Last night we were delighted to celebrate the publication of Sonia Melchett’s sublime memoir From the Ganges to the Thames in glamorous company befitting her legacy as one of London’s greatest society hostesses. The launch took place at Daunt Books in Holland Park amid an excited atmosphere and was capped by some well-chosen words from our chairman and Sonia herself. Her memoir tells of her adventurous life, her family and her extensive travels across the globe; from Syria to Burma and beyond.

Sonia Sinclair was born in Nainital in India to a tiger-shooting Army doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps. She attended the Royal School at Bath, and was evacuated to Longleat during the War. After leaving school, she worked for the BBC and in the Control Commission in Germany before marrying the dashing Julian Mond, later Lord Melchett, by whom she had a son and two daughters. This eventful marriage took her from life in a control tower in Norfolk to riches and acclaim as a leading light in high society. Following her first husband’s death in 1973 she worked as a magistrate and was on the board of the NSPCC, the Royal Court Theatre and the National Theatre. Her second husband is Andrew Sinclair, the much respected historian, writer and film-maker.

In writing From the Ganges to the Thames, Sonia Melchett recounts her extraordinary life story with a wit and charm that has come to be expected from an acclaimed author and a legendary society hostess. This record of her personal history, containing pictures taken from diaries and family albums, documents her life as a child of Empire living through the Second World War. It follows her dramatic journey from obscurity to the considerable glamour of her later years.

Buy From the Ganges to the Thames from Amazon or Quartet Books

You can now grab Allan Massie’s Cold Winter in Bordeaux and Dark Summer in Bordeaux e-books for only 99p until the end of April.

Dark Summer in Bordeaux

With his son’s safe return, Superintendent Lannes and his wife can, at last, have some joy amid the grim reality of Vichy France. Not that the unexplained murders seem to have stopped. Allan Massie’s second volume in his trilogy continues the story of dogged detection in a world seemingly gone mad. His first volume, Death in Bordeaux, was reprinted three times and garlanded with praise by reviewers.

Cold Winter in Bordeaux 

Winter. 1942-3. The war is turning against Germany on the Eastern Front. The Americans land in North Africa. Meanwhile, in Bordeaux, Superintendent Lannes – himself an object of suspicion, with one son in Vichy and another with de Gaulle’s Free French – investigates the murder of a woman. It looks like a crime of passion. His subordinate, Inspector Moncerre, calls it ‘a pre-war crime’, one which they may be allowed to solve. But the dead woman has been engaged in activities which have attracted the attention of the Vichy Secret Service, the Germans, and even the Resistance.

You can buy both e-books from Amazon for only 99p until 30th April.

Quartet children’s author Nouneh Sarkissian was interviewed in The Lady Magazine about her reading habits and finding the right book for toddlers. Here’s an extract just for you:

Books are exceptional: I like to turn their pages and even to smell them. When I get very old, I can leave my books to my grandchildren or to a library.

You can read the full interview in 1 April issue of The Lady Magazine. Nouneh Sarkissian is the author of The Magic Buttons, a fun novel for nine to eleven year old’s. The Magic Buttons follows the story of Pearl Darzi, a ten year old girl who has to save the magic which has been stolen from the International Conference of Wizards and Witches and cure the people from the terrible Blue Fever.

Buy The Magic Buttons here. 

Bookmunch have reviewed Japan’s WWII Legacy:Interviews with Japanese Veterans by Hiroko Sherwin. “Among the most affecting reads of the last few years.”

What makes this book so powerful is the realisation that many of these veterans, who are now haunted by their actions, believed they were doing no wrong at the time. Brainwashed by Japanese propaganda, they couldn’t understand why they would later be arrested for war crimes. Because of the way the emperor and the country refused to accept any blame, many of these veterans took decades to understand what they’d done. Now, though, these heartbreaking interviews make apparent the struggles these people have been through since the realisation hit home.

