For The Most Beautiful
For The Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (Doubleday, £12.99) The only prize I ever won in school was for speaking Greek verse. We, half a dozen state school girls from Hertfordshire, took on the might of the top (male) public schools and won. It was girl power at its finest. So armed with that victory and the subsequent O-level, here is my review of this lovely book by proper classicist Emily Hauser, a retelling of the Trojan Wars where the women also come out on top. The story
The Widow
The Widow by Fiona Barton (Bantam Press, £12.99) When it came to love, Jean Taylor was lucky. She was married young, to her first boyfriend Glen, her Prince Charming. A man who loved and cherished her and treated her like a queen. Life was good until the day Glen was accused of abducting a little girl called Bella, of taking her to be the child they could never have. Nothing was ever proved, but that didn't stop the papers. 'MONSTER!', they screamed and Glen helped Jean ignor
The triumph of Hope
The Ballroom by Anna Hope (Doubleday, £12.99) For all it's set in an asylum, this novel is less about insanity per se than about 'normality', the 'madness' that lurks within and the truth that, ultimately, all most of us need to heal is love. Its quiet brilliance lies in the subtlety with which author Anna Hope introduces her characters and ideas and then plays with the reader's perceptions as it goes along. The year is 1911, a fertile time for theories on the treatment of t
