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.

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.

Murder at Wrotham Hill takes the killing in October 1946 of Dagmar Petrzywalski as the catalyst for a compelling and unique meditation on murder and fate. Dagmar, a gentle, eccentric spinster, was the embodiment of Austerity Britain's prudence and thrift. Her murderer Harold Hagger's litany of petty crimes, abandoned wives, sloughed-off identities and desertion was its opposite. The texture of their lives and the impression their experiences made on their characters fated their meeting on that bleak autumn morning - and determined the manner in which both would meet their death. Featuring England's first celebrity policeman, Fabian of the Yard, the celebrated forensic scientist, Keith Simpson, and history's most famous and dedicated hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, this is a gripping and deeply moving book.