Narrator

Henrietta Meire

Henrietta Meire
  • Southern Auvergne, France, 1943.

    Occupied France is a dangerous place for Luke and Christine, especially when they are the children of a French mother and a British father. Desperate to escape, the two teenagers embark on a perilous journey back to England to the safety of their grandparents. But there are eyes everywhere.

    Luke and Christine band together with fugitive Allied airmen, thinking they will keep them safe and help them on their treacherous journey. But their new partnership could be putting them in more danger than they realize. Especially when there are hostile forces at work determined to scupper any plans to get the teenagers and airmen safely back to England.

    With secret operations mounting against the enemy, there is one path which remains unguarded: a risky escape route via the canals. Luke and Christine take refuge on a canal barge and find themselves immersed in the complex Operation Kingfisher.

    Can two teenagers make it across occupied France in one piece? Or will betrayal put them and the lives of others at great risk?

  • Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.

  • Multilayered, subtle, insightful short stories from the inimitable Booker Prize–winning author

    Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures―European, post-Independence Indian, and American―is never more acute.

    In “A Course of English Studies,” a young woman arrives at Oxford from India and struggles to adapt, not only to the sad, stoic object of her infatuation but also to a country that seems so resistant to passion and color. In the wrenching “Expiation,” the blind, unconditional love of a cloth-shop owner for his wastrel younger brother exposes the tragic beauty and foolishness of human compassion and faith. The wry and triumphant “Pagans” brings us middle-aged sisters Brigitte and Frankie in Los Angeles, who discover a youthful sexuality in the company of the languid and handsome young Indian, Shoki. This collection also includes Jhabvala’s last story, “The Judge’s Will,” which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013 after her death.

    The profound inner experience of both men and women is at the center of Jhabvala’s writing: she rivals Jane Austen with her impeccable powers of observation. With an introduction by her friend, the writer Anita Desai, At the End of the Century celebrates a writer’s astonishing lifetime gift for language and leaves us with no doubt of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unique place in modern literature.

  • France, 1944. The streets are filled with swastikas. This is the story of a brave English girl behind enemy lines, a German soldier, and a terrible sacrifice.

    When young English nurse Sibyl Lake is recruited as a spy to support the French resistance, she doesn’t realize the ultimate price she will end up paying. She arrives in Colmar, a French town surrounded by vineyards and swarming with German soldiers, but her fear is dampened by the joy of being reunited with her childhood sweetheart Jacques.

    Sibyl’s arrival has not gone unnoticed by Commander Wolfgang von Haagan, and she realizes that letting him get closer is her best chance of learning enemy secrets. Yet despite her best intentions, Sibyl soon finds that betrayal does not come easy to her.

    When Jacques finds that Sibyl is involved with the enemy, he is determined to prove himself to her with one last act of heroism—an act that will put all of their lives in terrible danger.

    A beautifully written, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable tale of love and loss in a time of war, The Soldier’s Girl is perfect for fans of The Letter by Kathryn Hughes and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.

  • Where is Wendy? Leading a labor strike against the Lost Boys, of course. In Jane Yolen’s first full collection in more than ten years, discover new and uncollected tales of beloved characters, literary legends, and much more.

    A Scottish academic unearths ancient evil in a fishing village. Edgar Allan Poe’s young bride is beguiled by a most unusual bird. Dorothy, lifted from Kansas, returns as a gymnastic sophisticate. Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility and sails away in a starship made of light. Alice’s wicked nemesis has jaws and claws but really needs a sense of humor.

    Enter the Emerald Circus and be astonished by the transformations within.

  • The Club is a blistering, timely, and gripping novel set at Cambridge University, centering around an all-male dining club for the most privileged and wealthy young men at Cambridge and following an outsider who exposes the dark secrets of this group, the Pitt Club.

