Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter. What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life, for a single professional woman in the post-war years, certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable, to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation, will charm all who read it.

This comic romance is set at a small bohemian liberal arts college in Vermont. Embarking on his first teaching job in a longed-for idyllic New England country setting, Richie Schuster’s marriage to snarky and glamorous wife, Sally, soon goes up in flames, along with his academic career as he declares war on his fellow faculty members. Contains many excellent farcial blackouts and sharp, Pinter-like dialogue.This was James Howard Kunstler’s second novel, published in 1981, some time before he became better known as a social critic and author of the acclaimed non-fiction books The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic. Reviewers pilloried Kunstler as “just another unhappy divorced college professor writing about his sorry life,” but Kunstler had never taught school at any level and had never been married when he wrote the book.

A multidimensional explosion hurls a starship's few passengers across the galaxies & onto an uncharted barren tundra. With no technical skills & scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end on an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible.Elegant & electric, We Who Are About To brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists decide to defy the odds & insist on colonizing the planet & creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she's threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex & exciting sf novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It's characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.

"It is the summer of 1967, and Andy Newmark, a 17-year-old New Yorker, takes a maintenance job at a Thunder (read Fire) Island resort. The reader is carried along by Andy's sense of exploration as he works, makes friends, surfs, and experiments with drugs, alcohol and sex. All the while, the fear of not being accepted to college and so being drafted into Vietnam hovers over him. Gradually overcoming personal conflictshis parents' divorce, his fear of failure and the social ills he encounters: the war, the prejudice he experiences as a Jew at a Catholic club, the decadence of Thunder Island by summer's end, Andy feels comfortable with himself and the dimensions of the adult world he is entering. Andy and his friends are likable, even if they seem as deeply characterized as the people in the rock songs that play everywhere on Thunder Island. And, like many novels of initiation, the adults are portrayed as ridiculous stuffed-shirts. Overall, though hackneyed expressions and trite situations diminish the effect of its simple story of innocence and discovery, this novel has charm. Steeped in the news and social events of the time as they appeared to young adults then, Thunder Island offers a sentimental, nostalgic version of adolescence in the late '60s and will be a welcome read on the beach in the late '80s."--Publishers weekly

Written by the author of "Moll Cutpurse: Her True History" and "The Fires of Bride", this is a fantastic, political and satirical novel set into time past and time present, taking a piercing and surreal look at the politics of the 1980s and 1990s.

One day in the desert, Veronica Smiles, a professional explorer, meets God. Apparently she'd called out to Him (at least, that's His story, she hadn't considered Him in years). A relationship reluctantly emerges, however, and as it develops Veronica finds herself enjoying some extremely uncharacteristic situations. Humour and grief are boldly combined in this extraordinary novel.

Alex Mendez, bored with the business empire he's created in London, leaves his wife Lalka behind and retreats to an isolated chateau in Provence. Both Polish Jews - and now with time on their hands, as they seemingly have little left to share - they seek their own personal revelations. Whilst Alex broods in Provence, gradually becoming aware of the chateau's ambiguous history during the Second World War, Lalka sets out for Poland with journalist friend Katie. But what was planned as a holiday and an assertion of independence comes to have other significance. A powerful exploration of the current and past lives of a group of people scarred by the result of war, Children of the Rose is a strong, emotional novel - written with Feinstein's characteristically delicate, brilliant prose - about the way in which memories can destroy lives and also, ultimately, provide redemption.

Her holiday peace was shattered!Quiet and solitude, the doctor had advised Samantha. But it vanished completely when novelist Bart Jackson arrived unannounced at Gable Cottage and took up residence there.Samantha had been crazy to fall for him. He had swept into her life like a typhoon and would as quickly sweep out of it when summer was over. It seemed he couldn'tovercome his long-standing fear of commitment. If she were sensible she would pack her bags and run far away.Unfortunately, falling in love hadnothing to do with common sense...

TV executive George Mellish has separated from his wife and seems determined to live it up in the lonely grandeur of his new penthouse flat, yet he finds himself still obsessed by his wife, to the point of spying on her from a treehouse. A comic novel from the author of Joe Orton's biography.

