From the award-winning author of Life After Life comes Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet, part fairy tale, part mystery, part coming-of-age novel
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Human Croquet tells the story of Isobel Fairfax, a girl growing up in Lythe, a typical 1960s British suburb. But Lythe was once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English

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Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired) leads a quiet life in the village of St. Mary, England, until his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But will their relationship survive in a society that considers...

Leaving London to move into a beautiful house in the country, Miranda and David find their marriage succumbing to long-standing conflicts until a mysterious Frenchman arrives to tend their garden, bringing with him a healing energy that is drawn from nature.

"In July of 1914, innocent, lovely Clarissa Granville lives with her parents and three brothers in the idyllic isolation of Deyning Park, a grand English country house, where she whiles away her days enjoying house parties, country walks and tennis matches. Clarissa is drawn to Tom Cuthbert, the housekeeper's handsome son. Though her parents disapprove of their upstairs-downstairs friendship, the two are determined to see each other, and they meet...

Highflying city career woman Jodie Welsh was prepared for a dramatic change in lifestyle when she met and married the Reverend Theo Welsh, settling down to an entirely new kind of life as the wife of a country vicar in the picturesque village of Lesser Hogben. But if she thought life as a city deal-maker was tough, nothing could have prepared her for the emotional rollercoaster of local church and village politics. As a newcomer, Jodie encounters...

Lois Meade has worked through all the days of the week, turning up clues and scrubbing up messes and murderers in the village of Long Farnden. A series of robberies have begun to plague Long Farnden, and Lois's own daughter, Josie, is shaken when a thief makes off with a hundred pounds from the till in her grocery shop. But before her policeman fiancé can crack the case, someone cracks Lois's husband on the head when he interrupts a burglary in progress....

An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of one of art's elusive old masters.

Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his scrupulous art-historian wife are invited to dinner by a boorish local landowner to assess the value of three dusty paintings moldering in the freezing breakfast room. But blocking the soot from the chimney is nothing less, Martin believes, than one of the world's lost treasures, camouflaged

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The 39th book by Miss Read (the real-life Dora Saint) is a delightful collection of 40 stories, first published 40 years ago in England, and based on her own lifelong involvement with country schools as a village schoolteacher in the Berkshires.