Recommendations based on "Jo & Laurie"

Joan Didion’s hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. In this now legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche, Didion searches for stories as the Sixties implode. She waits for Jim Morrison to show up, visits the Black Panthers in prison, parties with Janis Joplin and buys dresses with Charles Manson’s girls. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from this devastating tour of that age of self discovery into the harsh light of the morning after.

Flora Thompson's immortal trilogy, containing "Lark Rise", "Over To Candleford" and "Candleford Green", is a heartwarming portrayal of country life at the close of the 19th century. This story of three closely related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet, the nearby village and a small market town - is based on the author's experiences during childhood and youth. It chronicles May Day celebrations and forgotten children's games, the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations - all painted with a gaiety and freshness of observation that make this trilogy an evocative and sensitive memorial to Victorian rural England. With a new introduction by Richard Mabey

Available for a limited only, this special Meg Cabot Bundle with Bonus Material features all three of the novels in her funny and heartwarming Queen of Babble series (Queen of Babble, Queen of Babble in the Big City, and Queen of Babble Gets Hitched) as well as an extended excerpt from the New York Times bestselling Insatiable, the first book in Meg's newest series.

An exquisite 4-book gift set with stunning cover art by renowned stationery brand Rifle Paper Co.'s principal artist, Anna Bond! This gorgeous collection features four Puffin in Bloom classics with illustrated covers by Anna Bond in a charming keepsake box designed in her signature style. Box includes: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Little Women, and A Little Princess "Puffin in Bloom's lush new editions of children's classics are sure to entertain older girls." - Vogue"Read 'em and keep: Chic...As a gift or on your shelf, they speak volumes." - O, The Oprah Magazine

Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling short stories revolutionised the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they span short studies to longer tales, encompassing her three major volumes, Bliss , The Garden Party and In a German Pension, plus fifteen tantalising fragments of unfinished stories published after her death - including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter on the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Observing apparently trivial incidents to creative sensitive and quietly devastating revelation of her characters' inner lives, these deceptively simple stories confirm Mansfield's status as a pioneering Modernist writer.In her new introduction to this edition Ali Smith discusses the intensity of Katherine Mansfield's life and writing, and her radical influence on English fiction.

Three of Benson's Lucia stories. "Queen Lucia" was published in 1920, "Miss Mapp" in 1922 and "Lucia in London" in 1927. They are much-loved novels of provincial snobbery and became a successful television series.

The second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing's Sentimental Education.

A collection of sixteen short stories by the author of "Wide Sargasso Sea", "Voyage in the Dark" and "Good Morning, Midnight".

Just after Caroline Quiner starts teaching at the Concord School, she runs into her fiddle-playing neighbor Charles Ingalls, who's full of plans to head out west. As their friendship turns to courtship, Caroline realizes that she has a difficult decision ahead of her -- and a choice that may mean leaving behind her family and everything she's ever known. A Little House of Their Own is the seventh and final book in the Caroline Years series, and brings the story right up to where Little House began -- to Laura.

The great wits and beauties of their age, the Mitford sisters were immoderate in their passions for ideas and people, counting among their diverse friends Adolf Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy. As editor Charlotte Mosley notes, not since the Brontës have the members of a single family written so much about themselves, or have been so written about.The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged sisters: Nancy, the scalding wit who transformed her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during World War II; Unity, a suicide, torn by her worship of Hitler and her loyalty to home; Jessica, the runaway Communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire.Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle; they also provide an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted, and radically different women who wrote to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage, and gossip—and above all to amuse.