Alison Light Book order

A luminous memoir of love and grief from the author of Common PeopleAlison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic figure on the British Left, utterly driven by his work and by a commitment to collective politics. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead.Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements.She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother. Finally she reflects on the power of mourning and how it shapes a life.Through its frank and touching account of a marriage between two very different people, it celebrates the capacity we all have to share our lives and to change our selves.

Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, the author moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.

Through Virginia Woolf's, a feminist and a bohemian, extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, this title chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. It explores the hidden history of service.

Shows how ideas of national identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life during the period between the wars. Light looks at a range of writers from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Daphne du Maurier to Agatha Christie.