It is not all heartbreak, though. For some of the interviewees, and the children that have also had to live with their parents’ guilt, redemption has been possible. As horrific and harrowing as many of the recollections of war in the book are, perhaps the most emotional moments come when we hear how the perpetrators of this violence have come out the other side. Through charity work, through connecting with POWs, and through talking in schools and colleges about the atrocities they committed, many of the people in the book have begun to find a kind of peace. When reading their accounts, it’s difficult to argue that they haven’t earnt this respite.

This is not only a fascinating and gripping book, it’s also a very important one. Countries involved in conflicts such as this one often have to find a way to atone and move on. You only need look to Germany for an example. Many in Japan feel that this still hasn’t happened there, so literature like this can only be a benefit to the process. That Sherwin manages to paint these pictures in prose worthy of a top work of literary fiction only adds to the power of the book. Among the most affecting reads of the last few years.

Read the full review on Bookmunch here,  buy a copy of Japan’s WWII Legacy on the Quartet website here or buy it on Amazon here. 

Liz Hodgkinson, author of From a Girl to a Man: How Laura become Michael, has been interviewed in Ox Magazine as part of a full feature on authors appearing at the Oxford Literature Festival.

Liz talks of the sadness Dianna Cowell has felt all her life from not knowing her dad, who died in 2011. “She tried and tried to contact Roberta,” she says of Diana. “She found out where she was living, wrote to her, and never got any reply.

“She has no memory at all of her father. What she’s doing now is trying to fill in a huge gap in her life. So having her at the festival will add a lot to it, she’s really the only living link with the whole story.”

Roberta’s story actually became a worldwide sensation in 1954, so that’s been something else for Diana to get her head around.

Liz is clear about the ambition of the pair’s festival appearance. “One of the things we’re going to do is try and get to the bottom of what it’s all about,” she says. “There’s still a lot of confusion. People tend to think that transgender people are not quite right in the head but they are, they’re perfectly normal, they just feel that they’re in the wrong body.”

The First Sex Changes: How Laura Became Michael and Robert Became Roberta takes place on Wednesday 6th April, 4pm at Bodleian’s Divinity School

Read the full interview with Ox Magazine here. 

You can buy tickets to Liz’s event at Oxford Literature Festival here,  and buy From a Girl to a Man from Quartet Books here, or from Amazon here. 

We’re excited to announce that five Quartet authors are reading at Oxford Literature festival this year. The festival runs from Saturday 2 to Sunday 10 April and features events for children, young people and adults.

The authors who will be speaking include Liz Hodgkinson, author of FROM A GIRL TO A MAN: HOW LAURA BECAME MICHAEL, Jim Lee who wrote the memoir Life in B&W, Jayne Haynes and Marin Scurr, author of Doctors Dissected which was recently released in paperback, and Lucy Beresford, author of Invisible Threads and soon to be published Hungry for Love.

There’s still time to get tickets, so check out the links to the events below:

• Wednesday 6 April 2016 4pm – Liz Hodgkinson and Diana Cowell: The First Sex Changes: How Laura Became Michael and Robert Became Roberta – buy tickets here 
• Friday 8 April 2016 4pm – Jim Lee talks to Paul Blezard: Life in B&W – buy tickets here 
• Saturday 9 April 2016 2pm –  Martin Scurr and Cosmo Scurr, Chaired by Jane Haynes: Doctors Dissected – buy tickets here
• Sunday 10 April 2016 10am – Lucy Beresford and Leila Segal, Voices of Freedom: Fighting Oppression of Women – buy tickets here

You can view the full programme for Oxford Literature Festival here, and check out more Quartet books here.

