On his first night renting a cottage on the Cornish coast, widower John Tennant comes face to face with, of all things, a grizzly bear. Fearing for his life, John tries to convince the animal he isn't worth eating, and is relieved when the bear ambles away. Maintenance man Mitch Benjamin is two hundred years old but doesn’t look a day over forty. As a werebear, he needs to stay under the radar. The new renter is making that difficult. Not only is John attractive, but his vulnerability triggers all of Mitch’s protective instincts. If that wasn’t trouble enough, Mitch is struggling with his inner bear’s desire to befriend John. He knows what his bear is up to, but Mitch doesn’t want another mate. His last one was murdered ninety years ago, and he’s still grieving. John is confused by Mitch’s mixed signals. Physically, Mitch -- with his bulging muscles and hulking frame -- is a gay man’s wet dream come true. But emotionally, he keeps closing down. John discovers more comfort with the magnificent grizzly bear he occasionally meets on his evening walks along the beach. In an effort to help, Morwenna, the owner of the cottages, uses her psychic gifts to give John a message from his dead lover, George. Far from helping, it adds another layer of strangeness to what’s already turning out to be the strangest summer John can remember. Can a well-meaning medium and a determined grizzly bring John and Mitch together? Will Mitch come clean about his werebear nature? If he does, can John accept that a man and bear exist in the same body?

The villa near a small Tuscan town is everything the Pargeter family could want for three weeks. But when the idyll turns sour, Molly Pargeter begins to wonder about their mysterious absentee landlord.

From the author of the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book of 2019, Summer's Lease looks at the cooking techniques we use instead of heat which, in letting us step away from the stove, lend themselves perfectly to summer eating: breaking, salting, souring and ageing. The long dog days of a tiring summer are no time to be a cook. A few charred sardines are of course a wonderful thing, but there the grill sits, pouring out heat into the already-hot kitchen; anyone with any sense who wants charred sardines is somewhere close to the seaside.... It is a time when you might, if you weren’t so hot, wonder what it means to cook at all. Is there cooking without fire...? We understand that when we say something is cooked, we mean it has been heated; but we also understand that a cook does much more than just cooking. The chopping, the beating, the marinating, the dressing... What cooks do is best defined not by the word “cooking”, but by the idea of metamorphosis. Cooks transform ingredients. Through recipes and meanderings, award-winning food writer Thom Eagle explores what it means to create dishes without a reliance on fire and flame, and offers a unique and tantalising glimpse inside the mind of a chef.

This second part of Sir John Rothenstein's autobiography begins with his taking up his duties as Director of the Tate Gallery, which he faced a discouraging situation. The Gallery's administration had collapsed the previous year; there was no official purchasing grant; the Turner Bequest was in lamentable condition and largely unknown; the leading artists of the emerging generation were unrepresented. Before he had time to make more than a beginning the War broke out, the collection was dispersed to places of safety, and the Gallery suffered heavy damage from bombing. With the return of peace Sir John applied himself to the task of securing the repair of the building, the re-construction of the collection, and the forming of an administration. In 1946 the Tate was partially reopened and for the first time a purchasing grant was established. The six years that followed were, Sir John believes, the most fruitful of his directorship. But in 1952 there came a savage attack on him.