Sign up to our emails and be the first to know about new releases, special offers and more.
Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!
Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.
Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Margaret Forster
Drawing on private letters and papers, and with the co-operation of Daphne du Maurier’s family, the author explores the secret drama of her life - the stifling relationship with her…
Available to order, ships in approx 2 weeksAvailable to order
Margaret Elizabeth Forster
Churchill’s Grandmama
Available to order, ships in 10-14 daysAvailable to order
Kathleen Jones
Biographer Kathleen Jones skilfully traces Margaret Forster’s non-conforming career: her Carlisle upbringing and its working-class expectations, the competing demands of work and family, and the business of writing fact and…
Available to order, ships in 7-14 daysAvailable to order
Follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th century painting and the women whose lives it touches. This is a novel about women’s lives, about what…
Available to order, ships in approx 4 weeksAvailable to order
In 1831 John Dodgson Carr, son of a Quaker grocer, set off to walk from his home in Kendal to Carlisle, determined to launch a great enterprise.
Precious Lives is an intimate memoir about living and dying, and especially about the small change and odd currency of everyday life.
Available to order, ships in approx 3 weeksAvailable to order
Angela Bradbury has an appalling mother- self- effacing, self- sacrificing, expert at emotional blackmail. But in her relationship with her eldest and very difficult daughter, Sadie, Angela realises that she…
For Penelope, the family is everything. Her daughters, however, had different ideas. Rosemary rejected the ideal of motherhood and family life; Jess was destroyed by it; Celia found it eluded…
Rowena wants a baby. What she doesn’t want is the baby’s father. Yet, five years after the birth of Christabel, Rowena is dead, tragically killed in a climbing accident. The…
Mrs H, Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie appear as diverse as human nature can be. But they are all survivors. This novel follows these women’s lives, which have been…
The attack on 15-year-old Joe Kennedy was vicious. Sheila Armstrong’s grandson Leo, usually a quiet boy, was found holding a knife. Harriet Kennedy cannot cope with her son’s pain; and…
Don and Louise’s eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda has died in a sailing accident. While Louise takes steps to move on with her life, Don cannot come to terms with the chain…
Born in Carlisle in 1887, brought up in a children’s home and by reluctant relatives, Evie, with her wild hair and unassuming ways, seems a quiet, undemanding child. But there…
Only one person knows what happened that day… Julia was the only person who knew what happened that day. But she didn’t tell the police. And then it was too…
In Forster’s historically authentic novel, Elizabeth Wilson, Elizabeth Barrett’s maid and confidante, describes her daily experiences, her impressions of the large household and, especially, her sickly but charismatic mistress’s relationship…
Desperate to escape herself and her past, she changes her name, packs up her London home and moves to a town in the North of England where she knows no…
Traces the lives of eight women - Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Blackwell, Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman - each of whom pioneered vital…
Stanley and Rose live in Rawlinson Road, Islington, surrounded by younger, smarter families like the Orams. Encroached on by age and affluence, the only answer to their problems, in spite…
Talks about the fictional adventures of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. This novel opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving…
Catherine’s mother died when Catherine was just a baby girl, leaving nothing but her perfect reputation to live up to. But then Catherine finds a box addressed to her, filled…
This biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written with reference to Browning correspondence only recently available, argues that the poet was a strong and determined woman largely responsible for her own…
On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money…
London 1844, and a shy young woman has arrived to take up a new position in the grandeur of No. 50, Wimpole Street.
Georgy bears her fate bravely as she alternates between playing the fool and humbling herself before Meredith, her pretty, callous flatmate, although when James, middle-aged socialite and self-imposed ‘Uncle’, asks…
Margaret Forster’s grandmother died in 1936, taking many secrets to her grave. Where had she spent the first 23 years of her life? Who was the woman in black who…
‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was…
Professor Margaret Forster
Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 2013.
Daphne Du Maurier
* The celebrated biography of Gerald du Maurier, last of the great actor-managers, by his daughter.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A collection of works by a popular woman poet from the Victorian era features the complete Sonnets From the Portuguese, as well as excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora…
Celia Brayfield
The first book about a generation of women writers who challenged the world.
The biggest challenges of the 21st century require global solutions. Focussing on three of the most urgent problems of our time - climate change, conflict and poverty, and inequality -…