We’re excited to announce that today you can buy Doctors Dissected in paperback. Doctors Dissected by Martin Scurr and Jane Haynes features a new forward by Professor Mike Pringle, former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

‘Gritty and raw…a profound and intimate examination  of the life of a doctor’

TELEGRAPH

‘This wonderfully readable and unusual book is personal, conversational, unpredictable … it leaves one wanting to be part of a crusade to win doctors more time to be everything they want – and need – to be’

OBSERVER

‘Doctors speak in their own words in this fascinating book, and the result is a provocative insight into bodies and souls’

HILARY MANTEL

This is a ‘story’ book about medicine, body, mind, doctors and caprices of human nature written by an experienced doctor (Martin Scurr), who has seen every untidy vagary of disease, and a psychotherapist (Jane Haynes), who has listened to personal narratives that rival the visceral emotions of King Lear. Doctors – who at their most profound are mercurial messengers between life and death, and who at a more comedic level must suffer our jiggling body parts – are also vulnerable men and women struggling to make sense of their existence.

Through a series of candid and deeply personal interviews, psychotherapist Jane Haynes lifts the ‘mask’ and explores what draws someone to this vital profession and doctors, practitioners of all ages, both NHS and private, reflect on their lives. They explore their relationship with their own health and those around them. They discuss the restructuring of the job, how training, changing medical practices, new guidelines, shifting working hours and suffocating admin levels have all impacted – positively and negatively – on the doctor’s relationship with the patient. And they consider their own, often complicated and tortuous journeys into this most fascinating of occupations.

In Doctors Dissected Haynes and Scurr steal behind cultural issues into the heartlands of doctors who are drawn to a life in medicine, and conduct an autopsy as to the consequences of choosing a profession in which the practitioner is constantly being faced with lonely decisions that very often are a matter of life and death.

About the authors: 

Martin Scurr FRCP, FRCGP was educated at Stonyhurst College and Westminster Medical School. He commenced private practice in the centre of London, was the opening Medical Director of St John’s Hospice at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth, subsequently appointed as Physician to Westminster Cathedral taking responsibility for the care of many senior Catholic Clergy leading to a lifetime commitment to the care of those leading religious lives, of whatever denomination. Following appointment as Chairman of the

Independent Doctors Forum in 2003, he was appointed as medical columnist for the Daily Mail.

Jane Haynes originally trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst but then ‘defected’ and now refers to herself as a relational psychotherapist who works primarily through ‘Dialogue’. She has a private practice with her daughter Tanya in Marylebone. She is a consultant to the Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in St Petersburg and is a member of the SITE for contemporary psychoanalysis. In

2008 her book Who is it that can tell me who I am? was shortlisted for the PEN J.R. Ackerley literary autobiography prize.

Martin Scurr and Jane Haynes are reading at Oxford Literature Festival on 9 April 2016. You can buy Doctors Dissected from Quartet Books here, or  buy it from Amazon here. 

Nouneh Sarkissian, author of children’s book The Magic Buttons, has been featured in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster Today. 

The article talks of Nouneh’s life, of her strict upbringing in a communist regime and her staunch love of words. The article by Kate Hawthorne says of The Magic Buttons: 

It is an enchanting and creative tale, packed full of the sorts of stories, mysteries and happenings that children love to hear about. The process of reading, and being read to, will find a natural home here and imaginations heightened as the text brings intrigue and vision to the reader.

What more can you want; a story about people turning blue because of a Blue Magical Powder. Who IS going to find the cure? Tiny little people as your friends. Witches good and bad whose powers are robbed from them at an International witches’ and wizards’ conference. A forest packed full of more magic. Izzi Berton a villain who holds a book of all human secrets, and yes, the Magic Buttons and all that they can do.

 

The Magic Buttons is translated from Armenia and is Nouneh Sarkissian’s first UK publication, and is suitable for 8 to 12 year olds. You can purchase The Magic Buttons from Quartet Books here, or buy it on Amazon here. 

