The Strange Fate Of Kitty Easton

Struggling with trauma in the years following World War I, veteran Lawrence Bartram arrives in the village of Easton Deadall and is embroiled in a dangerous case involving a murdered woman who may be linked to the disappearance of a child years earlier.

1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914. Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death and the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England, and when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother, John Emmett, to kill himself, Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett's suicide, a group of war poets, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again, it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems, and that even those closest to him have their secrets . . .

A man investigates the deaths of his fellow veterans in this “haunting and beautifully written” novel of post–World War I England (C. S. Harris, author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries). London, 1920. In the aftermath of the Great War and a devastating family tragedy, Laurence Bartram has turned his back on the world. But with a well-timed letter, an old flame manages to draw him back in. Mary Emmett’s brother, John—like Laurence, an officer during the war—has apparently killed himself while in the care of a remote veterans’ hospital, and Mary needs to know why. Aided by his friend—a dauntless gentleman with detective skills cadged from mystery novels—Laurence begins asking difficult questions. What connects a group of war poets, a bitter feud within John’s regiment, and a hidden love affair? Was his friend’s death really a suicide, or the missing piece in a puzzling series of murders? As veterans tied to John continue to turn up dead, and Laurence is forced to face the darkest corners of his own war experiences, his own survival may depend on uncovering the truth. At once a compelling mystery and an elegant literary debut, The Return of Captain John Emmett blends psychological depth with suspenseful storytelling that calls to mind the golden age of British crime fiction, “full of jolting revelations and quiet insights” (The Wall Street Journal). “A captivating wartime whodunit.” —The Boston Globe

The first of the Grantchester Mysteries, and inspiration for the PBS/Masterpiece television series, finds Vicar Sidney Chambers beginning his career, as both a spiritual leader and a detective. It is 1953, the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II . Sidney Chambers, vicar of Grantchester and honorary canon of Ely Cathedral, is a thirty-two-year-old bachelor. Tall, with dark brown hair, eyes the color of hazelnuts, and a reassuringly gentle manner, Sidney is an unconventional clerical detective. He can go where the police cannot. Together with his roguish friend, inspector Geordie Keating, Sidney inquires into the suspect suicide of a Cambridge solicitor, a scandalous jewelry theft at a New Year's Eve dinner party, the unexplained death of a jazz promoter's daughter, and a shocking art forgery that puts a close friend in danger. Sidney discovers that being a detective, like being a clergyman, means that you are never off duty, but he nonetheless manages to find time for a keen interest in cricket, warm beer, and hot jazz-as well as a curious fondness for a German widow three years his junior. With a whiff of Agatha Christie and a touch of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, The Grantchester Mysteries introduces a wonderful new hero into the world of detective fiction.

In the summer of 1913, the world seems full of possibility for four very different young men. Young Jean-Baptiste dreams of the day he'll leave his Picardy home and row down-river to the sea. Earnest and hard-working Frank has come to London to take up an apprenticeship in Regent Street. His ambitions are self-improvement, a wife and, above all, a bicycle. Organ scholar Benedict is anxious yet enthralled by the sensations of his synaesthesia. He is uncertain both about God and the nature of his friendship with the brilliant and mercurial Theo. Harry has turned his back on his wealthy English family, has a thriving business in New York and a beautiful American wife. But his nationality is still British. Three years later, on the first of July 1916, their lives have been taken in entirely unexpected directions. Now in uniform they are waiting for dawn on the battlefield of the Somme. The generals tell them that victory will soon be theirs but the men are accompanied by regrets, fears and secrets as they move towards the line.

To celebrate forty years of Virago we asked our authors to write something inspired by the number forty . . . Maya Angelou Lisa Appignanesi Margaret Atwood Joan Bakewell Nina Bawden Joanna Bourke Susie Boyt Sarah Churchwell Amanda Coe Rachel Cooke Stella Duffy Sarah Dunant Kate Figes Victoria Glendinning Lyndall Gordon Linda Grant Yasmin Hai Lauren Liebenberg Anna May Mangan Paula McLain Claire Messud Jane Miller Raynes Minns Kate Mosse Chioma Okereke Frances Osborne Rosa Rankin-Gee Michele Roberts Charlotte Rogan Hannah Rothschild Elaine Showalter Elizabeth Speller Tracey Thorn Sandi Toksvig Katie Ward Sarah Waters Katharine Whitehorn Naomi Wolf

It starts with a cough, a few aches and pains and a weird spot on the back of your neck. It is HAV3N, the worst disease the world has ever seen. With friends and loved ones dying in their thousands, the villagers of picture-postcard village Great Sheen are convinced this is more than just media hype. Their entire existence is under serious threat. So they barricade themselves in - and the infected out. Seventeen-year Josh, his sister Martha and their two friends survive the onslaught of HAV3N, along with only seventy-eight other villagers. But they now face a very different future. One in which they could be the only living teenagers in the world . . .

On July 1st, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives. Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, and there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar across the battlefield, singing as they fly over the trenches. What follows is a day of catastrophe in which Allied casualties number almost one hundred thousand. A horror that would have been unimaginable in pre-war Europe and England becomes a day of reckoning, where their lives will change forever, for Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste, and Harry. Elizabeth Speller once again sublimely captures the dangerously romantic atmosphere of war-torn Europe in her latest novel that will leave critics and readers astounded.