Kirjahaku

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 "Taylor Swift might count Lady Sackville among her muses. Swift's fans...have linked Idina to The Bolter, a song on the record-breaking album, The Tortured Poets Department"--Tatler 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. "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

Lilla Eckford, interned in a Japanese civilian camp in China during the second world war after an extraordinary early life, passed her time by compiling a book about the joys of food. This cookery book blends together personal history, world events, period atmosphere and family anecdotes into a poignant story.

London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty.Below stairs, housemaid Grace Campbell is struggling. Her family in Carlisle believes she is a high earning secretary, but she has barely managed to get work in service - something she keeps even from her adored brother. Asked to send home more money than she earns, Grace is in trouble.As third housemaid she waits on Miss Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the house, who, fatigued with the social season, is increasingly drawn into Mrs Pankhurst's captivating underground world of militant suffragettes. Soon Bea is playing a dangerous game that will throw her in the path of a man her mother wouldn't let through the front door.Then war comes and it is not just their secrets - now on a collision course - that will change their lives for good.Brilliantly capturing a deeply fascinating period of British life in which the normal boundaries of behaviour were overturned and the social hierarchy could no longer be taken for granted, Park Lane is as gripping and intense as Frances Osborne's number one bestselling The Bolter.

* 'This is a truly astonishing book. Frances Osborne has not just brought to life a dizzyingly rich and scandalous slice of social history, she has produced a tragic and deeply moving tale as well. It is far more gripping than any novel I have read for years' Antony Beevor