What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp
Eva Rice
"Country girl Tara is whisked off to '60s London to become a star; there she is dressed, she is shown off at Chelsea parties, photographed by the best. She meets songwriters, singers, designers, and records her song. And she falls in love - with two men. Behind the buzz and excitement of her success, the bitterness between her elder sister Lucy and her friend Matilda haunts Tara. Their past friend
Tirra Lirra by the River
Jessica Anderson · 160 pages
Funny Girl
Nick Hornby · 452 pages
"From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel. Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest d
Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels
Nancy Mitford · 284 pages
A Far Cry from Kensington
Muriel Spark · 189 pages
Set in 1954, this is a tale narrated by one Mrs Agnes Hawkins, a plump, forthright and no-nonsense young war widow. Nancy (as she is called) is the calm at the center of the perennial storm in the offices of a struggling London publishing house in the difficult years after WWII. At work and at her seedy boarding house she is involved with a cast of characters ranging from the charmingly useless t
We Are All Made Of Glue
Marina Lewycka · 419 pages
From bonding to bondage, from B&Q to Belarus, along with seven smelly cats, three useless handymen, two slimy estate agents, social workers, a bonker lady. The story of a very unlikely friendship.Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out; her sixteen-year-old son is busy surfing born-again websites; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting her down.So when Georg
Books Do Furnish a Room
Anthony Powell · 248 pages
Books do Furnish a Room is the tenth novel of Anthony Powell's long sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time." It opens in the winter of 1945/46 as Britain settles back into peacetime, though not without annoying rationing and shortages. [Nick] Jenkins has come to his old university for research towards a biography on Robert Burton, but soon first himself involved in the launch of a new literary mag
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Laurie R. King · 368 pages
In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman literally stumbles onto him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern, twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a
Mariana
Monica Dickens · 349 pages
Monica Dickens's first book, published in 1940, could easily have been called Mariana - an Englishwoman. For that is what it is: the story of a young English girl's growth towards maturity in the 1930s. We see Mary at school in Kensington and on holiday in Somerset; her attempt at drama school; her year in Paris learning dressmaking and getting engaged to the wrong man; her time as a secretary and
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
Barbara Comyns · 196 pages
"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lack
The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters · 571 pages
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. For with the arrival o
Disobedience
Naomi Alderman · 240 pages
By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man.But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different world of her childhood, a world she thought she had left far behind. The orthodox Jewish suburb of Hendon, north London is outraged by Ronit and her prov
Girl in a Blue Dress
Gaynor Arnold · 438 pages
At the end of her life, Catherine, the cast-off wife of Charles Dickens, gave the letters she had received from her husband to their daughter Kate, asking her to donate them to the British Museum, "so the world may know that he loved me once." The incredible vulnerability and heartache evident beneath the surface of this remark inspired Gaynor Arnold to write Girl in a Blue Dress, a dazzling debut
An Experiment in Love
Hilary Mantel · 256 pages
Carmel McBain is the only child of working-class Irish-Catholic parents. Her mother aspires to something more for her than what life in their depressed mill town has to offer. She is ambitious for her daughter, determined that she slip through England's rigid social barriers. And so, early on, she pushes Carmel, first to gain a scholarship to the local convent school, then to sit the exams for a p
Alys, Always
Harriet Lane · 213 pages
Comforting a dying car crash victim before being invited to meet the woman's privileged family, Frances is transformed through her friendships with two family members from an unknown editor to a sought-after figure in literary society.
All the Broken Places
John Boyne · 400 pages
Mrs Hudson and the Spirits' Curse
Martin Davies · 320 pages
The Pure Gold Baby
Margaret Drabble · 297 pages
Her promising career in 1960s London interrupted by an affair with a married professor that renders her a single mother, Jessica Speight faces wrenching questions about responsibility, potential, and compassion when her sunny child reveals unique needs.
The Ecliptic
Benjamin Wood · 480 pages
On a forested island off the coast of Istanbul stands Portmantle, a gated refuge for beleaguered artists. There, a curious assembly of painters, architects, writers and musicians strive to restore their faded talents. Elspeth 'Knell' Conroy is a celebrated painter who has lost faith in her ability and fled the dizzying art scene of 1960s London. On the island, she spends her nights locked in her b
The Mirror World of Melody Black
Gavin Extence · 328 pages
De onzichtbare grens tussen de normale en de abnormale wereld van een vrouw die vecht tegen haar bipolaire stoornis.

