Mary Chamberlain

London, 1939. Eighteen-year-old Ada Vaughan, a beautiful and ambitious seamstress, has just started work for a modiste in Dover Street. A chance meeting with the enigmatic Stanislaus von Lieben catapults Ada into a world of glamour and romance. When he suggests a trip to Paris, it is a decision which will haunt her during the war and its devastating aftermath.

Mary Coe recalls summers spent gleaning in the fields, laudanum-soothed babies strapped to their mothers' backs. Ann Sharman, married and pregnant at seventeen, imagines another life outside the village. Eighty-six-year-old Sybil Hayhoe looks back with pride at her years in service, while the village postwoman is sharply aware of her unequal wages. Girls aspire to be housewives, hairdressers or nurses - except Fiona, who dreams of training horses.

Told through the voices of ordinary women, Mary Chamberlain's portrait of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens remains as vital and thought-provoking as on its groundbreaking publication in 1975. A feminist answer to Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, it vividly captures the rhythms, hopes and tensions of women's lives in a working-class rural community, and offers a unique snapshot of an almost-vanished England.

Dora Simon and Joe O’Cleary live in separate countries, accepting of their twilight years. But their monochrome worlds are abruptly upended by the arrival of Barbara Hummel, who is determined to identify the mysterious woman whose photograph she has found among her mother’s possessions. Forced to confront the past, Dora and Joe’s lives unravel – and entwine.