Claude Demanuelli Books

'Tell me the truth.' It is a simple request, but on that shakes the reclusive and enigmatic novelist, Vida Winter, to her very core. For has she not spent the past six decades writing fictional lives that have not only brought her fame and fortune but kept her violent and tragic past a secret? Now old and ailing, Vida Winter cannot escape her own history, no matter how many stories she weaves. 'Tell me the truth.' These words from the past echo in the heart of young biographer Margaret Lea, for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who lover her most, remains and ever-present pain. With a letter that promises finally to reveal the long-kept secrets of her life, Vida Winter invites Margaret on a journey to the past. Vida's tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and willful Isabelle and the feral twins, Adeline and Emmeline. In succumbing to Vida's storytelling, Margaret finds that it sheds a troubling light on her own life. Both women confront the ghosts that have haunted them and both become, finally, transformed by the truth.

Contemporary / British English It is 1954 and Kabuo Miyamoto is on trial for murder. He is a Japanese American living on the island of San Piedro, off the north-west coast of America. The Second World War has left an atmosphere of anger and suspicion in this small community. Will Kabuo receive a fair trial? And will the true cause of the victim's death be discovered?

On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his vehicle. Archie - working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt - is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion the events of the story. Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half of the twentieth century follows two families - the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire - as they make their way in modern England