From the author of Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao, an intimate family memoir about filial love and its limits, separation, and loss. Gavin is spending the quarantine with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But all he can write about is her. In this frank and revealing memoir, he unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place as a child, homophobic bullying at school, his brother’s mental illness and drug addiction, his father’s sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.

A Sunday Independent Book of the Year Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. In London, sisters Iris and Eva plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie; in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, which she will use to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two performances unfold, these three 'sisters' find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Mao shows us that the political is always personal.

A Sunday Independent Book of the Year Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. Revolution is a Family Affair. In London, sisters Iris and Eva, members of a radical performance collective, plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie. Meanwhile in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which she will use to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two astonishing performances unfold, Iris, Eva, and Jiang Qing are transformed into unforgettable protagonists in a single epic drama. The three 'sisters', although fighting very different personal battles, find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Mao shows us that the political is always personal.

Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Love is a bygone idea, centuries-worn. There are things we can go without, and love is among them; bread and a warm hearth are not. In September 1870 a train leaves Manchester bound for London. On board is Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums, embarking on the journey that will change her forever. Sitting in the first-class carriage beside her lover, the wealthy mill-owner Frederick Engels, the vision of a life of peace and comfort takes shape before her eyes. But as Lizzie soon learns 'the world doesn't happen how you think it will. The secret is to soften to it, and to take its blows.'