A stolen sister. A daughter determined to uncover the truth.

'I was gripped, moved and utterly in thrall to this deeply emotional and compelling tale' Kate Furnivall

Belle Hatton has embarked upon an exciting new life far from home: a glamorous job as a nightclub singer in 1930s Burma, with a host of sophisticated new friends and admirers. But Belle is haunted by a mystery from the past - a 25 year old newspaper clipping found in her parents' belongings after their death, saying that the Hattons were leaving Rangoon after the disappearance of their baby daughter, Elvira.

Belle is desperate to find out what happened to the sister she never knew she had - but when she starts asking questions, she is confronted with unsettling rumours, malicious gossip, and outright threats. Oliver, an attractive, easy-going American journalist, promises to help her, but an anonymous note tells her not to trust those closest to her. . .

Belle survives riots, intruders, and bomb attacks - but nothing will stop her in her mission to uncover the truth. Can she trust her growing feelings for Oliver? Is her sister really dead? And could there be a chance Belle might find her?

'A moving and complex story, beautifully told' Isabel Wolff

'Dinah Jefferies has a knack of getting under the skin of her exotic locations and this story about loss and love, set in sultry Burma during the troubled 1930s, is no exception' Kate Riordan

THE SUNDAY TIMES 1# BESTSELLER & BOOKER PRIZE WINNER

*One of Goodreads Most Popular Books of the Past Decade*

This is Britain as you've never read it.
This is Britain as it has never been told.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .

'The most absorbing book I read all year' Roxane Gay

'[Bernardine Evaristo] is one of the very best that we have' Nikesh Shukla

'Beautifully interwoven stories of identity, race, womanhood, and the realities of modern Britain. The characters are so vivid, the writing is beautiful and it brims with humanity' Nicola Sturgeon

'A choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain' Elle

'Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life' Ali Smith

'Exceptional. You have to order it right now' Stylist

Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018.

In a Free State tells the story first of an Indian servant in Washington, who becomes an American citizen but feels he has ceased to be a part of the flow. Then of a disturbed Asian West Indian in London who, in jail for murder, has never really known where he is. Then the central novel moves to Africa, to a fictional country somewhere like Uganda or Rwanda.

The novel's central characters once found Africa liberating, but now it has gone sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make the long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive  the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage  we know everything about the English characters, the African country and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. Naipauls greatest novels, hard but full of pity.

This is a story about displacement, the yearning for the good place in someone elses land and the attendant heartache.

Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired - Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti - the result is a collection of voices that speak to one another across the centuries.

Teasing, subverting, arguing, echoing and - ultimately - illuminating, Answering Back is a vibrant, fascinating and timeless anthology, compiled by one of the nation's favourite poets.

'Intriguing . . . Entertaining and stimulating' Good Book Guide

'A starry game of call and answer across poetic generations' FT Magazine