The Mystery Women

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William Boyd

"What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree and one-time spy." "In 1939 Eva is a beautiful 28-year-old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one. Even those she loves most." "Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life - but once a spy, always a spy. And now she must complete one final assignment. This time, though, Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help."--BOOK JACKET.

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Elizabeth Graver

Told in language at once spare and lyrical, Unravelling is the story of Aimee Slater, who has always longed for a life beyond the small New Hampshire farm her family owns. When, against her mother's wishes, she goes off at the age of 15 to work in the City of Spindles - the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts - she opens a rift between herself and her mother that feels, in her own words, like "an impossible distance." How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story about love, loss, and the power of redemption.

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Joan Aiken

Hatti Ward is the most accomplished and kind of the Ward sisters, but is treated with contempt by all except her mother. Packed off to her uncle's estate in Portsmouth, she has to endure her frightful cousins and haughty Lady Ursula. Soon she and Lady Ursula are in competition for a certain lord.

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Piter Akroid

In this remarkable detective novel Peter Ackroyd investigates the death of Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century poet-forger and genius, whose life ended under mysterious circumstances. Fusing themes of illusion and imagination, delusion and dreams, he weaves back and forth between three centuries, introducing a blazing cast of Dickensian eccentrics and rogues, from the outrageous, gin-sipping Harriet Scrope, an elderly female novelist, to the tragic young poet, Charles Wychwood, seeker of Chatterton's secret... They find more riddles than answers from their search.