and Elijah, who leave their pristine northern country to end up in the horrific trenches of World War I. Loosely based on the real life of a famous Canadian sniper, the story is told from two first-person views: those of Xavier and his old aunt and only living relative, Niska. After the war, Niska is taking her wounded nephew back home north to the bush in a canoe. Their trip is the three-day road of the title, which also refers to the journey taken after death. The story of the war is told in flashbacks on this journey as Xavier recovers from morphine addiction. Niska also relates various stories to Xavier, believing there is "medicine in the tale."

Boyden is a natural storyteller. Both the Native tales of the north and the grim accounts of the war in France and Belgium have the ring of truth. His images can be subtly appropriate--raiders who go over the top are "eaten by the night"--and his characterizations are excellent, especially the three main players and Xavier's Canadian trenchmates. Eventually, Elijah seems to feed on the death all around him, becoming a "windigo," while Xavier begins to question the sanity of the war and his friend's growing madness, realizing "we all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy." Not for the squeamish reader, this is a powerful novel that takes a new angle on a popular subject, "the war to end all wars." --Mark Frutkin

Sounds really interesting - I like stories with two separate narrators told in alternate chapters. I don't know if that is how this one is set up or not but I'm intrigued.

...as for The Paris Wife, I can't tell you how many times I've overlooked this one either on ŷ������, Amazon or in bookshops...I can't believe I nearly missed something so perfect for our groups sphere of interest, particularly as Hemmingway holds a a special place in the hearts of many of our members!

My coworker just showed me this graphic novel: Unterzakhn by Leela Corman

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.

For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life's lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for "Underthings") tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the "golden land," where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

She says it's really good. It would be something different for us!

Russian Court at Sea by Frances Welch

On 11th April 1919, less than a year after the assassination of the Romanovs, the British battleship HMS Marlborough left Yalta carrying 17 members of the Russian Imperial Family into perpetual exile. They included the Tsar's mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, and his sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, Prince Felix Youssupov, the murderer of Rasputin and a man once mooted as a future leader of Russia, and Grand Duke Nicholas, former Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies.

As the ship prepared to set sail, a British sloop carrying 170 White Russian soldiers drew up alongside. The soldiers stood on deck and sang the Russian National Anthem. It was the last time the anthem was sung to members of the Imperial Family within Russian territory for over 70 years. The Dowager Empress stood on deck alone. Nobody dared to approach her.

The Russian Court at Sea vividly recreates this unlikely voyage, with its bizarre assortment of warring characters and its priceless cargo of treasures, including rolled-up Rembrandts and Faberge eggs. It is a story, by turns exotic, comic and doomed, of an extraordinary group of people caught up in an extraordinary moment in history when their lives were in every way at sea.

I recently picked up the ARC for History of a Pleasure Seeker, so hopefully I can read that soon-ish.

I also picked up the ARC for Gilded Age: A Novel by Claire McMillan which is a retelling of House of Mirth. It looks like it's modernized, but I thought I'd mention it.

Raymond Chandler: A Mysterious Something in the Light: A New Biography by Tom Williams

A major new biography of the writer who, more than any other, has defined modern crime fiction What we know of Raymond Chandler is shrouded in secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his magisterial novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, literary gumshoe Tom Williams casts light on this most mysterious of writers. The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age �� experiences that fuelled his writing as much as they scarred his life. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the cruel collapse of his parents�� marriage, his father’s alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland, and later London. As a young man, eager to forge a new life unconstrained by the stuffy English class system, he returned to the US, where �� in corruption-ridden Los Angeles �� he met his one great love: Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior. It was only during middle age, after his own alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction, although his success was to prove bittersweet. An obsessive attitude towards his craft, unrealised literary ambitions and a suicidal turn after Cissy’s death combined to prevent him from recapturing the verve of his earlier writing. However, his legacy �� the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe �� endures, compelling generation after generation of crime writers to go down mean streets. In this long-awaited new biography, the most thorough and comprehensive yet written, Tom Williams shadows one of the twentieth century’s true literary giants and considers how crime was raised to the level of art.

Ally wrote: "[bookcover:Raymond Chandler: A Mysterious Something in the Light: A New Biography] Raymond Chandler: A Mysterious Something in the Light: A New Biography by Tom Williams

A major new biography of t..."

Sounds interesting. Doesn't look like it is available here yet.