In Ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece - the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen - the gift of life. Now his wife, Galatea is expected to be obedience and humility personified, but it is not long before she learns to use her beauty as a form of manipulation. In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, she is locked away under the constant supervision...

Without even noticing, thirty-four-year-old Esther Fairchild has become a prisoner of routine. Living with her adored brother, Christian, she divides her time between illustrating children's books, nightly shifts as a waitress, weekly visits to her father and fortnightly meetings with her married lover. Then one day she encounters a face in the crowd which jolts her out of her mundane existence and makes her question both her life and the past that...

My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor.' It started when she could no longer remember the word for 'book'. Then her mind, her language and her identity began to slip away. This is Erwin Mortier's moving, exquisitely observed memoir of his mother's descent into dementia, as a once-flamboyant woman who loved life and pleasure becomes a shuffling, ghostlike figure wandering through the house. Piecing together the fragments...

He has educated himself by watching extensive television, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo realizes that racing is a metaphor: that by applying the techniques a driver would apply on the race track, one can successfully navigate the ordeals and travails one encounters in life. Enzo relates the story of his human family, sharing their tragedies and triumphs....

And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own-this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley?s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, makingMy Father and Myselfa pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book...

A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted her life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary,...

Two entwined families: the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them. One stately home: Cavendon Hall, a grand imposing house nestled in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. Two best friends: DeLacy Ingham, daughter of the earl, and Ceci Swann, daughter of the valet. Inseparable from childhood, but with two very different destinies. But the year is 1913, and soon life as the two families of Cavendon Hall know it - Royal Ascot, supper dances, grouse...