    As a boy, Hans Stichler enjoys a fable-like childhood among the rolling hills and forests of North Germany, living an idyll that seems uninterruptable. A visit from Hans’ ailing English aunt Alex, who comes to stay for an entire summer, has a profound effect on the young Hans, all the more so when she invites him to come to university at Cambridge, where she teaches art history. Alex will ensure his application to St. John’s College is accepted, but in return he must help her investigate an elite university club of young aristocrats and wealthy social climbers, the Pitt Club. The club has existed at Cambridge for centuries, its long legacy of tradition and privilege largely unquestioned. As Hans makes his best efforts to prove club material and infiltrate its ranks, including testing his mettle in the boxing ring, he is drawn into a world of extravagance, debauchery, and macho solidarity. And when he falls in love with fellow student Charlotte, he sees a potential new life of upper-class sophistication opening up to him. But there are secrets in the club’s history, as well as in its present―and Hans soon finds himself in the inner sanctum of what proves to be an increasingly dangerous institution, forced to grapple with the notion that sometimes one must do wrong to do right.

  • A collection of eighteen crime stories with a diverse range of characters and scenarios, from guilt-ridden fraudsters to lovesick murderers.

  • The sweeping love story at the heart of the Second World War, vividly reimagining General Eisenhower and Kay Summersby’s infamous, star-crossed affair

    In his latest historical novel Ike and Kay, acclaimed author James MacManus brings to life an unbelievably true and controversial romance and the poignant characters and personalities that shaped the course of world history.

    In 1942, Kay Summersby’s life is changed forever when she is conscripted to drive General Eisenhower on his fact-finding visit to wartime London. Despite Eisenhower’s marriage to Mamie, the pair takes an immediate liking to each other and he buys Kay a rare wartime luxury: a box of chocolates.

    So begins a tumultuous relationship that, against all military regulation, sees Kay traveling with Eisenhower on missions to far-flung places before the final assault on Nazi Germany. The general does dangerously little to conceal his affair with the woman widely known as “Ike’s shadow,” and in letters Mamie bemoans his new obsession with “Ireland.” That does not stop him from using his influence to grant Kay citizenship and rank in the US army, drawing her closer still when he returns to America. When officials discover Eisenhower’s plans to divorce from his wife they threaten the fragile but passionate affair, and Kay is forced to take desperate measures to hold onto the man she loves …

    Based on the scandalous true story of General Eisenhower’s secret World War II love affair, Ike and Kay is a compelling story of love, duty, sacrifice, and heartbreak, set against the backdrop of the most tumultuous period of the twentieth century.

  • When Lu Spinney’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead…” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma.

    Thus begins the erratic loss—Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness—that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home, holding out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family’s intimate experience.

    And yet, as personal a book as this is, it offers universal meaning, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney’s story takes a turn. The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Cutting her last thread of hope, Spinney wishes for her son to die, and yet even as she allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Because Miles is diagnosed as being in a “minimally conscious state” rather than a “persistent vegetative state,” there is no legal way to bring about his death—a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom.

    This profound book encompasses the lyrical revelations of a memoir like Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as the crucial medical and moral insights of a book like Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.

  • The secret to raising the happiest kids in the world? Whatever it is, it’s somewhere in the Netherlands.

    Would parents rather their children be successful or happy? Kids in the US face lots of pressure to excel—often at the expense of happiness. But does it have to be this way? Not in the Netherlands! In The Happiest Kids in the World, expats Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison—both married to Dutchmen and bringing up their kids in the Netherlands—examine the unique environment that enables the Dutch to turn out such well-adjusted, independent children. With heaps of good humor, and no shortage of amazement, the authors are delighted to find that

    • Babies get an average of fifteen hours of sleep per day,
    • Children learn bike safety and proficiency in school,
    • Teenagers are less likely to get pregnant than their counterparts in almost every other nation, and
    • Parents really do serve chocolate sprinkles for breakfast!

    Along the way, they discover that the most commonly strived-for grade is just passing—six points out of ten—how to achieve the perfect work-life balance, and that being normal is crazy enough.