The Girl From The Savoy

‘Addictive, charming and gleaming with Jazz Age glitz’ The Lady The fabulous new novel from the author of The Girl Who Came Home

Presenting a dazzling new historical novel … The Girl From The Savoy is as sparkling as champagne and as thrilling as the era itself. ‘Sometimes life gives you cotton stockings. Sometimes it gives you a Chanel gown …’ Dolly Lane is a dreamer; a downtrodden maid who longs to dance on the London stage, but her life has been fractured by the Great War. Memories of the soldier she loved, of secret shame and profound loss, by turns pull her back and spur her on to make a better life. When she finds employment as a chambermaid at London’s grandest hotel, The Savoy, Dolly takes a step closer to the glittering lives of the Bright Young Things who thrive on champagne, jazz and rebellion. Right now, she must exist on the fringes of power, wealth and glamor—she must remain invisible and unimportant. But her fortunes take an unexpected turn when she responds to a struggling songwriter’s advertisement for a ‘muse’ and finds herself thrust into London’s exhilarating theatre scene and into the lives of celebrated actress, Loretta May, and her brother, Perry. Loretta and Perry may have the life Dolly aspires to, but they too are searching for something. Now, at the precipice of the life she has and the one she longs for, the girl from The Savoy must make difficult choices: between two men; between two classes, between everything she knows and everything she dreams of. A brighter future is tantalizingly close—but can a girl like Dolly ever truly leave her past behind?

The new rich and compelling novel from the author of The Girl Who Came Home. Perfect for fans of Kate Morton and Rachel Hore. Dolly Lane is a dreamer; a downtrodden maid who longs to dance on the London stage, but the outbreak of war takes everything from her: Teddy, the man she loves – and her hopes of a better life. When she secures employment as a chambermaid at London's grandest hotel, The Savoy, Dolly's proximity to the dazzling guests makes her yearn for a life beyond the grey drudgery she was born into. Her fortunes take an unexpected turn when she responds to an unusual newspaper advert and finds herself thrust into the heady atmosphere of London's glittering theatre scene and into the sphere of the celebrated actress, Loretta May, and her brother, Perry. All three are searching for something, yet the aftermath of war has cast a dark shadow over them all. A brighter future is tantalisingly close – but can a girl like Dolly ever truly leave her past behind?

“Reading Nanaimo Girl is like enjoying a martini or three with Auntie Mame. The stories are colourful, global, boozy and just cheeky enough to make you envious — and at the same time a little concerned.” — Dana Gee, Vancouver Sun Born in Nanaimo, British Columbia in the 1930s, Prudence Emery was expected to do the right things, but shattered family expectations by going to art school in London, England, where studies sometimes took a back seat to partying. And then she found herself in the world of celebrities. From Expo 67 in Montreal to the press office at London's Savoy Hotel, Prudence met the likes of Twiggy, Noël Coward, Louis Armstrong, Petula Clark, Liza Minelli, and Edward Albee. She escorted David Frost to an interview with Sheikh Mujibar Rahman and arranged for Pierre Trudeau to attend a party where he met Barbra Streisand for the first time. It was a world so rich with stories that the Canadian Press wrote, "If ever a job was tailor-made for a book of memoirs, Prudence Emery has it." But it was just the beginning. A new career as a film publicist spanned decades and introduced her to some of Hollywood's biggest names, from Sophia Loren to Jennifer Lopez, from Peter O'Toole to Matt Damon. She worked with Nicolas Cage when he was a nervous teenager and later when he was an outgoing superstar. And she was a frequent colleague of famed director David Cronenberg. Nanaimo Girl is the story of a life well lived and an encouragement to all, young and old, to get out, defy expectations, and have a rip-roaring good time.

The captivating story of the famed Savoy Hotel’s founders, told through three generations—and one hundred years—of glamour and high society. For the gondoliers-themed birthday dinner, the hotel obligingly flooded the courtyard to conjure the Grand Canal of Venice. Dinner was served on a silk-lined floating gondola, real swans were swimming in the water, and as a final flourish, a baby elephant borrowed from London Zoo pulled a five-foot high birthday cake. In three generations, the D'Oyly Carte family and London's Savoy Hotel pioneered the idea of the luxury hotel and the modern theater, propelled Gilbert and Sullivan to lasting stardom, made Oscar Wilde a transatlantic celebrity, inspired a P. G. Wodehouse series, and popularized early jazz, electric lights, and Art Deco. Following the history of the iconic Savoy Hotel through three generations of the D'Oyly Carte family, The Secret Life of the Savoy brings to life the extraordinary cultural legacy of the most famous hotel in the world.

The ultimate bartender's book, this richly illustrated hardcover compilation of 750 recipes comprises non-alcoholic drinks as well as sours, toddies, flips, slings, fizzes, coolers, rickeys, juleps, punches, and other refreshments.

Inspired by true events, the New York Times bestselling novel The Girl Who Came Home is the poignant story of a group of Irish emigrants aboard RMS Titanic—a seamless blend of fact and fiction that explores the tragedy's impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. Ireland, 1912. Fourteen members of a small village set sail on RMS Titanic, hoping to find a better life in America. For seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy, the journey is bittersweet. Though her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in Ireland with Séamus, the sweetheart she left behind. When disaster strikes, Maggie is one of the lucky few passengers in steerage who survives. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that terrible night ever again. Chicago, 1982. Adrift after the death of her father, Grace Butler struggles to decide what comes next. When her Great Nana Maggie shares the painful secret she harbored for almost a lifetime about the Titanic, the revelation gives Grace new direction—and leads her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those they thought lost long ago.

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.