The brand-new Cotswold romance from Anita Faulkner, author of A COLOURFUL COUNTRY ESCAPE. Cosy up for chilly winter nights, falling snow and heart-stopping romance - the perfect festive read! 'Cosy, charming and utterly captivating' HEIDI SWAIN CAN GRETEL FIND THE RECIPE FOR THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS? The Gingerbread Café is always full of Christmas magic. Come rain or shine (or even a July heatwave), there's always a hot chocolate bursting with cinnamon and marshmallows waiting for you. For introverted Gretel, it's been the perfect escape from 'real life'. The owner, Nell, is Gretel's last link to her late mum, and hiding out at the café feels so much safer than making new friends. So when Nell suddenly passes, Gretel is left heartbroken. Then she discovers that Nell has left the café to her - but there's a catch. Gretel has to share the running of The Gingerbread Café with the least festive person ever: Nell's nephew, Lukas. Head chef at the local fancy restaurant, Lukas makes it clear he has no time for the café, Gretel or even Christmas itself, and Gretel's too busy struggling to save her burnt batches of gingerbread to work out why. Gretel is determined to keep Christmas alive and make the café a success before Lukas hands the keys over to the scrooge-like developers. But she can't do it alone; besides an over friendly ferret and a waitress with a secret, the only person she has now is Lukas. Will it take a Christmas miracle to get the pair to finally see eye to eye, or could the ice already be melting? Packed full of sugar and spice, The Gingerbread Café will tick all the wishes off your Christmas list this festive period. Perfect for fans of Heidi Swain, Jo Thomas and Bella Osborne. 'Don't miss this enchanting sparkly Christmas read . . . grab it as soon as you can and devour, along with a steaming mug of hot chocolate, marshmallows and a gingerbread cookie!' GEORGIA HILL 'A beautiful Christmas story full of love and festive magic' KATIE GINGER 'One of the most beautiful Christmas books I've ever read. Warm, lovely, homely, and filled with community spirit and festive joy in all the right places!' JAIMIE ADMANS PRAISE FOR ANITA FAULKNER: 'Full of fun and colour' BELLA OSBORNE 'A heart-warming and uplifting romance!' HOLLY MARTIN 'Such a fun ride! Faulkner brings colour and humour to every line' PERNILLE HUGHES 'I absolutely adored this book. Fresh, funny and upbeat' KITTY WILSON 'Pure delight - I loved it!' NICOLA MAY 'Endlessly joy-lit. Bursting with character and warmth' CHRISTIE BARLOW 'A vibrant, charming book. Makes me quite want to take a colourful adventure of my own, especially after these rather beige past couple of years!' ISLA GORDON
Motivating activities help develop visual and basic cognitive skills related to early learning. Activities such as tracing, coloring, and counting help children with the alphabet, numbers, colors, and more.
For more than 70 years, the words of Anne Frank have inspired young people to believe that their voices have power. This essential guide to the life and writing of Anne Frank combines biographical details, primary source images, and accessible literary analysis to create an unforgettable reading experience. The engaging design features timelines and graphic organizers, which encourage readers to look at literature in a fresh way. As readers discover the historical context behind The Diary of a Young Girl and its impact on future generations, they deepen their understanding of the ways history, current events, and literature are connected.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) is a novel by Anita Loos. Adapted from a series of stories written for Harper’s Bazaar, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was an astounding success for Loos, who had mired for over a decade as a screenwriter in Hollywood and New York. An immediate bestseller, the novel earned praise from leading writers and critics of its time, and has been adapted several times for theater and film. Recognized as a defining text of the Jazz Age, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an absolute classic dubbed “the great American novel” by Edith Wharton. Lorelei Lee is a young flapper living a life of luxury in Manhattan. A mistress for prominent Chicago businessman Gus Eisman, who pays handsomely, Lorelei has far surpassed her roots as a young woman from Little Rock, Arkansas. Despite her talent as an actress, she finds herself held as an object by wealthy, often married men, whom she uses accordingly. Hers is a life of fine cuisine, opulent jewelry, and tickets to the best shows in town. Soon, however, she grows tired of New York, and sets off on a trip to Europe with her friend Dorothy Shaw. Away from the men who had dragged them down, the two women explore London, Paris, and Vienna, where they find new dopes to dupe with the promise of love. A caricature of the Jazz Age woman, Lorelei Lee reflects the libido and materialism of a generation caught between wars, situated in a time of exponential cultural change, yet wary of disaster’s proximity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
In A Closed Eye, Anita Brookner explores, with compassionate insight and stylistic brilliance, the self-inflicted paradoxes in the life of Harriet Lytton, a woman whose powers of submissiveness and self-denial are suddenly tested by the dizzying prospect of sexual awakening. In Harriers gallant struggle with the single great temptation that comes her way, Brookner creates a hauntingly flawed heroine and a study in the evasions and disappointments that make up all our lives.
In her superbly accomplished novel, Anita Brookner proves that she is our most profound observer of women's lives, posing questions about feminine identity and desire with a stylishness that conveys an almost sensual pleasure. From the moment Jane Manning first meets her aunt Dolly, she is both fascinated and appalled. Where Jane is tactful and shy, Dolly is flamboyant and unrepentantly selfish, a connoisseur of fine things, an exploiter of wealthy people. But as the exigencies of family bring Jane and Dolly together, Brookner shows us that we may end up loving people we cannot bring ourselves to like -- and that this paradox makes love all the more precious and miraculous.
