The Guinness Girls - A Hint of Scandal, Emily Hourican ( paperback April 2022)
£9.99
From the top ten bestselling author of The Glorious Guinness Girls, a stunning new novel of secrets, scandals and passions which follows the three enigmatic Guinness sisters, set in Ireland and London in the fascinating 1930s. 'An utterly captivating insight into these fascinating women and the times they lived in ...
As Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh - the three privileged Guinness sisters, darlings of society in Dublin and London - settle into becoming wives and mothers, they quickly discover that their gilded upbringing could not have prepared them for the realities of married life. For the eldest, Aileen, in Luttrellstown Castle outside Dublin, being married offers far less than she had expected; for outspoken Maureen, in the crumbling Clandeboye in Northern Ireland, marriage means intense passion, but fierce rows; while Oonagh's dream of romantic love in London is shattered by her husband's lies. And as 1930s Britain becomes increasingly politically polarised, the sisters' close friends, the Mitfords, find themselves under the media glare - causing the Guinness women to examine their own lives.
Inspired by true-life events, The Guinness Girls: A Hint of Scandal is a sweeping, epic novel of Ireland and Britain in the grip of change, and a story of how three women who wanted for nothing were about to learn that they couldn't have everything.
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This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams ( paperback 2020)
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A new novel from the wonderful Niall Williams ( History of the Rain, Four Letters of Love).
One of my favourite books of 2020 - Linda
Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living.
But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets for which he needs to atone. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community - its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs - and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.
The Most Fun we Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo ( paperback, June 2020)
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This book got a little overlooked when published as a hardback because it was simply gigantic. I predict late success with the paperback, it has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and is a superb, engrossing read.
MARILYN has somehow fallen into motherhood and spent four decades married to DAVID, who's pretty certain he loves her more than anyone has ever loved another person.
WENDY, their eldest, a cause for concern, soothes herself with drink after being widowed young, while VIOLET, lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mother, is disturbed by the reappearance of a son placed for adoption fifteen years earlier. LIZA, a professor, is pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves and GRACE, their dawdling youngest daughter, lives a lie that no one in her family suspects. 'A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory' Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles'
Everything about this brilliant debut cuts deep: the humor, the wisdom, the pathos' Rebecca Makkai
Writers & Lovers, Lily King ( pb 4 Feb 2021)
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Recently out of a devastating love affair and mourning the loss of her beloved mum, Casey is lost. The novel she has been writing for six years isn't going anywhere, her debt is soaring, and at thirty-one, with all her friends getting married and having kids, she feels too old for things to be this way. Then she meets Silas.
He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar - older, fascinating, troubled - walks into her life, his two boys in tow. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, torn between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures. And she's still got to write that book...
'Exquisite' Sunday Telegraph' Funny and immensely clever' Tessa Hadley
The Good The Bad - and the Little Bit Stupid. Marina Lewycka, ( pb, March )
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A LAUGH-OUT-LOUD NOVEL FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN
After walking out on his wife to shack up with 'Brexit Brenda' next door, George Pantis thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he can't access the money because he's forgotten his password. What is he meant to tell all the forceful people who keep appearing at his doorstep desperate to know his mother's maiden name?The situation is shadier than he thinks, and George is need of rescue.
But will his dysfunctional family be able to save him, and in the process, can they save each other?
