Search results for ""Author Mary Chamberlain""

Her heart died in the war – can she breathe new life into it? 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 a time they thought buried in the past, Dora and Joe’s lives unravel – and entwine. For, trapped on the Channel Islands under the German occupation in the Second World War, Dora, a Jewish refugee, had concealed her identity; while Joe, a Catholic priest, kept quite another secret... This is a story of love and betrayal, shame and survival. But can a speck of light diffuse the darkest shadows of war?

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TWO SISTERS, ONE DANGEROUS LIE, AND A DEVASTATING TRUTH. Joan, once a singing star of the 1940s and 1950s, now ekes out a lonely, impoverished existence – until a chance encounter promises a comeback concert and an album. Her sister Kathleen is a successful medical researcher who has been offered the directorship of a prestigious institute in Los Angeles as she contemplates the recent break-up with the love of her life. Over the years, Joan and Kathleen draw closer together until a figure from Joan’s past threatens everything they’ve built. As the sisters excavate the lies that bind them, a more profound truth threatens to drive them apart.

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‘The Forgotten is an utterly absorbing novel... The devastation of Berlin in 1945 is powerfully portrayed through the eyes of the women who are caught between the conquering forces.’ Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne How do you rebuild a life from the ashes of despair? London 1958. Twenty-six-year-old Betty Fisher is one of the first to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and attend its inaugural meeting, where she meets John Harris. Posted to Berlin towards the end of the war, John has been left traumatised by his experiences in Germany. And, as his initial admiration for Betty shifts into an overwhelming need to protect her, he is plagued by flashbacks and fantasies. John's increasing fragility brings to the surface Betty's own memories. And soon her past, too, begins to unravel...

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‘The Forgotten is an utterly absorbing novel... The devastation of Berlin in 1945 is powerfully portrayed through the eyes of the women who are caught between the conquering forces.’ Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne How do you rebuild a life from the ashes of despair? London 1958. Twenty-six-year-old Betty Fisher is one of the first to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and attend its inaugural meeting, where she meets John Harris. Posted to Berlin towards the end of the war, John has been left traumatised by his experiences in Germany. And, as his initial admiration for Betty shifts into an overwhelming need to protect her, he is plagued by flashbacks and fantasies. John's increasing fragility brings to the surface Betty's own memories. And soon her past, too, begins to unravel...

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A compendium of remedies and cures handed down from mother to daughter from the beginning of time, this work presents a challenge to orthodox medicine and a history of female wisdom which goes back to the earliest times. What are old wives' tales? Where do they come from? It answers these questions, and more.

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Originally published in 1975, Fenwomen was the first non-fiction book published by Virago. A vivid social and oral history of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens, it provides a unique portrait, spanning nearly 100 years, via the previously unheard voices of the women who lived there, of a community where there were virtually no professional or middle-class people, where intermarriage was common and a single family owned all the village land. Fenwomen was in a tradition stretching through Ronald Blythe (Akenfield) and 20 years further back to the true pioneer of English oral history, George Ewart Evans, with his publication Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956). In an extended new introduction to this Full Circle edition, Mary Chamberlain ecalls her original intent to write a "feminist Akenfield", a "history from the bottom up… not of great country houses and the chatelaines who ran them but of women as labourers and labourers' wives". She describes, too, how she revisited the village and talked to some of the original women about how their lives had changed over 35 years."By any measure, this book is essential reading, but in this handsome new edition, with Justin Partyka's eloquent, unforgettable photographic portraits of Isleham and its people, it is a joy to own" - Stephanie Cross, The Lady

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