Jerri Matheson is not interested in love. When she leaves New York for Camaroche, a lush island in the Caribbean, to escape an intolerable situation, love is the last thing on her mind. Years of abuse in a loveless marriage has left her wounded, and wary of men. But in Camaroche, when Kerrel Waring--a member of a breed of people who call themselves weavers, mysterious people, with strange abilities--enters her life with warmth, tenderness, and a gentle touch that brings her to life inside, the intense attraction between them draws her to him against her will. But Kerrel has his own secrets. As he gets close to Jerri he steals her heart and changes her in subtle ways, while keeping from her his true identity, and the fact that his people want to use her in a last-ditch desperate attempt to heal one of their own. Unexpected love, or her greatest threat? Should Jerri trust this charming enigmatic man? Her head says no, but her heart whispers, "Take the risk.
The Weight of Water On Smuttynose Island, off the coast of New Hampshire, more than a century ago, two Norwegian immigrant women were brutally murdered. A third woman survived by hiding in a cave. In 1995, Jean, a photographer, is sent on an assignment to shoot a photo essay about the legendary crime where unearths letters written by Maren, the sole survivor of the murder spree. Soon her interest becomes an obsession with the ancient story - leading to unrecoverable consequences. Resistance As the wife of a Resistance member in German-occupied Belgium, Claire Daussois has grown used to hiding strange men in her attic. But when the B-17 bomber that crash-lands outside Claire's village it contains the man who will be both the last and the most significant of the attic's residents: US Air Force pilot Ted Brice. He is found by ten-year-old Jean Benoit who realises that Claire is the pilot's only hope of survival.
With this novel, Booker Prize-winning author Anita Brookner confirms her reputation as an unparalleled observer of social nuance and deeply felt longings. Brief Lives chronicles an unlikely friendship: that between the flamboyant, monstrously egocentric Julia and the modest, self-effacing Fay, who is at once fascinated and appalled by Julia's excesses. Thrust together by their husbands' business partnership -- and by a guilty secret -- Julia and Fay develop an intense bond that is nonetheless something less than intimacy, a relationship in which we see our own uneasy compromises, not only with other people, but with life itself.
Remembering the December afternoon nearly twenty years earlier when her father and she discovered an abandoned infant in the snow, Nicky recalls her father's efforts to escape society after a painful tragedy, a young woman struggles to live with the consequences of her choices, and a clever detective is determined to promote justice. 300,000 first printing.
Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction “The excellent strength [the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them.” – San Francisco Chronicle Set in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. An unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures where he discovers a surprise "relic." A translator blurs the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unraveling her desires and achievements. In the title novella, a hermit hidden away in the woods with a secret is discovered by a film crew, which compels him to withdraw even further until he magically disappears . . . Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these novellas remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer. “Desai, at her best, offers enchanting, subtle, and deeply observed portraits of layered characters trapped between worlds.” – Daily Beast “Lingers in the memory the same way these landscapes and people of India prove impossible to forget.” – Boston Globe
In Undue Influence, acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner proves once again that even in the most closely circumscribed of lives, hearts can venture into unknown-and potentially explosive-territory. Claire Pitt is nothing if not a practical young woman, living a life in contemporary London that is to all appearances placid, orderly and consciously lacking in surprise. And yet Claire's tangled interior life gives the lie to that illusion. She is prone to vivid speculation about the lives of others, and to fantasies about her own fate that lead her into a courtship so strange that even she wonders at its power to compel her. Martin Gibson and his chronically ill wife Cynthia come to depend on Claire to an extent that is nothing short of baffling, and yet Claire becomes ever bolder in her pursuit of their acquaintance-and, ultimately, of Martin's elusive affections. The result, a potent tale of urban loneliness and the chance intersections that assuage it, constitutes one of Brookner's finest and most psychologically acute achievements.
Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. George Bland is an aging bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name--up until now. For into George's life walks Katy Gibb, young, abrasively self-assured, who incites in George the most alarming feelings.
When Honora and Sexton Beecher are rendered penniless by the crash of the stock market, Sexton is forced to work in a nearby mill that is plagued by violence, and as they try to reconstruct their lives, they are confronted by passions of every kind.
The extraordinary Anita Brookner, praised by The New York Times as "one of the finest novelists of her generation," gives us a brilliant novel about age and awakening. In Visitors, Brookner explores what happens when a woman's quiet resignation to fate is challenged by the arrogance of youth. Dorothea May is most at ease in the company of strangers. When her late husband's relatives prevail on her to take in a young man for the week before an unexpected family wedding, Thea's carefully constructed, solitary world is thrown into disarray. As the wedding approaches, old family secrets surface and conflicts erupt between the generations, trapping an unwilling Thea in the middle. Confronted by the company of Steve Best, a carefree young wanderer, Thea's fragile facade of peaceful acceptance is pierced, forcing her to face in a new way both her past and her future. Exquisite writing, richly drawn characters, and penetrating prceptions about people are here combined into another superb novel by the writer about whom The New York Times Book Review has said, "If Henry James were around, the only writer he'd be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner.
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?
At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become independent, she must leave her mother's comfortable London flat and venture out into the wider world ... with a scholarship to study in Paris.
Everywhere hailed for its emotional intensity and unflagging narrative momentum, this magnificent novel transports us to the turn of the twentieth century, to the world of a prominent Boston family summering on the New Hampshire coast, and to the social orbit of a spirited young woman who falls into a passionate, illicit affair with an older man, with cataclysmic results.
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