Claude Demanuelli Book order (chronological)

A compelling emotional mystery about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling. A dying writer bids a young bookshop assistant to write her biography.

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!

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

[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?