When seventeen-year-old Mary O' Connor collapses one Sunday in church she is taken to live with Dr Roberts & his wife in a beautiful Yorkshire village for her health. Though initially employed as a maid, Mary soon becomes the daughter the couple were never able to have.

With Britain at war, unable to remain idle, Mary finds employment in the local steel works but when her fiancé Tom Downing is killed in action Mary is convinced it is retribution for their night of sin during Tom's Christmas leave.

However, Mary grows to love Jack Holmes, a local miner. They marry & move into a humble terrace house with little but their love to keep them going. As the years pass Mary is determined to achieve success for herself & her family. She sets up her own dressmaking business & it seems as if she has finally found peace of mind. But the business starts to dominate her life until tragedy once more threatens to destroy all she most cherishes...



...

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, & the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen ...

It is the autumn of 1945 & identical twins Joy & Gillian Lawrence are on their way home to Liverpool, having been evacuated to Devonshire five years earlier. Their mother has been killed in the blitz but the girls hope that with their beloved father ...

There was never any question that young George Mc Cray would grow up to be a man, but there was a big question about the kind of man he'd grow up to be. It is the winter of 1962, snow is piling higher by the day, & George is called upon to endure more than most men could withst&. With the help of his grandparents & Tucker, his beloved Irish setter, George must navigate through life ...

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, & it is a tribute to his vision & achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable & revealing book ...

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, & it is a tribute to his vision & achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable & revealing book ...

Christy Brown was severely disabled from birth with cerebral palsy & unable to use any part of his body other than his left foot. Doctors said he was a mental defective & that he would never be able to lead any kind of normal life; Christy proved them wrong.

This is the first authorised biography of Christy Brown, written with the help of his surviving family members & artists who knew him well. It tells the astonishing story of Christy

...

In CHROMA Derek Jarman explains the use of colour in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists & draws on the great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He also talks about the meaning of colours in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion & alchemy. The colours on Jarman's palette are mixed with memory & insight to create an evocative & highly personal work. ...

One night José Antonio Maria Vaz hears gunfire from the deserted theatre next door to his bakery. He races to the theatre's uppermost gallery, & there beneath him on a spotlit stage lies the wounded body of Nelio, a street urchin renowned for living on his wits. Gasping, the wounded boy asks to be taken to the roof to breathe the beautiful air fresh off the Indian Ocean. On that theatre roof, his life ebbing away, Nelio begins his story.

At the age of five, Nelio watched helplessly as his village was burned to the ground & his people were massacred by bandits. He escaped by chance; a man handed him a gun & ordered him to shoot another boy, but instead he turned the gun on the bandit & ran. He made his way to the coast, encountering en route bizarre characters who gave him guidance. Upon arrival in the city Nelio joined a rough street gang, & began a very different way of life.

Henning Mankell's Chronicler of the Winds is a dazzling new venture from the master of crime; a beautifully told fable of the African continent.



...