From Banking to the Thorny World of Politics by Shaukat Aziz with Anna Mikhailova has been featured in The News, a leading newspaper in Pakistan. Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has co-authored the book which analyses the complex relationships between Pakistan and the United States, India, Afghanistan and China. Co-authored by an award-winning Sunday Times journalist Anna Mikhailova, this book provides an insider’s account of what it was like for Shaukat Aziz to join General Pervez Musharraf’s military government.

The forthcoming book focuses on how things had changed drastically just two years after Shaukat had assumed charge as Pakistan’s finance minister on November 6, 1999, as the 9/11 episode had made Pakistan a vital strategic ally in the US-led War on Terror.

Having served as prime minister of Pakistan from August 20, 2004 to November 15, 2007, and as country’s finance minister from November 6, 1999, to November 15, 2007, Shaukat Aziz had left behind a 30-year career as a senior Citibank executive to join General Musharraf’s military regime in Pakistan, following a coup on October 12, 1999, that had unceremoniously ousted Premier Nawaz Sharif from power.

Before commencing his journey through the cozy yet intriguing corridors of power in 1999, Shaukat Aziz had been the President of the Citi Private Bank in New York.

While campaigning on July 29, 2004, he had survived an assassination attempt in the small town of Fateh Jang in Attock District. He was contesting an election on a National Assembly seat from Fateh Jang, shortly before, he was appointed the country’s chief  executive. The life attempt was made when the Prime Minister-designate was departing after meeting his prospective voters and loyalists.

A suicide bomber, with explosives strapped around his body, had struck the convoy of Shaukat Aziz, when he was leaving after an election rally at Fateh Jang.

Aziz’s chauffeur was among those killed in the attack, along with eight others.

After the incident, a credible Indian news, information, entertainment and shopping web portal “Rediff.com” had quoted Aziz as saying: “I had a providential escape.”…

Read the full article on The News here. From Banking to the Thorny World of Politics is released with Quartet Books on 26 May 2016, and you can pre-order a copy from Amazon here.

The Tablet reviews Jane McLoughlin’s The Unfriended, released with Quartet in September 2015 and soon to be available in e-book format.

Jane McLoughlin’s nostalgic coming-of-age story seems to have captured the atmosphere of the place and the time most evocatively (Dublin in the 1960’s). A quartet of female students are thrown together in their fresher’s year: Ellie, Ffion, Sandra and Hilary. They all have a self-conscious sense of being different from their mothers, or wanting to be different, and embark on their youthful experimentations, which will involve sexual intercourse, fear of pregnancy, abortion –  one performed by a medical student in a kitchen – experience of suicide, fatal car crashes, the discovery of feminism, and the simultaneous rivalry and bonding friendships that are part of girl politics.

 

McLoughlin understands how important the question of motherhood – or non-motherhood- is for women. As time goes by, and age brings its reproaches and regrets, her four protagonists live into the age of Aids, the acceptance of homosexuality, and the Gillick ruling: there’s a stroking scene in which the underage daughter of one of the women insists on an abortion without telling her parents, supported by Ffion,the beauty of the group, and possibly the authorial voice.

 

The narrative reaches its apex with the election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland, toasted by the four friends in whiskey (which would not be the very sober Mrs Robinson’s style at all.) It’s a story which will please all those old “Trinners” alumni I meet, and enlighten those who never got past those gates.

Read the full review on The Tablet here,  buy a copy of The Unfriended on the Quartet website here or buy it on Amazon here. 

The Bath Chronicle reviews Hiroko Sherwin’s Japan’s WWII Legacy, released with Quartet on 25 February 2016.

Book reviewer Roy Linley said:

How did this gentle nation come to commit such appalling atrocities in the Second World War and why has she largely failed to atone and mourn for them? These are the  questions that Hiroko Sherwin seeks to answer in this magnificent and meticulously researched, if harrowing, book, which is being published both here and in Japan. And we must remember that Japan’s war began back in1931 with the unprovoked invasion of Manchuria, and included the horrific Nanjing massacre of 1937/38.

