Božica Jakovlev 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.

'Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.' The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone...