Lila by Marilynne Robinson One of independent bookshop Foyles’ top tips for the autumn, Robinson’s fourth novel is a prequel to her Pulitzer prizewinning Gilead. The story of how a homeless girl becomes the wife of minister John Ames, Lila has just been longlisted for the National Book Award in the US.
The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey by Rachel Joyce Joyce’s debut The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry sold more than two million copies. This is the breakaway bestseller’s parallel story, of Queenie, who learns, as she’s dying, that Harold is walking the length of the country to get to her.
Sheila Hancock has had a go at writing a novel! Miss Carter’s War begins in 1948 and Britain is struggling to recover from the Second World War. Half French, half English, Marguerite Carter, young and beautiful, has lost her parents and survived a terrifying war, working for the SOE behind enemy lines.
Leaving her partisan lover she returns to England to be one of the first women to receive a degree from the University of Cambridge. Now she pins back her unruly auburn curls, draws a pencil seam up her legs, ties the laces on her sensible black shoes, belts her grey gabardine mac and sets out towards her future as an English teacher in a girls’ grammar school. For Miss Carter has a mission – to fight social injustice, to prevent war and to educate her girls.
