Claude Demanuelli Book order (chronological)

'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.

Reissue of this highly acclaimed Virago title, a 'finely written, beautiful and tragic novel' - Hermione Lee, FT

On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes!

In the author's words, this novel is an attempt at a comic family epic of little England into which an explosion of ethnic colour is injected. It tells the story of three families, one Indian, one white, one mixed, in North London and Oxford from World War II to the present day.

[Longman Simplified Fiction]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?