The Colefaxes are an unconventional family. When you think you understand them their behaviour startles you. The story tells us about Rosemary, a traditional wife whose discovery of her husband’s deceit changes her into a renegade and fierce rival. David, a well-meaning but self-doubting husband contained in his safe, middle class world who believes his secret is safe and Sean, their complex and insightful son, just discovering his adult persona. Their fates are interwoven by Alice, a designer whose commune childhood has given her a liberal and free-thinking attitude to love, sex and childbirth. 1960s London is exploding with liberated sex, fashion and music and morals break down rapidly into the summer of love. Alice’s family leaves David stunned with confusion. Sean’s discovery of free love grows during his adventures in Rome on holiday with his parents, where he meets Gina, a stunning Roman beauty. Each has a secret passion only expressed in the heady atmosphere of a Roman hot-bed. After they return to London and recognise their individual desires all are focussed on Alice and an intricate and hilarious farce ensues between the four that ends in an unexpected drama on New Year’s Eve.

Arguing for a radical re-evaluation of the modernist aesthetic, the essayists consider how women writers created their own version of modernism through the use of sentimental and domestic subject matter, by writing about maternal concerns, and through experiments with plot, voice, and points of view.

Including a foreword by Paul Bowles, this is David Herbert, second son of the 15th Earl of Pembroke’s recollections of the rich and famous, including Barbara Hutton, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the Duke and Duchess of Kent.

In this book McKibbin investigates the ways in which class culture characterised English society and intruded every aspect of life, during the period 1918-1951. He also shows the increasing effects of Americanisation on this culture.

Morgan McBride is tough as nails – but a surprise mail-order bride is enough to have him quaking in his cowboy boots in this laugh-out-loud historical romance. The oldest of the McBride siblings, Morgan has had to look after his siblings since Ma died and Pa ran off. It hasn’t always been easy, especially when his heart longs for the solitude of the wide open road. But now that his brother Kit is married and settled, the time is right for Morgan to leave in search of adventure. Little does he know that Junebug, his hellcat of a little sister, is dead set on keeping him at home – all with one honest advertisement in The Matrimonial News. Epiphany Hopgood has always been good at doing the wrong thing. She’s too tall, too loud, too opinionated, and too contrary for polite society. Staring down the barrel of spinsterhood, she decides to answer a seemingly straightforward ad for a bride. But when Pip shows up to meet her betrothed, she finds that Morgan McBride is not the husband she expected. In fact, he doesn’t even want to be a husband. Unwilling to return to her unsupportive family, Pip is determined to take control of her own future – with or without Morgan McBride ...

The long-awaited prequel to Koen’s beloved Through a Glass Darkly, Dark Angels is a feast of a novel that sparkles with all the passion, extravagance, danger, and scandal of seventeenth-century England. Alice Verney is a young woman intent on achieving her dreams. Returning to England after a messy scandal forced her to flee to Louis XIV’s France, Alice is anxious to re-establish herself by regaining her former position as a maid of honor to Charles II’s queen and marrying the most celebrated duke of the Restoration. But all is not as it seems in the rowdy, merry court of Charles II. Since the Restoration, old political alliances have frayed, and there are whispers that the king is moving to divorce his barren queen, who some wouldn’t mind seeing dead. Alice, loyal only to a select few, is devoted to the queen, and so sets out to discover who might be making sinister plans—and if her own father is one of them. When a member of the royal family dies unexpectedly, the stakes are raised. As Alice steps up her efforts to find out who is—and isn’t—true to the queen, she learns of shocking betrayals throughout court, and meets a man who she may fall in love with—and who could spoil all of her plans. With the suspected arrival of a known poison-maker, the atmosphere in the court electrifies, and suddenly the safety of the king himself seems uncertain. Secret plots are at play, and war is on the horizon—but will it be with the Dutch or the French? And has King Charles himself betrayed his country for greed? Unforgettable in its dramatic force, here is a novel of love and politics, of romance and betrayal, of power and succession—and of a resourceful young woman who risks everything for pride and status in an era in which women were afforded little of either.