The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

With the elegant economy of scenes glimpsed from a moving train, this extraordinary novel portrays one woman’s trajectory through life in episodes as haunting as dreams remembered. A single image – fine leather gloves strewn across the landscape by Nazi soldiers – speaks to us as powerfully as the more sweeping events of Anna’s life. Not since D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel has there been a novel of such elegiac, heart stirring beauty. It is a portrait with all the richness and exactitude of a Vermeer and the resonance of Anna’s own music.

German South-West Africa, early 1904: Revolt is raging among the oppressed Hereros. High above the infinite expanse of veld that is their homeland towers a Wagnerian castle, from which the ruthless Baron von Steinberg rules with neither mercy nor restraint. Into this cauldron of strife come two adventurers. Here each will meet a woman who will challenge his loyalties at the same time as she kindles his passions – and here they will witness violence and bloodshed such as they have never known.

The Great Gatsby captures all the romance and glitter of the Jazz Age in its portrayal of a young man and his tragic search for love and success. It is a rare combination: a literary masterpiece – and one of the most popular novels of our time.

It’s been almost thirteen years since we last saw Cannie Shapiro, the heroine of Good in Bed, whose journey towards happy-ever-after made millions of women the world over laugh, cry and recognise themselves. The last decade of Cannie’s life has brought some surprises. Her life story, in fictional form, became an unexpected bestseller, and Cannie has since retreated from fame’s fallout, writing science-fiction under a pen name and praying that all her daughter inherited from her father, Cannie’s ex-boyfriend Bruce Guberman, are her curls and her eye-colour, and not his predilection for smoking pot. Meanwhile Cannie’s best friend, Samantha, is looking for love in all the wrong places, and Cannie’s husband, Peter, has decided that he’d like to have a baby, and the family’s first choice for a surrogate is none other than Cannie’s flamboyant kid sister …