Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.

My mother-in-law Annie lived with us for 17 years and was picture-book perfect.

It took a while before the family realised that Annie was increasingly (as she would put it) 'Mutt and Jeff'. So Phyllida began to write out the day's gossip at the kitchen table, putting her notes by Annie's bed before going to hers. One night as her husband wandered off to bed he muttered darkly that she spent so much time each evening writing to Annie she could have written a book. 'And illustrated it ' Here it is.

It is a book full of the delights of a warm and loving household. Of Boot the Cat being sick after over-indulging in spiders; the hunt for cleaning products from the dawn of time; persistently and mysteriously malfunctioning hearing aids; an unusual and potentially hilarious use for a clove of garlic; and the sad disappearance of coconut logs from the local sweetshop.

It's about the special place at the heart of a home held by a woman born in another age. Who polished the brass when it was 'looking red at her'. Who still bore a scar from being hit by her employer when, as a young woman, she was in service. Who could turn the heel of a sock and the collar of a shirt, and make rock-cakes, bread pudding and breast of lamb with barley."

Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. -- .

*** 'An honest and thoughtful memoir. Moving but, ultimately, full of hope. Beautiful.' KATE MOSSE 'Superb. Love & Care is a book about the unbreakable bonds of family, the cruelty of passing time and a love that never dies.' TONY PARSONS 'A beautiful, intimate story of love and understanding - candid and funny. This is a lyrical memoir of hope and forgiveness.' RAYNOR WINN, author of The Salt Path * Shaun is finally free of responsibilities to anyone but himself; single, with two grown up daughters, he is just embarking on a new life in a new country when he gets a call to say his father is dying. His mother has Parkinson's Dementia and is in a care home. Shaun faces a stark choice: should he give up his new-found freedom, or turn his back on the woman he'd fought so hard to protect, not least from his own father? Shaun's mother had loved and cared for her son all her life. Could he now do the same for her? 'A heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and beautifully humane account of loving and caring.' NICCI GERRARD, novelist and author of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love 'An insightful tale of care . . . this book needed to be written.' JO GOOD, BBC Radio London 'A vital subject, a really strong voice and, hurrah, humour makes this absorbing reading.' CAROLINE RAPHAEL, Radio 4's Book at Bedtime 'An eye-opening - and at times jaw dropping - account that will make you weep with its tenderness and compassion . . . A highly readable tale of redemption and a celebration of love's many hues.' PAUL BLEZARD, Love Reading 'Moving' DAILY MAIL