Set in post-war London, The Limits of Love is an examination of the lives and tensions of several Jewish families. Otto Kahane, a Dachau refugee, his nephew, delicatessen-keeper Isidore, Ben the zealous Communist, Paul the reluctant Jew and his girl-friend, Julia--Frederic Raphael probes the characters and their shifting relationships with a touch at once clinical and sympathetic. His long, intricately woven novel displays the same gift for detail and dialogue that characterizes all the work of this talented writer.

A tragic-comic first novel set in South Africa at the turn of the century. The novel's hero emigrates from Lithuania because of anti-semitism. He arrives in South Africa and encounters a culture full of contradictions, peopled by bizarre and colourful Breedt and Quinn, foes from the recent Boer War, locked in a silent battle of wills; April, their Shakespeare-spouting slave; Nakosa, the Bushgirl with extra breasts; Gommie, the half-caste who rises from the dead only to die again; the Scuteris, travelling opera singers-cum-barbers who bring a day of magical festivity to the isolated settlement of Middlepost.

From Publishers Weekly With this first installment in a projected trilogy, the prolific author (The Patriarch) once again depicts immigrant Jews assimilating in Great Britain. A rabbi's son and former yeshiva student who himself emigrated some years ago from Russia to the United Kingdom, Bermant is a shrewd but loving storyteller, and he limns WW II Britain and the Jewish milieu with acuity, buoying a familiar coming-of-age plot with wry humor and deft characterization. Foremost among the engaging, authentic characters is his protagonist Sammy Hoch, or Titch, whose Yiddish-speaking parents, "making desperate efforts to turn native," address him only in English, "with the result that until I was about six we were virtually incommunicado." Short and bookish, and afflicted with the double burden of being Jewish and Polish by birth, Titch enlists in the British army but ends up, alas, in a Polish army regiment stationed in Britain. There he is made acolyte to an apostate rabbi, an immigrant who assumed an ecclesiastic role as a ticket to England (if his sponsors "had asked me to become a juggler, I would have become a juggler, and I would probably have enjoyed it more"). Bermant followers won't be surprised that Titch's "most important experience of the war" is an encounter with a married woman. Readers will be eager to pursue Titch and his adventures in the forthcoming sequels. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This is the first installment of a trilogy by the author of The Patriarch and other novels of Jewish life in Great Britain. In 1925, young Sammy Hoch travels with his parents and sister Sosh from Poland to Manchester, England. Sammyor "Titch," as his sister Sosh lovingly calls himsees himself as too short, too bookish, too Jewish, too foreign. His parents are repressive, his sister Sosh shrewish. After a shining academic career, Titch looks forward to escaping his past with a military career in World War II. Unfortunately, after a stint in the British army, Titch gets called up by the Polish armyand confusion and hilarity result. Titch's attempts at romance are amusing, colorful, and droll, his descriptions of wartime Britain revealing. Bermant does portray Jewish values as burdensome, but then this is only the first of the trilogy. Recommended. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description Glady's Sperber remains home as one by one her younger brothers and sisters marry and move out, but finally, at sixty, she decides to marry From Publishers Weekly Originally published in England in 1960, this is a bleak rendition of a mother/daughter love/hate relationship by the Booker Prize-winning author (see review of Our Father below). Gladys Sperber, the family "martyr," is the oldest of five "failures" who, because her mother is "too busy," virtually raises her siblings. "She would take her food when the others had eaten. . . . She would wait for their happiness before she felt entitled to her own, and she would have looked after their dying if she'd been able." The title refers to Gladys's destructive symbiotic relationship with her mother: the biblical book of Ezekiel observes that fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Although the novel, which covers two world wars, evokes the limited choices available to women in a man's world and is replete with manifestations of mother-daughter interdependence (an adult Gladys shares a bedroom with her widowed mother), it doesn't probe the psychodynamics of that relationship. The result is a contrived work that depresses rather than engrosses. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Set on the south coast of France, this romance relates how an adventure develops into real danger when teenagers uncover a sinister plot which threatens their safety. Patricia Robins, the author of many romantic novels, is best known for her family sagas written under the name Claire Lorrimer.