The pretty Arnold sisters have grown up on their father's farm. Ellen, loyal and honest, loves the countryside. Gina, impulsive and unreliable, craves excitement and yearns for something more than drudgery and toil. But life for the sisters and their mother is tainted by their father's black moods. His worst treatment is often aimed at Gina, who has given up trying to please the man who seems to despise her. Grindle Hall, the big manor house, is owned...

Hollywood in the 1950s was a bizarre juxtaposition of high and low culture, a place where the sublime paid tribute to the ridiculous. This book looks back to Hollywood's golden era.

The magnificent new novel from Kate Atkinson, the Costa Novel winning author of A God in Ruins. In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been...

In 1956 the Suez Crisis finally shattered the old myths of the British Empire and paved the way for the changes of the decades to come. Dominic Sandbrook discusses the dramatic story of affluence and decline between 1956 and 1963.

After losing his mother at the age of 7 and living for a time in an orphanage, Peter Stockley had faced much tragedy. However, with the Scallywags he was able to discover the true joy of being part a gang. These Liverpudlian rascals caused mischief wherever they went and his recollections are affectionate and amusing and also moving.

Set in the Irish Catholic community of 1950s Liverpool and in Ireland, this is a saga of working class families, living on the edge of poverty yet bound together by humour and loyalty, gossip, grumbling and endless cups of tea. It is also the gripping, moving - and shocking - story of a girl betrayed by a man trusted and revered by the people of the Four Streets and of that community?s revenge, played out over the course of a drama in three acts:...

This delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this post-war decade, whether in town or country, wealth or poverty.

Michele Hanson grew up an 'oddball tomboy disappointment' in a Jewish family in Ruislip in the 1950s - a suburban, Metroland idyll of neat lawns, bridge parties and Martini socials. This hilarious and wonderfully evocative memoir charts Michele's childhood and coming of age in a Britain that was emerging from post-war austerity.

It's 1954 and, in Barbados, Ruby Haynes spots an advertisement for young women to train as nurses for the new National Health Service in Great Britain. Her sister, Connie, takes some persuading, but soon the sisters are on their way to a new country - and a whole new world of experiences. As they start their training in Hertfordshire, they discover England isn't quite the promised land; for every door that's opened to them, the sisters find many slammed...

Rebecca Hunter's Growing Up series reveals what is was like to be a child during the 20th century. Each volume follows the experiences of real people as they grew up. The individual volumes cover the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties.