The Wicked Boy

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698135008
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book! From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.

Mrs Robinson's Disgrace

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408831244
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
When the married Isabella Robinson was introduced to the dashing Edward Lane at a party in 1850, she was utterly enchanted. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake...In one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century, Isabella Robinson's scandalous secrets were exposed to the world. Kate Summerscale brings vividly to life a frustrated Victorian wife's longing for passion and learning, companionship and love, in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality.

The Queen of Whale Cay

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408832208
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
_______________ 'A biography that sparkles with enthusiastic research and empathetic writing' - Sunday Times 'A small jewel of a biography' - The New Yorker 'A fascinating, hilarious and deliciously subversive book' - Literary Review _______________ THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Born in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs realised very early on that she was not like most little girls. Liberated by war work in WWI, Marion reinvented herself as Joe, and quickly went on to establish herself as a leading light of the fashionable lesbian demi-monde. She dressed in men's clothes, smoked cigars and cheroots, tattooed her arms, and became Britain's most celebrated female speed-boat racer - the 'fastest woman on water'. Yet Joe tired of the limelight in 1934, and retired to the Bahamian Island of Whale Cay. There she fashioned her own self-sufficient kingdom, where she hosted riotous parties which boasted Hollywood actresses and British royalty among their guests. Although her lovers included screen sirens such as Marlene Dietrich, the real love of Joe's life was a small boy-doll named Lord Tod Wadley, to whom she remained devoted throughout her remarkable life. She died, aged 93, in 1993.

The Book of Phobias and Manias

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782835652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ALL BIBLIOMANIACS A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR AND DAILY MAIL A WATERSTONES BEST POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK Plunge into this rich and thought-provoking A-Z compendium to discover how our fixations have taken shape, from the Middle Ages to the present day, as bestselling author Kate Summerscale deftly traces the threads between the past and present, the psychological and social, the personal and the political. 'Fascinating' Malcolm Gaskill, author of the No. 1 bestseller The Ruin of All Witches 'Fascinating' Observer 'An endlessly intriguing book ... All the bibliomanes (book nutters) I know will love it' Daily Mail

The Wicked Boy

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110462
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 402

The Virago Book of Ghost Stories

Author: Richard Dalby
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9781860491542
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Thirty four spooky stories by classic storytellers of the twentieth century - many from the 1920s and 30s - chill and excite in this classic collection. All of them demonstrate a subtle power to delight and chill at the same time as they explore those ghostly margins of the supernatural which are part of private experience as well as of popular tradition. Authors include Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Carter, Elizabeth Jane Howard, E Nesbit, Fay Weldon, Edith Wharton and Lisa St Aubin de Teran.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0747582157
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

Secrets of Happiness

Author: Joan Silber
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094466
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR When a man discovers his father in New York has long had another, secret, family—a wife and two kids—the interlocking fates of both families lead to surprise loyalties, love triangles, and a reservoir of inner strength in this "expansive and elegantly crafted novel" (Fresh Air, NPR). "Rich with the complexities of life . . . the stories create a world made fully dimensional through changes of perspective—major characters appear and reappear as part of one or another’s experience and testimony . . . Pull any life’s thread and you discover a mesh of involvement that soon takes in all the others. It is a fine thing, subtly done, and truly exhilarating." —The Wall Street Journal Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family—a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, as events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives. As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal. Evoking a generous and humane spirit, and a story that ranges over three continents, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.

How to Create the Perfect Wife

Author: Wendy Moore
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465065732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
A captivating tale of one man's mission to groom his ideal mate. Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal, yet tough and hardy, and completely subervient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up on his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her. So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife. A few days after he turned twenty-one and inherited a large fortune, Day adopted two young orphans from the Founding Hospital and, guided by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of the Enlightenment, attempted to teach them to be model wives. Day's peculiar experiment inevitably backfired -- though not before he had taken his theories about marriage, education, and femininity to shocking extremes. Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism -- and deep contradictions -- at the heart of the enlightenment.

Dark Matter

Author: Michelle Paver
Publisher: Orion
ISBN: 1409132587
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken. But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark. This Special Edition Ebook will feature exclusive material: AUTHOR EXTRAS: Dark Matter ¿ An exclusive interview with Michelle Paver and an extended author biography with integrated photos of the landscape of Spitsbergen. COVER DESIGN: Dark Matter ¿ the jacket designer¿s take and cover design progression (5 x visuals). DARK MATTER - A SHORT FILM: Dark Matter ¿ Turning the novel into a short promotional film and Dark Matter - The Film Director's Cut, the rejected film scripts, the final film script and behind the scenes at filming (3 x visuals).