Böcker av Susan Day

Sally-Ann has never been further from home than Scarborough. She is suffocating in her parents' house, fed up with their old-fashioned rules and bored with her job. Then Terry comes in to the library where she works to look at maps for his "trip around the world."'What's your name?' he asks her. 'Zita,' she lies. But becoming Zita is not so simple.Susan Day deftly leads you into Sally-Ann/ Zita's life and adventures, her coming of age, discovery of life's unpredictabilities and growing old. Her skilful depiction of the characters brings them to life and you'll miss them and wonder about them when you've turned the last page.

Nothing is more important to Lynn and Dave Wilde than family. They have lived in Sheffield all their lives, and their two married daughters live close by. Their son Jamie meets and marries Niecey, and they have a son. Niecey is something of an enigma - she is not from Sheffield, she appears to have no family, no friends and no past - but she is accepted into the family. Then Jamie discovers, by accident, the birth certificates of two children, and consults his parents and sisters about what this might mean: are they Niecey's children? did they die? who is their father? Does she know where they are? Does this explain her constant wandering around the city, her hovering outside school gates? As the secret gradually comes out, each member of the family reacts to the situation in a different way. Tensions run high, and Niecey is forced to reveal her history. Finally, answers come from an unexpected source, and open the way to a resolution. Sue Day describes with wonderful sensitivity, precision and honesty the life of this ordinary Sheffield family, as they are faced with an extraordinary dilemma.

As deaths mount during the coronavirus pandemic a retired history teacher reflects on the much greater personal impact of her sister's death 12 years before. Pam Dearly - lonely, grumpy, resentful - uses the lens of lock-down to review her life, her family and her relationship with her sister.

This beautifully understated story, of two working-class girls in the 60's, explores the opportunities and the limitations, hopes and disappointments - and the music - that they grew up with; and the choices they hardly remember making that shaped their lives.

There are families that would fall apart if the truth came out. Jen admires her father and Frank believes that his daughters are happy, but no one in any family knows the whole story. This family has fractured before, and been patched up by secrets and evasions. Now things are about to change.

One wartime morning four girls set out on a bike ride that will bind them together for years to come - through marriage, children and divorce, and even across continents. Many years later they are still in touch, and still trying to understand the tragedy that has been one of the constants in their lives. What did happen to Marcie?

The design revolutions of the early 20th century were woven into the very fabric of the carpets and rugs of that era. This book charts the evolution of carpet design out of the floral effusions of the Victorian salons and into the angular elegance of Art Deco and bold abstraction of Modernism popularized by the machine age.