Nancy's sisters Unity and Diana were furious with her for making fun of Diana's husband, Oswald Moseley, and his politics, and the book caused a rift between them all that endured for years. Nancy Mitford skewers her family and their beliefs with her customary jewelled barbs, but there is froth, comedy and heart here too.
It isn't just Nanny who finds it difficult in France when Grace and her young son Sigi are finally able to join her dashing aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard after the war. For Grace is out of her depth among the fashionably dressed and immaculately coiffured French women, and shocked by their relentless gossiping and bedhopping.
By the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001, this is a witty and tender romance that demonstrates that sometimes, unexpectedly, there can be something better than perfection.
Opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle's reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence.
Alexei Sayle is back, with a new collection of dark, timely, and comic tales. These dazzlingly written stories cut right to the heart of the modern world
Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without. If he can just deliver a lecture on Merrie England, a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple...
Flynne Fisher lives in rural near-future America where jobs are scarce and veterans from the wars are finding it hard to recover. She scrapes a living doing some freelance online game-playing, participating in some pretty weird stuff. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse.