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At the end of her life, Frances Osborne’s one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother Lilla was as elegant as ever–all fitted black lace and sparkling-white diamonds. To her great-grandchildren, Lilla was both an ally and a mysterious wonder. Her bedroom was filled with treasures from every exotic corner of the world. But she rarely mentioned the Japanese prison camps in which she spent much of World War II, or the elaborate cookbook she wrote to help her survive behind the barbed wire. Beneath its polished surface, Lilla’s life had been anything but effortless. Born in 1882 to English parents in the beautiful North China port city of Chefoo, Lilla was an identical twin. Growing up, she knew both great privilege and deprivation, love and its absence. But the one constant was a deep appreciation for the power of food and place. From the noodles of Shanghai to the chutney of British India and the roasts of England, good food and sensuous surroundings, Lilla was raised to believe, could carry one a long way toward happiness. Her story is brimming with the stuff of good fiction: distant locales, an improvident marriage, an evil mother-in-law, a dramatic suicide, and two world wars. Lilla’s remarkable cookbook, which she composed while on the brink of starvation, makes no mention of wartime rations, of rotten vegetables and donkey meat. In the world this magical food journal, now housed in the Imperial War Museum in London, everyone is warm and safe in their homes, and the pages are filled with cream puffs, butterscotch, and comforting soup. In its writing, Lilla was able to transform the darkest moments into scrumptious escape. Lilla’s Feast is a rich evocation of a bygone world, the inspiring story of an ordinary woman who tackled the challenges life threw in her path with an extraordinary determination.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE #1 TERRIFIC READ • In an age of bolters—women who broke the rules and fled their marriages—one woman was the most celebrated of them all. • “Even today Lady Idina Sackville could get tongues wagging."—NPR "Sackville’s passion lights up the page.” —Entertainment Weekly • An engaging, definitive final look back at those naughty people who, between the wars, took their bad behavior off to Kenya and whose upper-class delinquency became gilded with unjustified glamour.” —Financial Times • “Intoxicating.” —People Idina Sackville's relentless affairs, wild sex parties, and brazen flaunting of convention shocked high society and inspired countless writers and artists, from Nancy Mitford to Greta Garbo. But Idina’s compelling charm masked the pain of betrayal and heartbreak. Now Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, using letters, diaries, and family legend, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the “Happy Valley Set.” Dazzlingly chic yet warmly intimate, The Bolter is a fascinating look at a woman whose energy still burns bright almost a century later.
This book is a blend of social history and family history covering the years 1800-1950. It is structured around the relationships which fascinate those interested in finding out more about their ancestors, fathers, mothers, babies, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and the elderly, friends and neighbours. The book will examine how readers might find out more specifically about how their own ancestors functioned in these relationships – when and in what circumstances did my ancestor become a father? What records can tell us more about his role as a father? Each chapter starts with a guide on how to interpret the most common and direct of family history sources (photographs, BMD certificates and censuses). The book then goes on to examine each relationship in its changing historical contexts – how, for example, did the role of a father differ in the Victorian period from earlier periods? What similarities and differences were there in behaviour and roles between fathers of different social classes? How did fatherhood change in the context of the two world wars?
A Goldsboro Crown Historical Fiction Award Nominee The bestselling author of The Bolter returns with a delicious novel about two determined women whose lives collide in the halls of a pedigreed London town home. When eighteen-year-old Grace Campbell arrives in London in 1914, she’s unable to fulfill her family’s ambitions and find a position as an office secretary. Lying to her parents and her brother, Michael, she takes a job as a housemaid at Number 35, Park Lane, where she is quickly caught up in lives of its inhabitants—in particular, those of its privileged son, Edward, and daughter, Beatrice, who is recovering from a failed relationship that would have taken her away from an increasingly stifling life. Desperate to find a new purpose, Bea joins a group of radical suffragettes and strikes up an intriguing romance with an impassioned young lawyer. Unbeknownst to each of the young women, the choices they make amid the rapidly changing world of WWI will connect their chances at future happiness in dramatic and inevitable ways.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Kathleen Buhle shares her story of resilience and self-discovery after her marriage to Hunter Biden unraveled in the wake of substance abuse and infidelity in this “dignified and revealing” (People) memoir. “Kathleen Buhle’s brave and honest story transcends politics, division, hearsay, and judgment.”—Connie Britton This is not a story about good versus evil. Or who was right. Or who was better. For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator at the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. Within months of falling in love, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged, living a life beyond anything she’d ever known. Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how rapidly and irrevocably a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction. When the lies became insurmountable, Kathleen was forced to reckon with the compromises she had made to try to save her marriage. She wondered if she could survive on her own. The result is a memoir that is page-turning and heart-breaking. Here Kathleen asks why she kept so much hidden—from her daughters and herself—for so many years, why she became dependent on one man, and why she was more faithful to a vow of secrecy than to her own truth. This inspiring chronicle of radical honesty and self-actualization speaks to women who have lost part of their identity and want to reclaim it.
One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.