Anthropology, by Dan Rhodes

I loved an anthropologist. She went to Mongolia to study the gays. At first she kept their culture at arm’s length, but eventually she decided that her fieldwork would benefit from assimilation. She worked hard to become as much like them as possible, and gradually she was accepted. After a while she ended our romance by letter.

It breaks my heart to think of her herding those yaks in the freezing hills, the peak of her leather cap shielding her eyes from the driving wind, her wrist dangling away, and nothing but a handlebar moustache to keep her top lip warm.

A Red Rose or a Satin Heart, edited by Antonia Fraser

Meet the romantics and the unromantics, the passionate and the fainthearted, the tragic and the comic, in all their lyrical glory. This anthology explores the full range of emotions inspired by poetry’s most popular subject: love. Antonia Fraser has made a touching, inspired and wonderfully diverse selection. Poems range from the fifteenth century to the present, from ballads to sonnets to modern verse. Included alongside well-known classics by Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, are contemporary poems by Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside and Carol Ann Duffy, illuminating the ways of the heart in all its forms.

The Madness of a Seduced Woman, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

“During all those years when everyone wanted me to tell them…how I came to fire that shot, I never wanted to talk. Now I think I do…” Agnes Dempster – young, beautiful, and accused of murder.

Vermont, 1890. After an unhappy childhood, Agnes Dempster turns her back on her family and escapes to the city to begin a new life. There she meets Frank Holt, a local stonecutter, a man who captures her imagination and opens her eyes to an entirely different world.

They begin a relationship, but over time Agnes becomes more dependent on Frank and this soon becomes an obsession – a dangerous one. And when she discovers her beloved is not as perfect as the image she had created of him, the cracks in her already fragile psyche begin to deepen. He is a betrayer, a man who will never make her happy. And as her life spirals out of control Agnes is propelled into a state of barely-controlled madness; a madness that leads to a chaotic and destructive resolution which will affect her and those around her for the rest of their lives…

How to Kill Your Husband, by Kathy Lette

All women want to kill their husbands some of the time “Where there’s a will, I intend to be in it,” wives half-joke to each other. Marriage, it would appear, is a fun-packed frivolous hobby, only occasionally resulting in death. But when Jazz Jardine is arrested for her husband’s murder, the joke falls flat. Life should begin at 40 – not with life imprisonment for killing your spouse.

Jazz, stay-at-home mum and domestic goddess; Hannah, childless career woman; and Cassie, demented working mother of two are three ordinary women. Their record collections are classical, not criminal. Cassie and Hannah set out immediately to prove their best friend’s innocence, uncovering betrayal, adultery, plot twists, thinner thighs and toy boys aplenty en route but will their friendship survive these ever darker revelations?

Sexy, funny and wise, Kathy Lette’s irresistible novel is about women not Having It All But Doing It All. It’s about how today’s mother is often a married lone parent. It’s about the fact that no woman has ever shot her husband while he was vacuuming. This is Kathy Lette at her brilliant best, casting her trade mark caustic eye on what goes on in the bedrooms and kitchens of ordinary married couples. A novel which will strike a cord with married women everywhere and ensure that, from now on, they all read the small print on their marriage licenses.

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries 1941-1973, edited by Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson

The love affair between the writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen’s death in 1973. Theirs was a passion that flourished in the heightened, dangerous atmosphere of wartime London that Bowen wrote about so vividly in her novels. When Ritchie’s diplomatic career took him further afield — to Paris, Bonn, New York and Ottawa — the lovers wrote to one another continuously, sharing their hopes and fears, their boundless affection for one another, and their longing to be together again.

Published for the first time in this exquisite volume, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie’s remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal a passionate, intelligent, eloquent, strong-minded and wonderfully funny woman. They also reveal a man bewitched by her writer’s mind and imagination, and by her adoring vision of him as a greater man than he ever felt himself to be.

Aunt Margaret’s Lover, by Mavis Cheek

Aunt Margaret, surrogate mother to teenage Saskia, has just waved goodbye to her niece. She has sent her to Canada for a year. Now, buoyed up by an unexpected legacy that’s given her a year of freedom, Aunt Margaret decides to kick up her heels a little and have some fun . . .

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