When a scrawny, freckled girl with bright red hair arrives on Prince Edward Island, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are taken by surprise; they'd asked for a quiet boy to help with the farm work at Green Gables. But how can you return a friendless child to a grim orphanage when she tells you her life so far has been a 'perfect graveyard of buried hopes'? And so, the beguiling chatterbox stays. Full of dreams, warmth and spirit, it is not long before Anne Shirley wins their hearts. This collection of the best children's literature, curated by Virago, will ...

Between April 20th and June 22nd of 1945 the anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin wrote about life within the falling city as it was sacked by the Russian Army. Fending off the boredom and deprivation of hiding, the author records her experiences, observations and meditations in this stark and vivid diary. Accounts of the bombing, the rapes, the rationing of food and the overwhelming terror of death are rendered in the dispassionate, though determinedly optimistic prose of a woman fighting for survival amidst the horror and inhumanity of war. This diary ...

Maya Angelou’s seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s ...

A memoir of politics and activism, from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS ‘A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman’ BARACK OBAMA It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved – and now seriously teenage – son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that’s where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin ...

Radio 4 Book of the Week In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it. In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather's diary, one page ...