The treacherous glitz of show business and the sublime madness of family relationships are brought to life in this hilarious and ultimately touching novel from the bestselling author of The Future Homemakers of America and The Unfortunates. The Boff brothers live at home with their Mam. They have a lav down the yard and a jerry under the bed and they play bookings at the Birmingham Welsh and the Rover Sports and Social. Cled tinkles on the piano and Sel is the crooner. 'Sel's the one who can lift people out of themselves and send them home feeling grand and you can't argue against that' says Cled. When Sel decides he must try his chances with the brights lights of New York City, he packs up his sequinned suits and enlists his brother as travel companion and accompanist. What follows is a tale of mad-cap high jinx; of mirrored ceilings and heart-shaped tubs; of screaming girls, romancing and No Business Like Show Business. As jealousy starts encroaching on the brothers' relationship, Cled finds that there are more secrets in his family than he had bargained for. With her characteristic wit and wisdom, Laurie Graham brings us a touching celebration of the sparkle and dust of family life.

The hilarious and touching novel from Laurie Graham - the fictional diary of the Queen's best friend in pre-war London. Laurie Graham's brilliant novel is the fictional diary of Maybell Brumby, a wealthy American widow who arrives in London in 1932 and discovers that an old school friend is in town: Bessie Wallis Warfield, now Mrs Ernest Simpson. Maybell and Wally are made for one another. One has money and a foothold in high society, courtesy of a sister who married well. The other has ruthless ambition and enough energy to power the National Grid. Before the year is out, Wally has begun her seduction of the Prince of Wales, and as she clambers towards the throne she makes sure Maybell and her cheque book are always close at hand. So Maybell becomes an eye-witness to the Abdication Crisis. From her perch in Carlton Gardens, home of her influential brother-in-law Lord Melhuish, she has the perfect vantage point for observing the anxious, changing allegiances for and against Queen Wally, and the political contours of pre-war London. When the crisis comes and Wally flees to the south of France, she insists on Maybell going with her. 'Are you sure that's advisable, darling?' asks the King. 'Of course it is,' snaps Wally. 'She's the Paymaster General.' Maybell's diary records the marriage, the Windsors' exile, and the changing complexion of the Greatest Love Story. It takes the sound of German jackboots at the gate and personal tragedy to make her close its pages for the last time.

A brilliant novel by Laurie Graham set in wartime London, which follows Kick Kennedy, sister of future US President JFK, as she takes London society by storm. Nora Brennan is a country girl from Westmeath. When she lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But it's the Kennedy family. In 1917 Joseph Kennedy is on his way to his first million and he has plans to found a dynasty and ensure that his baby son, Joe Junior, will be the first Catholic President of the United States. As nursemaid to all nine Kennedy children, Nora witnesses every moment, public and private. She sees the boys coached at their father's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by their mother to be good Catholic wives. World War II changes everything. At the outbreak of war the Kennedys are living the high life in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and in particular Kick, who throws the first spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant. Laurie Graham's poignant new novel views the Kennedys from below stairs, with the humour and candour that only an ex-nursemaid dare employ.

It is 1962. The first avocado pears are appearing at the greengrocers, people are thinking about carpeting their lavatories and boxing in their banisters, and Ronnie Glover, housepainter, husband and father, is feeling the first vague stirrings of discontent with his life. Then, out of the blue, the fabulous, sophisticated (and married) Jacqueline bursts into his life and teaches him to tango. She seems to offer everything he ever dreamt of. But is it all too good to be true? What can a woman who has traveled the world want with a man who carries a stub of pencil behind his ear? And are the Ten O'Clock horses of Ronnie's painful childhood awake and sniffing the wind?

There is one great love in everyone's life. For Ducky, Princess Victoria Melita, hers was a Romanov cousin, a member of the doomed Russian royal family. Her father is Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria's second son. Her mother is Grand Duchess Marie, the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. Ducky seems doomed to be a pawn on her grandmother's dynastic chessboard. But Ducky is not so easily controlled. In an era when death is considered preferable to divorce she fights for the freedom to be with the true love of her life. From disgraced exile in Paris to the glitter of St Petersburg and the mud and carnage of the Eastern Front, she forges her own path. As Russia descends into the chaos of 1917 and the Romanov dynasty falters, Ducky is right at the heart of events. Exiled once more, she tells us her story.

Pittsburgh was too small for Beryl Wexler. Barely out of high school, she changed her name to Buzz and set off for the bright lights of London. She never looked back. Now she's at the top of her game in the music PR business, looking after the coolest groups on the planet. And for a woman who was forty-two last birthday she certainly keeps up the pace. But her life is about to change. Some twenty-year-old has been given the new Japanese girl band predicted to go stellar, and Buzz is being sidelined. Instead, Buzz gets to tour with the Gorni Grannies, Bulgarian singers of a certain age. These ladies may not be the tantrum-throwing celebs Buzz is used to, but they present other challenges. How to stop Lubka straining yogurt through her knee highs? How to dissuade Kichka from stealing everything not nailed to the floor? Fuelled by copious shots of home-brewed plum rakia, Buzz and Lubka address life's ups and down, until the world tilts and a different future beckons.

