A Sunday Times Book of the Year Winner of the Polari Prize 'A book about love, identity, acceptance and the freedom to write, paint, compose and wear corduroy breeches with gaiters. To swear, kiss, publish and be damned. It is vastly entertaining and often moving... There isn't a page without an entertaining vignette' The Times . The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, Between the Wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris. 'One of the best books I've read this year.' James Bridle

Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Gestapo for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border.

This dual biography reveals, as never before, the secret life and the extraordinary relationship of Hollywood's legendary pair: Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, the celebrated Hollywood photographer who immortalized her image. With provocative details about their personal lives and a subtle focus on their work, Diana Souhami divulges the secrets of Greta and Cecil's unconventional loves and obsessions. It is a compelling tale of a strange romance where boundaries merge between image and reality, fact and fantasy, male and female, and art and life. Their ardent affair, Garbo's discreet liaisons with the women she loved, and Beaton's charismatic yet emotionally distraught personality are brought to life in Diana Souhami's hallmark style. Photographs, letters, and a wealth of new research reveal the obsessions, true desires, and secrets of Hollywood behind closed doors.

Radclyffe Hall was born in 1884 in Bournemouth in a house of horrors called 'Sunny Lawn'. It was an unhappy childhood, until her father's death when Radclyffe inherited £200,000. She was 18. She leased a London house, dressed in chappish clothes, called herself Peter then John & wrote her first collection of verse. She was a political reactionary, a reformed Catholic, obsessive about work, hunted with 3 packs, got her pipes from Dunhill's, wore brocade smoking jackets & had her hair cropped. She thought real women were born to be wives & disliked doing any business with them. Her 1st love was Mabel Batten, known as Ladye, who reputedly had an affair with Edward VII. Radclyffe Hall is now most famous for THE WELL OF LONELINESS, written in 1928. A novel about 'congenital inverts' - lesbian love - the book was suppressed both here & the US & caused Radclyffe to be put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act. Brilliantly written, this biography is a fresh and irreverent insight into the lives of one of the most alluring and eccentric women of this century.

Diana Souhami's critically acclaimed biography of lesbian painter Hannah Gluckstein - the woman, the artist, the legend. To her family, Hannah Gluckstein was known as Hig. To Edith Shackleton Heald, the journalist with whom she lived for almost forty years, she was Dearest Grub. And to the art world, she was simply Gluck. She was born in 1895 into a life of privilege. Her family had founded J. Lyons & Co., a vast catering empire. From the beginning Gluck was a rebel. At a time when only men wore trousers, she scandalized society with her masculine clothing - though she always dressed with style and turned androgyny into high fashion. Her affairs with high-profile women shocked her conservative family, even while she achieved fame as an artist. During the 1920s and thirties, Gluck's paintings - portraits, flowers, and landscapes, presented in frames designed and patented by her - were the toast of the town. At the height of her success, when wounded in love, her own obsessions caused her to fade for decades from the public eye, but then, at nearly eighty, her return to the spotlight ensured her immortality.

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL & MILITARY. Alexander Selkirk was marooned on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez in 1704 after a row with the captain of his ship. He had been on a treasure seeking adventure to the South Seas. His abandonment meant he was alone for four years and four months, dependent for survival on what the island offered. When rescued he was clad in goat skins and had forgotten how to speak. His story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, the first English novel. In this startlingly original book, which is as much a biography of the island as the man, award-winning author Diana Souhami draws on contemporary memoirs, letters and documents, as well as her own experience of the island to evoke one man's struggle with solitude, fate and his environment.