Firstly, we are reminded that Emperor Hirohito was considered to be a god and so to be obeyed without question. Then, within the Armed Forces there was a lack of respect for life and a total disregard of the Geneva Convention. For example, training involved the bayoneting of enemy prisoners. Then, imagine being locked inside a kaiten, a manned torpedo. The occupant would go off in a usually vain search for enemy shipping. Death by suffocation was frequent. Only two American ships suffered damage. Men in the Air Force fared little better, often being forced into suicide bombing missions, whilst soldiers fought in impossibly hostile conditions in the jungles of the Philippines and New Guinea. Comfort women were forcibly transported from enemy lands; their lives were ruined beyond human redemption. You simply could not avoid being brutalised. All this we learn from accounts given by veterans in the first half of the book.

Those who survived to return, defeated, to their homeland did so with a deep sense of shame. Japan had lost the War and turned in on itself. It was, of course, an island nation, unlike Germany. Everywhere there was denial; children growing up in the 1950s learned little of the War.

And what of the situation since? Officially, in terms of atonement, it has been patchy. Hirohito never apologised either to his own people or to his former enemies. Sincere apologies have been given by prime ministers, only to be revised by successors. The Yushu-kan War Museum gives a heavily revisionist interpretation of history.

It has been left to individuals to atone for the sins of their forbears. Fortunately, their efforts, often in the face of initial hostility, have been truly inspirational. Some have established Chu-ki-ren, an organisation devoted to promote international friendship by testifying to the truth of the War; others have travelled half way around the world to apologise personally to victims; others again ensure the immaculate maintenance of POW cemeteries and organise visits for the relatives of those buried there. They have, in the end, found that their former enemies have been ready to forgive. I defy anyone to read the second half of the book with being deeply moved.

This splendid work deals with a specific period in the history of one nation. Yet, in terms of man’s inhumanity to man, the need for atonement and the power of forgiveness, it has a message for fallen humanity which is eternal. For this, Hiroko Sherwin deserves our unswerving gratitude. It is compulsive reading.

The review was printed in the Bath Chronicle on 18 February 2016. You can buy Japan’s WWII Legacy from Quartet here, or buy it on Amazon here. 

We’re extremely excited to announce that Allan Massie’s End Games in Bordeaux has been longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. It looks like he’s up against some great competition too.

End Games in Bordeaux is the fourth and final chapter of the ‘Bordeaux’ novels, Allan Massie’s acclaimed crime series featuring Superintendent Lannes. It’s set in the early summer of 1944, in a France in turmoil, where the Allied invasion is nervously awaiting and brings the promise of Liberation. The Vichy regime is in its death throes. Those who have served it and collaborated with the German Occupation fear the revenge of the Resistance. Superintendent Lannes, suspended from duty by order of the Boches, searches unofficially for a missing girl, and investigates cases of historic sex abuse. The narrative of this tense economical novel switches between Lannes in Bordeaux and the young characters met in the first three books of this Vichy Quartet, now caught up in the terrible drama of these months – in France, London and on the Eastern Front.

The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize will be announced in March. It looks like he’s up against some great names too, check out the full Walter Scott Prize longlist here.

Praise for the ‘Bordeaux’ series…

 ‘Finishing Massie’s Bordeaux Quartet, it’s hard to imagine how any work of history could give one a better understanding of the complexities of Occupied France’ The Spectator

‘I think Death in Bordeaux is both a thriller and a “literary” novel: a difficult trick, but in my book the greatest to bring off’ Robert Harris

 ‘A humane and memorable detective’ Sunday Times

 ‘Wonderfully unorthodox – and grimly convincing’ Spectator

‘Remarkable’ Literary Review

 ‘Massie expertly captures the privations of surrender’ Guardian

 ‘A compelling portrait of a family experiencing the privations of war’ Sunday Times

You can buy and read a copy of End Games in Bordeaux from Quartet Books here, or on Amazon here.