Nan's mother loves to tell her daughter stories, though the details vary according to how much she has drunk. The tale she tells most often claims that Admiral Lord Nelson is Nan's father: he was her lover and she saw him die at Trafalgar. Or so she claims. From poor beginnings, resourceful Nan makes her own determined way through life, but always haunted by the wish to know the truth about her father. From Portsmouth in the early 1800s to the battlefields of the Crimea, Nan discovers the world is full of people with a story about Nelson. There are some questions we can never hope to answer...

When Lady Enid - a woman in need of a project and a husband - throws in her lot with dashing Bernard Finch, she thinks she's found her perfect life's companion. Handsome and clever, Bernard has come a long way from his small-town American roots. Now he is a man transformed, more English than the English, a celebrated lecturer on Aegean cruises. Which is where his past comes back to bite him, in the shape of his old college chum, Frankie Gleeson. Frankie has made his fortune in corn snacks and to celebrate his success he brings his wife, Nola, to cruise the Greek islands. Frankie is a simple man but he has the gift of total recall, of every detail of Bernard's early years. Yet while Bernard shuns his cruise companions, Enid finds herself strangely drawn to them. It's amazing how much can happen between Istanbul and Venice.

It shouldn't have been like this. Being on television was meant to lead to fame and a glamorous social life. But for Lizzie Partridge, forty-something, divorced and TV cook on Midlands This Morning, it meant dinners for one, coping alone with an air-head adolescent daughter and following middle-aged men into corner shops pretending she needed a bottle of Lea & Perrins. Her good friend Louie - if only he wasn't gay - thought he knew what the trouble was: Lizzie was always on the wrong side of the glass, looking in at other people's lives. True or not, things for Lizzie were going to get a lot worse before they got better...

From the fictitious diary of the equally fictitious Kennedy nanny comes an inside look into the early years of the dynasty--with all the juicy bits intact.

Newly arrived from Ireland, Nora Brennan finds a position as nursery maid to the Kennedys of Brookline, Massachusetts--and lands at the heart of American history. In charge of nine children practically from the minute they're born--including Joe Jr., Jack, Bobby, Teddy, vivacious "Kick," and tragic Rosemary--she sees the boys coached at their father's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by mother Rose to be good Catholic wives. With her sharp eye and her quiet common sense, Nora is the perfect candidate to report on an empire in the making. Then World War II changes everything.

When Maybell Brumby, frisky, wealthy, and recently widowed, quits Baltimore and arrives in London, she finds that her old school chum, Bessie Wallis Warfield, is there ahead of her. Impoverished and ambitious as ever, Wallis is on the make. Hampered by plodding husband number two, but armed with terrific bone structure and a few erotic tricks picked up in China, Wallis sets her sights on the most eligible bachelor in the world: the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne. Maybell, with her deep pockets, makes the perfect ally, and her disarming dimness makes her the most delicious chronicler of the scandal that rocked a monarchy and changed the course of history.

Six Women...
Their Loves, Laughter, and
Lifelong Friendship

For five American Air Force wives, Norfolk, England, in 1952 is a long way from home. But Peggy Dewey and her friends are determined to make the most of their overseas mission. While their husbands patrol the skies in F-84 fighters, the high-spirited group of military wives and young moms staves off homesickness by clipping coupons, trading gossip, and going to London to see Princess Elizabeth "get coronated." Over a stick of Juicy Fruit, brass polisher Audrey Rudman, good-time girl Lois Moon, alcohol-loving Gayle Jackson, "Pie Crust Queen" Betty Gillis, and the ever reliable Peggy meet a scrappy Englishwoman named Kath Pharaoh and a lasting friendship is forged. Through marriage and divorce, separations and reunions, the gang will try to hold fast to one another…in a story that takes us to the heart of female friendship-and reveals the secret of the perfect Three Color Refrigerator Cake.

A Featured Alternate of The Literary Guild®, of
Doubleday Book Club®, and of Book-of-the-Month Club®

"Singing the City" is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done--both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart.

"Singing the City" is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city's landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place.

Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology--the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.

'They like it if you're marvellous for your age. If you can't be that, they want you down Plaistow Crematorium, not hanging about here, taking up bus seats.' So says Bernie Gibbs, living on her memories on the seventh floor of an East End high-rise. Her diet is mainly chocolate bars and she yearns for action, or at least for the re-opening of the old Imperial Dance Hall, where she used to have good times. One of her ex-husbands, Jimmy Dwyer, turns up from nowhere with a greyhound that needs a temporary home, then disappears again. Seeing Jimmy revives memories of the War, when Birdie and her friends did their bit. She still does her bit today, though the world around her doesn't make much sense. When the Fruit Bowl Estate boils over in the scorching summer of '95, Birdie gets all the action she can handle.

