Michèle Roberts Boeken

Adam is a writer, struggling to come to terms with the death of his painter father, Robert, and his difficult marriage to Catherine. Before he married Catherine, he had been the lover of her sister, Vinny. The classic menage à trois seems about to repeat itself, when Adam discovers his wife's father was less innocent than he had thought. Set mainly in contemporary London, partly in France, the action also harks back to the 1970's. The narrative evokes the style of the nineteenth century novelists and their themes: desire, guilt, pleasure. Pastoral landscapes alternate with those of the inner city and the past's interaction with the present is acted out by ghosts. The dead father haunts his son; in real life Vinny haunts her sister; and the whole novel is haunted by one of its great earliest exponents, Charlotte Bronte, and her passionate search for creative fulfilment.

In this intimate and wryly honest journal Michele Roberts reflects on cities and countryside, loss and love, food, friendships, sisterhood, pleasure and memories, her abiding relationship with France and with literature.

A feast of short stories from a writer who relishes the sensual language of food and eating. They include the tales of a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; and a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therèse and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war. Intrigued by adults' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village's buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

A lyrical tale of family secrets and self-discovery. Denis knows his mother kept things from him. His godmother, Clemence, knows the truth. In rich, sensuous prose, Roberts interweaves Denis's search for answers with Clemence's memories of the time she spent working for Matisse.

Who is Aurora? Every time she becomes a new Mrs (three times when last we counted) she becomes a new woman: art collector with the first; hippy with the second; deli owner with the last. Sad that they all died. Widowed three times...When Aurora decides to take herself off to Italy to visit her old friend, Nun Leonora, after her last husband's demise, she finds herself plunged into intrigues at the convent; and very odd goings on at the art gallery. Combined with her own dangerous lust for sex and food, this could well be the scenario that reveals the real Aurora - even to herself.

Prize-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and memoirist Michèle Roberts tells of her experience of reading the novels of French writer Colette, whose work has inspired and encouraged her throughout her own writing life.

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels' promises of pleasure - and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house. As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other. Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Daughters of the House.