Alison MacLeod

Acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded,blending fiction, biography and memoir Hovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures. In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman wears a new fur coat to a dance that will change everything. A teenager searches for his lover on a charged summer evening in 2011, as around him London erupts in anger. A cardiac specialist lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he awaits a new heart - and is transported into the past. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overcome by all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. Precise, playful and evocative, these exquisitely crafted stories unfold at the line between reality and fiction, capturing the unexpected joys, small tragedies and profound truths of existence.

The spellbinding story of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the society that put it on trial; the story of a novel and its ripple effects across half a century, and about the transformative and triumphant power of fiction itself. D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer. Jacqueline and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial. A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love. Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it obscenity - or is it tenderness?