What happens when career ambition begins to clash with a commitment to religious and personal values? In Bylines and Blessings, award-winning author Judy Gruen shares how she resolved these two seemingly conflicting drives.

As a young, secular woman determined to succeed as a writer, she learns to turn rejection and obstacles into steps toward professional excellence. Along the way, she also becomes a powerful voice for traditional Jewish values, understanding that words create worlds. Discovering the surprising impact of her writing on readers of all ages and across many faiths, she ultimately finds the blessings in the bylines.

This heartfelt, compelling memoir traces Judy's path in building not only a career but a purposeful life. Filled with humor and depth, this book will feel like having a heart-to-heart talk with an old friend.

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. A century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs (Edward VII, George V, George VI and the Queen), the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, women's suffrage, the birth of the NHS, the march of suburbia and the clearance of the slums. It was a period that saw the work of the Bloomsbury Group and T. S. Eliot, of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, of the end of the post-war slump to the technicolour explosion of the 1960s, to free love and punk rock and from Thatcher to Blair. A vividly readable, richly peopled tour de force, it is Peter Ackroyd writing at his considerable best.