London, the 1880s, and Jack the Ripper is at large. Two childhood friends meet again having found very different fortunes in the fog-bound, Ripper-stalked streets of Victorian London. Plain but witty Dot is a music hall star; pretty Kate (Eddowes, a true-life Ripper victim) has fallen on hard times. 'Poignant and unsentimental, Dot's whipllash humour had me cheering' DAILY MAIL When star of London's Victorian music hall, Dot Allbones, bumps into her childhood friend Kate Eddowes outside the Griffin theatre in Shoreditch, it's a blast from the past. The two grew up together in the Midlands, but life has treated them very differently since then. Told through the eyes of the irreverent Dot, this is the story of a London populated by chancers, some rich, some destitute. During one hot summer in the 1880s Whitechapel famously became the scene of unspeakable horror, and Kate Eddowes found a grisly fame that would far outshine Dot's. Because out there, in the stews of East London, Saucy Jack is sharpening his knife . . .

Bobs and Ba live in happy prosperity. They began with nothing, but now they have a successful chain of car repair yards. Bobs has even bought a racehorse! But on a Caribbean holiday to celebrate Bobs' fiftieth birthday, it becomes clear he is a man with things on his mind. Has he found a younger woman? The receipt in his pocket from Sasha Lingerie is pretty damning. And what's the terrible secret in the cupboard behind his pool table? As the gossip starts at the golf club and the kids stop calling, Ba's life is turned upside down. What's more, her daughter Melody is getting married and everyone's nerves are in shreds. It takes events beyond their control to show Bobs and Ba just what their marriage is made of.

The Early Birds is the touching and funny follow-up to The Future Homemakers of America. 'Funny, heartwarming and a real treat. I would recommend it to anyone!' Katie Fforde 'Wit and insight to match Nick Hornby, and the entertainment value of Helen Fielding' Independent on The Future Homemakers of America 'Why is Laurie Graham not carried on people's shoulders through cheering crowds? Her books are brilliant!' Marian Keyes Peggy, the southern belle. Kath, the pragmatist with the only Norfolk accent in New York state. Gayle, the preacher with healing hands. Mrs Colonel Audrey Rudman, forever keeping up the standards of the Officers' Wives Club. Lois, who's never had a thought she didn't voice. Loudly. Their menfolk may be long retired, but once a US Air Force wife, always an Air Force wife, and the bonds of friendship forged in base after military base are still going strong fifty years later. Time is rendering its Accounts Payable for all of them now: hip replacements, eye problems, forgetfulness and departures. In this hymn to lifelong female friendship, Peggy soldiers on through new upheavals, including her ex-husband Vern's Alzheimer's diagnosis, the death of one of her nearest and dearest, a life-changing house move and the world-shattering events of 9/11 with the help of her sharp-tongued, often eccentric, but always loyal group of friends.

'Entirely original, this makes us laugh a lot and take a long look at our lives. I absolutely adored it!' KATIE FFORDE The laugh-out-loud sequel to Perfect Meringues - can former queen of the TV cooks Lizzie Partridge claw her way back into the nation's hearts? Life has been going downhill for ex-TV chef Lizzie Partridge ever since she spectacularly ended her television career by throwing a chocolate mousse at the host of Midlands This Morning. Her partner Tom has left her, Nigella and Jamie have got the cookery world sewn up, and now her cookery column - her last bit of work - has been axed. Surely the only way is up from here? In a desperate bid for sympathy and attention she runs away, from the gas bill and the mouse under the sink, and in wet and wintry Aberystwyth she experiences a brush with her past and a glimmer of new prospects. And when her nephew's girlfriend - a TV producer - has the bright idea to reunite her with her former nemesis and target of the mousse attack in a new show, it seems like things could be going Lizzie's way again after all!

'Why is Laurie Graham not carried on people's shoulders through cheering crowds? Her books are brilliant!' MARIAN KEYES The Early Birds is the feel-good and funny follow-up to The Future Homemakers of America that proves that no matter what life throws at you, great friends and regular cocktails will always see you through. Peggy, the southern belle. Kath, the pragmatist with the only Norfolk accent in New York state. Gayle, the preacher with healing hands. Mrs Colonel Audrey Rudman, forever keeping up the standards of the Officers' Wives Club. Lois, who's never had a thought she didn't voice. Loudly. Their menfolk may be long retired, but once a US Air Force wife, always an Air Force wife, and the bonds of friendship forged in base after military base are still going strong fifty years later. Time is rendering its Accounts Payable for all of them now: hip replacements, eye problems, forgetfulness and departures. In this hymn to lifelong female friendship, Peggy soldiers on through new upheavals, including her ex-husband Vern's Alzheimer's diagnosis, the death of one of her nearest and dearest, a life-changing house move and the world-shattering events of 9/11 with the help of her sharp-tongued, often eccentric, but always loyal group of friends.

As a participant observer at Subaru-Isuzu Automotive, Laurie Graham conducted extensive covert research. Her findings will interest all those concerned about Japanese management strategies, the auto industry, and the American worker's experience of lean production.