Wendy Robertson

The story of three ordinary people in the extraordinary Decade that follows 1941. As the bombs fall around her Ruth Kelman gives birth to her daughter Alice in a Tyneside cellar. A thousand miles away, Louis Roxby, a young English soldier adjusts to the severe strictures and strange opportunities of prison camp life. Between 1941 and 1951 these three become who they will be. Alice Kelman becomes a northern grammar school girl; Ruth becomes a skilled photographer and Louis Roxby becomes, in turn, a forger, an artist, and a teacher, finally to enjoying the freedom of post-war bohemian London. Then in 1951, their paths cross as, like millions of others, they are drawn like iron filings to a magnet to the celebratory Festival of Britain in London's South Bank. Becoming Alice is the first of three short novels spanning the second part of the Twentieth Century. "Novelist Wendy Robertson at her consummate best. Once again - as in 'Long Journey Home' and 'Writing at the Maison Bleue' -she paints on a big canvas, brilliantly welding together the broad sweep of history and the fine detail of individual experience."

A powerful portrayal of the unbreakable bond between a mother and her son.As Adam Matheve walks towards his mother's house, to see her for the first time in two years, he has just one hope - to forge the bond with her for which he's always yearned. Enigmatic Marie Matheve has spent her life indulging her passion for drawing buildings. Now, after a dangerous fall, she lies unconscious, her life slipping away. All Adam can do is wait in desperate hope for her recovery. But as time passes Adam begins to unravel the mystery of his mother's past and discovers how little he really knows about the woman who raised him.

Edward Maichin is the golden boy of the Chapels. But at home, Edward's hidden darkness runs riot: his Irish Catholic mother, has no control over him since his father, Ellis, fled to America; his two brothers, Rhys and Caspar, live in fear of him. Only Theo, his imaginative younger sister, dares defy him. A suspicious death halts Edward's rise, forcing the family out of the valley, to the mines of the North-East, where Theo's talent for writing begins to match her brother's skills in social climbing. But when Theo takes a position as companion to a strange old woman, she discovers a family even more complex and vulnerable than her own...