The Making of Americans is not really a novel, as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-"not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you"-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves, we are presented, on the surface, with a portrait of the "simple middle class monotonous tradition" as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow, sieved attempt at something like total knowledge, an excavation of an overwhelming impulse "to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them."

"5th Edition " In London in the 1950s, aspiring young writer John Wilmot meets successful painter Oliver Cambourne and agrees to model for him. Oliver is older, sophisticated, elegant, and wealthy, and he introduces John to another world. For the first time in his life, John has love and money more than he ever imagined. While the relationship opens many doors for John, it is also dangerous and must be kept a secret. Oliver s commitment to John is absolute and deeper than John initially realizes, but John is confused by his own feelings. He worries about the changes his affair with Oliver are causing in him and about his future security. One night, he makes a fateful decision that will have repercussions not just for him, but on the lives of everyone around him. His choice and its consequences affect not merely the future but send him looking into himself for answers. Only through time and careful introspection can he grow and move past the pain of the choice that has changed everything. A Bittersweet Dreams title: It's an unfortunate truth: love doesn't always conquer all. Regardless of its strength, sometimes fate intervenes, tragedy strikes, or forces conspire against it. These stories of romance do not offer a traditional happy ending, but the strong and enduring love will still touch your heart and maybe move you to tears. "1st Edition published by Branch Line, 1980." "2nd Edition published by Methuen Publishing, 1985." "3rd Edition published by Welbeck Press, 2009." "4th Edition published by Capuchin Classics, 2012."

"Gillian Freeman is among the finest contemporary novelists." - Brigid Brophy, New Statesman "It is altogether an astonishing novel for a young woman to have written. The story describes, convincingly and touchingly, the brief, sensual affair ... between a sailor on leave and a young schoolteacher ... their frank sexual attraction for each other is given a warm and compelling context ... a novel that has the ring of truth." - Times Literary Supplement "This novel is successful in an honest and unpretentious way." - The Guardian When Freda Mackenzie, an eminently respectable young schoolteacher with a stockbroker father and a background of tennis, riding and university, meets Derek Smith, a big blond sailor from the East End of London, she tells herself that she sees him only as a challenge, that she simply enjoys watching his reactions as she introduces him to good food, good films, good music. But their friendship develops into something more: Derek awakens in Freda a latent sensuality, a passionate joy in the act of love she has never before experienced or even imagined. As their affair becomes more intense, Freda and Derek find themselves torn between their feelings for each other and their very different social backgrounds-and they have only three short weeks in which to make their choice . . . Critically acclaimed on its initial publication and later recognized by critic Mary Cadogan as "considerably in advance of its time", Gillian Freeman's first novel, The Liberty Man (1955), returns to print for the first time in almost 40 years. This edition features a new introduction by Edward Thorpe and a reproduction of the original jacket art.