I'm Sorry You Feel That Way
Rebecca Wait

The Author

Rebecca is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, was a Times, Guardian, Express, Good Housekeeping and BBC Culture Book of the Year. Her previous novel, Our Fathers, received widespread acclaim and was a Guardian book of the year and a thriller of the month for Waterstones.

The Book

For Alice and Hannah, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one.  There is also their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.  And there is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has stopped everything…

As adults, Alice and Hannah must deal with disappointments in work and in love, as well as increasingly complicated family tensions.  They must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother:  submit or burn the house down.

And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hannah would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.

Praise for Rebecca Wait

The funniest novel you’ll read this year. The Guardian

Small Pleasures
Clare Chambers

 The Author

Clare’s first job after reading English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford, was working for the renowned Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch.  Her first novel Uncertain Times was published by Diana at André Deutsch in 1992 and she is the author of five other novels.   Small Pleasures is her first work of fiction in ten years.   It has been selected for BBC Two’s ‘Between the Covers’ Book Club and BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, and it has been named Book of the Year by Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Red, Prima, Evening Standard, Spectator and Daily Express.

 The Book

1957, the south-east suburbs of London. Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper, disappointed in love and – on the brink of forty – living a limited existence with her truculent mother:  a small life from which there is no likelihood of escape.  When a young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilbury’s.  Jean doesn’t mean to fall in love with Gretchen’s husband, Howard, but when she does, she falls hard.  Jean cannot bring herself to discard the chance of finally having a taste of happiness…But there will be a price to pay, and it will be unbearable.

(image credit:  Anna McCarthy)

Praise for Clare Chambers

A little gem of a book that transplants the listener quite elsewhere, while exploring the abiding issue of how much we are prepared to suspend our disbelief if we glimpse a chance of happiness.  Financial Times