Alex Mendez, bored with the business empire he's created in London, leaves his wife Lalka behind and retreats to an isolated chateau in Provence. Both Polish Jews - and now with time on their hands, as they seemingly have little left to share - they seek their own personal revelations. Whilst Alex broods in Provence, gradually becoming aware of the chateau's ambiguous history during the Second World War, Lalka sets out for Poland with journalist friend Katie. But what was planned as a holiday and an assertion of independence comes to have other significance. A powerful exploration of the current and past lives of a group of people scarred by the result of war, Children of the Rose is a strong, emotional novel - written with Feinstein's characteristically delicate, brilliant prose - about the way in which memories can destroy lives and also, ultimately, provide redemption.

'Feinstein's triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena's predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.' Guardian Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much loved husband - sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous - to invoke his solid presence; it is the man rather than her grief which is the centre of the book. Many lyrics recall the closeness of their last months together; others confess the ambivalence of a long marriage. Theirs was never an easy relationship, and she is not afraid to register the differences between them. With wry humour, she questions her own life before their meeting, and looks steadily at a future without him. As she imagines that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets and her dependence on friends and children. Always in complete control of rhythm and tone, these beautiful lyrics explore the most intimate thoughts with a clarity and tenacity Ted Hughes once described as 'unique'. It is Elaine Feinstein's most passionate book of poetry.

In a recent article in "Novy Mir," the critic Dmitry Polishchuk writes: "The 25-35-year-old generation is now experiencing an efflorescence--a new type of poetic vision, with a distinct poetic language, a new kind of baroque; with novel structures, combining the far-fetched, the heterogeneous, the incompatible, in a poetics of contrast." This is particularly true of women's writing, which transcends post-modernist or Western feminist tendencies. This collection looks not only at those living and working in Moscow or Petersburg, but also at those authors writing throughout the whole of Russia.

Valentina Polukhina (Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University) is the leading Brodsky scholar in the West, and has edited four collections of poetry in translation.

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhythms flow down the page, seeking to draw a coherent shape out of the inner uncertainties. She also writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus. Hers is a poetry which can contain and welcome. The rare landscape poems are always peopled, and the considerable narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give urgency to her evocation of the classical figures of Dido and Eurydice. She has also found a poignant lyricism in writing of the inhabitants of her local streets and the ordinary pleasures of daily life. The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems.The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.

Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. `In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the `girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

"[The] biography that needed to be written, an attempt to set the record straight and clear the air."—New York Times Book Review

Although Ted Hughes ended his days as England's beloved poet laureate, his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. He never entirely recovered from the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, for which many have held his adultery responsible. In this insightful biography, the first written since Hughes's death, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, throwing new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with their young daughter. 12 b/w photographs.

"A fascinating read...the story of [Hughes's] romantic escapades...keeps this book rolling."—The Virginian-Pilot

"An admirable book....Hard to believe it could be bettered any time soon."—The Times [London]

Montague Small, an obsessive writer of detective thrillers, mourns his lately dead wife, who may or may not have been unfaithful to him. His attempts at meditation are a failure. He detests his fictional detective. His interest in his neighbour's difficulties and his neighbour's wife appear to be his only consolations after all. The neighbour, Blaise Gavender, is an amateur psychotherapist who has seen through himself. Has Blaise the courage to change his life and become an honest man? What is honesty in any case? Blaise's wife Harriet lives for love, love of her husband, love of her son. She if fond of Monty too. Emily McHugh is quite another matter. She too lives for love: for love and justice and revenge, aided and incited by her ambiguous friend Constance Pinn. Emily's son Luca, a very disturbed child, becomes the subject of a tug of war between two possessive women. Edgar Demornay, a distinguished scholar, also blunders into the fray; he adores Monty and falls in love with Monty's women. A deed of violence finally solves many problems. This is a story of different loves; and of how a man may need two women in such a way that he can be happy with neither.

Sacred and profane love are related opposites; the one enjoyed renders the other necessary, so that the ever unsatisfied heart swings constantly to and fro.

In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material-including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family-to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.
Anna Akhmatova rose to fame in the years before World War I, but she would pay a heavy price for the political and personal passions that informed her brilliant poetry. In "Anna of All the Russias "we see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940 and again after World War II. We see her steadfast opposition to Stalin, even while her son was held in the Gulag. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich, and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved.

Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile. When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to her lover Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi - and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.

Life of the Russian poet who withstood Stalinism and became an inspiration to millions Anna Akhmatova is recognised as one of the greatest poets of Russian literature, an iconic figure who gave voice to the suffering of the Russian people during the brutal years of Stalin's Terror. Akhmatova began writing at a time when 'to think of a woman as a poet was absurd' but her genius soared above any such category. Hailed as a great beauty, she married three times yet her personal life was shot through with tragedy and her only son and third husband were held captive in the Gulags. Through illness, poverty and repression she maintained her resistance to the regime, with a dignity and composure that led her to be dubbed 'Anna of all the Russias'.

An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.