Gliterary Lunches - Food For Thought

Once a Land Girl
by Angela Huth

The Author

Angela Huth worked on various newspapers and magazines before becoming the first woman reporter on 'Man Alive', the BBC's flagship current affairs and documentary series. She has written eleven novels and four short-story collections as well as TV, radio and stage plays. Two of her novels - Virginia Fly is Drowning and Sun Child - she adapted for the BBC. She is an established freelance journalist, critic and broadcaster.

Once a Land Girl is the moving sequel to Land Girls - which was an international bestseller and memorably made into a film starring Anna Friel and Rachel Weisz.

Praise for Land Girls

'Huth's controlled, eloquent style has been compared to Jane Austen's, but her talent is entirely original'
The Times

The Plot

The war is over, but life goes on for Land Girls Prue, Stella and Ag. While two of the girls are married, Prue, the incorrigible flirt, has no one and is engaged in a quest for a man to provide her with security and gold taps.

A year after the girls leave Hallows Farm, Prue finds just such a man and a marriage that protects her from the hardships of post-war Manchester. But she still hankers for the life she so loved as a Land Girl.

The lives of her two old friends, Stella and Ag, have moved on and neither visit her. Additionally Prue finds that her newly wedded state and fresh horizons fail to supply the answers she seeks. Yet, in the puzzling world beyond the fields, Prue remains quite sure that the life she imagines is just round yet another corner.

Lovers and Newcomers
by Rosie Thomas

The Author

Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including Bad Girls, Good Women, A Simple Life and the Top Ten bestsellers Every Woman Knows a Secret, Moon Island, White and The Potter's House. When not writing fiction she spends her time travelling.

Once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, and spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica. Her previous novel, Iris and Ruby was the winner of the 2007 Romantic Novel of the Year Award. She lives in London.

Praise for Rosie Thomas

'Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love'
The Times

The Plot

A group of old friends reunite to start a new stage of their lives. They were wild in the 60s; but now they face turning sixty themselves….

Focusing on a group of six friends, this unique and compelling novel explores the lasting bonds of friendship and reawakening of past love. It also raises some very pertinent questions 'does life really change at sixty' and 'do intimate friendships become more important than a long term relationship as we get older'?

Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age.