Carol Drinkwater
The Olive Harvest: A memoir of Love, Old Trees and Olive Oil

Carol Drinkwater has already built up a large readership eagerly awaiting the third volume of her Olive Farm memoirs. Returning to their home after an extended absence Carol and her husband Michel are looking forward to summer together on the farm. A shocking blow leaves Carol alone.The future is uncertain. The Olive Harvest takes us beyond the perimeters of her olive groves to where hunters, poets, bee-keepers, boars and gypsies abide. In search of the language of troubadours, the dark and sometimes barbarous heart of Provence is revealed. Nature and the generosity of the South of France's harvests offer a path to joy and an abundant resolution.The magnificent humanity and honesty that characterised the first two episodes of her trilogy sets Carol Drinkwater's work apart from others in the same genre. The Olive Harvest and its vibrant Mediterranean world will enthral her many readers.

Miles Kington
Someone Like Me

For the last twenty years Miles Kington has written a humorous column in which everything has been made up and nothing can be trusted. Now he has written an autobiography by those same exacting standards.Was his father a German spy? Did his mother insist on permission from theVatican before dancing on Sundays? Was baby Miles the victim of pram-napping and can he really claim credit as co-creator of the anti-squirrel device? Who cares when a book is as brilliantly entertaining as this one.Action, adventure, sex education, intrigue, tears, laughter, a homicidal brother with a penchant for amateur dramatics - Someone Like Me has got it all and then some. Filled with fabulous tales of Dadaist dog training, decadent ears, borrowed lawnmowers and visions of the Virgin Mary, this is one of the funniest and most original books you'll have read in decades.

Finland 1901. Eeva, the young orphaned daughter of a revolutionary, is sent from the orphanage to work as housekeeper for Thomas, a widowed country doctor. Her challenging, independent, enigmatic presence disturbs Thomas as much as it fascinates him. Their relationship will shatter all the certainties of his life. Meanwhile Eeva is drawn back to Helsinki, to the comrades of her childhood, and in particular to Lauri, the son of her father's friend. It is a world full of danger. For this is Finland in political ferment - the power of the Russian empire over its subject peoples is growing more oppressive, but resistance to the Tsar's rule is growing too, both in Finland and in Russia. Some call such resistance terrorism; others call it a fight for freedom...

`If bids for immortality are in the offing I'd say that Helen Dunmore has a better chance than most. She has written another novel o f great tenderness and beauty, one that celebrates both the small pleasures and the grand passions, and which ranges over her characters and their stories with a brofoundlv combassionate eve'- Indebendent