East Coast Bays Historical fiction

In September 1943, Claudette Blum and her father flee across the Alps into Italy with other Jews seeking refuge, only to find an open battle…

"I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness. In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier life her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that begins with them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationaship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, the family's move to Africa and the impact of her…

A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.

"Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America to live and work in a Brooklyn neighbourhood "just like Ireland" she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blonde Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future. Publisher description.

On the ancient marshlands of Somerset a girl grows up in the shadow of the English Civil War. The girl is Eleanor Glanville, destined to become one of the famous entomologists in history, bequeathing her name to the rare butterfly which she discovered, the Glanville Fritillary. But not before she had endured a life of extraordinary vicissitude.

A schoolmarm leaves England in 1792 to join her father and brother in a mountainous village in upstate New York, where she falls in love with a man torn between white and Native American culture.

A novel based on the life of Jack Lovelock; published with 'Berlin Diary' McNeish's journal written in Germany while researching the novel; and an afterword, which contains a commentary on Lovelock's death.

With the end of the World War II in sight, a German officer orders the reprisal shooting of eight women in a small Alpine village near Lake Como. Fifty years later in Sydney, the daughter of one of the victims discovers that her mother's executioner is living quietly nearby under an assumed name.

Instantly recognizable. Auguste Renoir's masterpiece depicts a gathering of his friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a cafe terrace alpng the Seine near Paris... Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models, and using settings in Paris and on the the Seine, Vreeland illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era. With a gorgeous palate of vibrant, captivating characters, she paints their lives, losses, and triumphs in a brilliant portrait of her own.

Mary became Queen of Scotland only six days after her birth and by her 18th birthday she had been married, widowed, had lost one throne and been named by the Pope for another. Months later she set sail to take her place as queen of Scotland. This novel is a recreation of her life and times.

Passion, painting and politics in sixteenth-century England. The year is 1526. Hans Holbein the Younger is at the beginning of his remarkable career when he travels to England under the patronage of Sir Thomas More. His arrival brings the Renaissance in painting from Europe to Britain. As a guest in the splendid More household in Chelsea, Holbein begins to paint their first family portrait. The great household of the courtier and scholar, Sir Thomas More, was famous for its liveliness and learning. Two people visiting the great house find themselves irresistibly drawn to Meg Giggs, one of More's foster daughters. One of them is John Clements - dark, tall, elegant - an erstwhile tutor, now practising to become a medical doctor; a man of compelling presence and mysterious background. The other is Holbein himself - warm, ebullient, radical and foreign - sent by the great Erasmus to paint the More family portraits. Meg will find herself powerfully drawn to these two wildly contrasting men. She will love one, and marry the other.The two Holbein family portraits frame this remarkable story with its background of love, family, and of religious and political turmoil.

Dreaming daily of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is torn from her…

Set over the period 1490 to 1492, Tracy Chevalier's novel moves between a chateau in Lyons and the cities of Paris and Brussels. The story concerns a series of six Flemish tapestries known as the lady and the unicorn tapestries.

Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd menage marshalled by the resourceful Omar, which travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor.

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, this is the story of four Londoners three women and a young man with a past. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching .Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret .Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover .Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances

Stunning historical novel from the author of THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL and THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE, in which Mary, Queen of Scots, is placed under house arrest with the newly-married Bess of Hardwick and the Earl of Shrewsbury, but fights to regain her kingdom and more.

"A mysterious stranger known as u2032 The Wolf u2032 leaves an infant with the sisters of Santo Spirito. A tiny silver key hidden in her wrappings is the one clue to the child u2032 s identity Rosa u2032 s only family is the nuns who have raised her. When she turns fifteen, she must leave them and become governess to the daughter of an aristocrat and his strange, frightening wife. Their house is elegant but cursed, and Rosa blessed with gifts beyond her considerable musical talents is torn between her desire to know the truth and her fear of its repercussions. And all the while, the hand of Fascism curls around beautiful Italy, and none of her citizens is safe. Rosa faces unimaginable hardship: her only weapons her intelligence, intuition and determination .and her extraordinary capacity for love. Publisher description.

World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the centre of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of a natural disaster - the Black Death.