The Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain's most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London's East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, brilliantly bringing to life an age in which t...

'Joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain' DAVID KYNASTON'A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history' CLARE CHAMBERSIn Red, Red Robin, Alison Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childh...

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize'A remarkable achievement...should become a classic.' - Margaret Drabble'Light writes beautifully...Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the England of the Industrial Revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.' - The Times Book of...

WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE'The greatest memoirs offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art' GuardianAlison Light met the charismatic social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead.Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he, twenty years her ...

Yvonne Kapp, best known today for her biography of Eleanor Marx, was a remarkable woman whose life spanned virtually the entire twentieth century. Time Will Tell charts her life: 'enfant terrible' in London, the literary editor of Vogue in France in the late 1920s, work for anti-fascist refugee committees in 1930s' London, research for the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the British Medical Research Council, then, in her later years, work as a translator and a biographe...

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars.From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces t...

Loathing, anger, shame – and deep affection: Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her servants was central to her life. Like thousands of her fellow Britons she relied on live-in domestics for the most intimate of daily tasks. Her cook and parlour maid relieved her of the burden of housework and without them she might never have become a writer. But unlike many of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf was frequently tormented by her dependence on servants. Uniquely, she explored her violent, oft...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Common People: The History of An English Family by Alison Light, read by Caroline Laskowska.Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.Epic in scope and deep in feeling,...

AS SELECTED FOR THE ZOE BALL BOOKCLUB, A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, OBSERVER, RED and THE TELEGRAPH.I AM, I AM, I AM is a memoir with a difference - the unputdownable story of an extraordinary woman's life in near-death experiences. Insightful, inspirational, gorgeously written, it is a book to be read at a sitting, a story you finish...

'I raced through it, breathing fast and when I had finished had to reread parts of the wonderful early chapters. I don't like historical novels but this is the exception. I shall let a few months go by and then read it all over again with, I'm sure, undiminished pleasure' Ruth Rendall, GuardianIt is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell v...

In the third book in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood.Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors...

The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women—the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila—who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy.In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, Elena and Lila’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florenc...