Lily Page, fifty years of age, biddable, amenable, has lived her entire life in the family home in North London’s Islington, brought up after her mother’s early death by her indomitable aunt and classicist father with an implied sense of obligation.

This psychological detective novel explores the once largely unacknowledged-not only soldiers get post-traumatic stress disorder: that child abuse whether it is overt or covert incest, is a time bomb. Lily's Odyssey unfolds with the inevitability, impact, and resolution of an ancient Greek play. The dialogue rings true, the journey conveyed with moods and half-tones, to portray fragmented Midwestern characters with poignancy. From child to grandmother, Lily's voyage is told with lyricism, humor, and irony through a poet's voice to distill American life in religion, marriage, and family. A contemporary odyssey without maps by a woman short listed for the 2009 Eric Hoffer Award for Best New Writing, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Award Winner.

Lily Page, fifty years of age, biddable, amenable, has lived her entire life in the family home in North London's Islington, brought up after her mother's early death by her indomitable aunt and classicist father with an implied sense of obligation.

In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.

"I am going to find my parents... if I don't track them down I'll be one of the unlucky ones." So writes seventeen-year-old Lily Myers, for whom, adopted at birth, there are so many unanswered questions. Who are her biological parents? Does she have brothers and sisters? Where else might she have lived had if she not been given away? Most pressing is the simplest question of all: "Why was I given up?" In Lily's case there is refuge in melody. It's in the dub venues of the north of England, in the fizzing bass lines, the buzz of static. Here is the volume to quell the doubts, the fears, even the truth. Yet these melodies have the power to suggest possibilities of their own - not least when coupled with Ayahuasca, a visionary plant used by Amazonian shamans as a vehicle to commune with the spirit world, a world where there can be no secrets. Hitherto Lily's quest has been confined to this psychic plane, transcending space and time to communicate with spirits so real they are real, gathering from them clues about her past, her people. It has been at perilous cost to her mental health. Now, at eighteen, her birth certificate and adoption file are hers for the taking. But will the journey end there? Indeed can she ever come to understand the true significance of 'finding my parents'? Praise for Matthew Yorke's previous novel The March Fence: This is a novel which throbs with life and wonder at the manifold varieties of experience... The talent for writing novels may be hard to define, yet it is unmistakable when encountered... is the real thing... the best first novel that I have read in a long time. Alan Massie. A most impresseive debut. Elaine Feinstein, The Times. Distinctive, energetic...the narrative takes a real grip. Hilary Mantel. Daily Telegraph.

Grace Barnes, living in her subterranean one-room flat at the nether end of Earl’s Court, feels out of tune with striving, self-seeking 1980’s London. Meeting Archie Copeland, she is gratified to have found a man who shares her obsession for reading and seems more fascinated by Shelley than shifting share prices.

It is 1966 and 12-year-old Mary Foster’s narrow, prescribed world is abruptly disturbed by a sudden move from suburban London to a neglected Victorian house on the south coast of England. A new friendship provides Mary with some comfort in an unfamiliar world of seagull squawks, endless horizons and strange new lodgers. But an unexpected discovery of deceit and deception profoundly affects her life and Mary is left to carry on, bitter and resentful, but silent on the matter. 40 years later, Mary wants to know more. Another age, another era, another century; such secrecy and lies seem cowardly and irrelevant. Mary is anxious for the truth. Or at least she thinks she is – until the chance to uncover certain realities tests her resolve.

Lily Burana had given up on stripping years before she accepted a marriage proposal-but decided to strip her way from Florida to Alaska before settling down. Lily, now a successful journalist, looks back at stripping with a writer's perspective. Her humorous yet hard-edged memoir deftly describes funky clubs and offbeat characters, the exhilaration that overtakes a dancer on stage-and the darker realities that assail her heart when she's out of the spotlight. Strip City is both a hugely entertaining insider's account of a hidden world and a moving voyage of self-discovery. Lily Burana has written for The New York Times Book Review, GQ, New York magazine, The Village Voice, Spin, and Salon. She lives in New York State. This is her rst book.

A New York Times Editors’ Choice—“a gripping epic about a father and daughter that plumbs the dark side of a family riven by addiction and mental illness” (Entertainment Weekly). Gardiner Amory’s life is reeling—Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when the pair divorces, Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed in a deluge, the chasm between all of them widens, and Daley is stretched thinly across it. As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world of her father’s prejudices and embarks on her own life—until Gardiner hits rock bottom. Returning home to help her father get sober, Daley risks everything she’s found beyond him, including a chance at love, in an attempt to repair a trust that was broken long ago . . . In this Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, Lily King pulls readers into “a brilliant exploration of the attraction of martyrdom, the intoxication of playing savior. . . . An absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line” (Washington Post).