This book is full of murky, frustrating romantic relationships, but the central
love story is an abiding friendship. Rachel and James are just beginning their
adult lives, working together at a university bookstore, when they fall in
love.
If it weren’t for James’s emphatic homosexuality and Rachel’s obsessive
crush on her married, Liam Neeson-esque English professor,
they might have ridden off into the sunset together. Instead, they become best
friends, roommates, and partners in crime on the Cork, Ireland, club circuit.
Things get complicated when James starts sleeping with said English professor.
I laughed so much reading this book that I mailed it to my own lifelong best friend the day I finished
it.
The Rachel Incident is an all-consuming love story. But it's not the one you expected...
*2023's MOST ANTICIPATED SUMMER READ*
'Funny, nostalgic, sexy ... it's everything I want in a summer book' MONICA HEISEY 'Funny, LOVELY, romantic, DRENCHED in nostalgia' MARIAN KEYES 'You will love The Rachel Incident' GABRIELLE ZEVIN, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The Rachel Incident is an all-consuming love story. But it's not the one you're expecting. It's unconventional and messy. It's young and foolish. It's about losing and finding yourself. But it is always about love.
This book is set in the scorching hot summer of 1900, often noted by young people of the time as a moment of hope, peace, and infinite possibility. They didn’t know what was coming for them. Neither does Hartley’s narrator, a fatherless 12-year-old boy spending his summer holiday with the wealthy family of a school friend.
I loved the imagery in the book: a stolen afternoon of coed swimming in a sky-blue river; a village cricket game that exposes both class tension and a forbidden romance; a green summer suit with smoked-pearl buttons that makes a boy suddenly conscious of how he is seen in the world.
When the boy becomes an unknowing accomplice in the affair between his friend’s debutante older sister and a tenant farmer, the course of his life is permanently distorted. Fans of Atonement and Lady Chatterley’s Lover will adore this book.
L.P. Hartley's moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.
'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The…
Like the Victorian classics that inspired it, The New Life is both political and deeply personal, illustrating how the Oscar Wilde indecency trial might have affected ordinary people.
If you’re a fan of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope and have always wondered what really went on behind Victorian bedroom doors, this book is for you. Tom Crewe places readers inside the bodies of his flawed and fascinating characters and sends them into the sooty nooks and crannies of 1890s London.
I was horribly envious of his visceral, immediate prose. If this wasn’t one of the best historical fiction novels I’ve ever read, I would have stopped around page 150 and flung it across the room in a jealous fit.
Discover Tom Crewe's magnificent debut novel about forbidden desire and the search for freedom in Victorian England...
'Beautifully written' Graham Norton 'Subtle, sexy and beautifully crafted' Sarah Waters 'Lavishly imagined' Sunday Times ______________
After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John has finally found a man who returns his feelings. Meanwhile, Henry is convinced that his new unconventional marriage will bring freedom.
United by a shared vision, they begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.
Before it can be published however, Oscar Wilde is arrested and their daring book threatens to throw them, and all…
Spanning from England's anti-fascism protests of 1936 through the
aftermath of WWII, my book brings together an Irish Catholic photographer and a British Jewish
medical student, each discovering the price of love, art, and ambition.
Kate Grifferty is a press photographer in a Fleet Street agency, an
unusual job for a young woman. She's talented and daring, going wherever the story might be, including, one October
day, an anti-fascism protest in East London. There, she meets David Rabatkin, a
brilliant Jewish medical student.
They fall
deeply in love, but as war looms, the differences between them are thrown into sharp relief.
