Abortion

‘Everyone has a mother, but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake,’ we hear in the first few pages of Lili is Crying. It’s a sensible message, but one which seems suited to an entirely different book. Hélène Bessette’s 1953 debut novel – translated into English for the first time – is a tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. Charlotte and her daughter Lili live in Provence, and the novel jumps between the 1930s and 1940s, from Lili’s ‘ribbons and Sunday dresses’ to her first freighted dalliances with boys. Charlotte runs a boarding house from which

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theatre where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something ‘complicated but important’ to tell her:

Gabriel Weston is an extraordinary writer. An ENT surgeon who now prefers to carry out excisions of skin cancers, she has found a niche in exploring moral dilemmas in medicine. Her first book, Direct Red (2009), examined such clashes as a patient’s need for empathy and a surgeon’s requirement to be steely. A serious problem at the time was how the punishing schedules of junior doctors made it virtually impossible for them to give patients the attention and compassion they so often needed. Weston’s second book, Dirty Work (2013), was a novel – and no less ethically probing. Nancy, its female gynaecologist protagonist, takes on her department’s unpopular abortion lists,

‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians – three from left of centre, three from the right – who, in his view, changed the political weather of modern Britain. Only one, Nigel Farage, is still alive.  First up is Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing firebrand who, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the mighty, vested-interested British Medical Association, presided over the creation of

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent times. She’s credited with anticipating Angela Carter and for being in the vanguard of tackling themes of traumatic dissociation and the realities of childbirth. Yet younger, trendier writers have regularly eclipsed her. Aged 29, Barbara was broke: a single mother who’d weathered affairs, an abortion and a suicide attempt Every fan remembers their first Comyns novel: the visceral jolt of black humour, the suckerpunch of stark horror. Knowing that she drew from life, we have longed for a biography, and hooray, it’s finally here. Avril Horner, emeritus professor of English

I am working on a play about Marilyn Monroe at the moment and, reading Britney Spears’s book, the similarities of these two fragile blondes came to mind. Both were celebrated and castigated for their woman-child sex appeal; both struggled with sinister Svengalis – Darryl Zanuck and Mickey Mouse. But one big difference between the two is that Marilyn often wished she had a father, while one imagines Britney often wishes she hadn’t. In the long and sorry history of parasitical men leeching off talented women, was there ever a more worthless example than Jamie Spears? He used his daughter as a cash-cow from her childhood; when she became an adult

We might be twins, Catherine Taylor and I. We were both girls growing up in Yorkshire in the same decades – I in the West Riding (where an alley is a ‘ginnel’), her in the south (where it’s a ‘gennel’). We are children of the Yorkshire Ripper years, conditioned to be constantly scared of the murderer, the dark, and our independence. We were both fatherless too young – mine dead, hers departed to another household; and we both had strong mothers keeping the remaining family afloat and forced to take in lodgers – in our case, Polish, German and French, in hers, Japanese and Senegalese. Much of this bookis familiar