Bella Pollen

When a Cold War diplomat dies under suspicious circumstances and is promptly declared a mole, the man's wife relocates to a remote Scottish island, where her steadfast youngest child discovers a marooned brown bear and uncovers truths about his father's activities.

The Summer of the Bear

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This stylish, screamingly funny, razor-sharp look at the British aristocracy in decline introduces the Bevans. Adrift in a rapidly changing world, the Bevans cling to tradition while wrestling with taxes, tree blight, and the need to keep the family skeleton firmly in the cupboard.

Hunting Unicorns

An intelligent, wonderfully funny romantic comedy by Bella Pollen, author of Hunting Unicorns, the novel voted favourite summer read by viewers of Richard and Judy Sometimes life can be like a bad movie. You sit through it, hoping it will get better, suspecting that it won't and wondering at what point you can reasonably walk out...Kit Audrey Butler is the manager of the Orange, a dilapidated independent cinema. Estranged from her father, undermined by her boyfriend, and with her third screenplay recently rejected Kit finds herself badly adrift. Her favourite therapy, renting the appropriate video and scrutinizing the footage for clues on how to behave, no longer provides her with all the answers. But when new ownership threatens the Orange, Kit is forced to confront reality and discovers that help and heroes come in the unlikeliest forms...

Daydream Girl

Growing up the middle child of transatlantic parents--her English Rose mother and cowboy boot-loving father--Bella Pollen never quite figured out how to belong. Restlessly crossing back and forth between the boundaries of family and freedom, England and America, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living. When she awakes one morning in an existential panic, Pollen grudgingly concludes that in order to move forward, she needs to take a good look at her past. In Meet Me in the In-Between, Pollen takes us on the uproarious journey of a life, from her privileged, unorthodox childhood in Upper Manhattan through early marriage to a son of an alluring Mafioso, to the dusty border towns of Mexico where she embarks on a border crossing with some Pink Floyd-loving smugglers. Throughout all, Bella grapples intently with relationships, motherhood, career ups and downs, and a pathological fear of being boxed in. Interwoven with exquisite original illustrations by the award-winning Kate Boxer, this is a tender, funny, and poignantly honest story of one woman’s quest to keep looking for the extraordinary in an ordinary life. Reminiscent of Roz Chast’s Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Pam Houston’s Cowboys are my Weakness, novelist Bella Pollen has created an endearingly naughty and intoxicatingly humorous, dead-on look at what it means to be a modern woman.

MEET ME IN THE IN-BETWEEN

Sometimes life can be like a bad movie. You sit through it, hoping it will get better, suspecting that it won't and wondering at what point you can reasonably walk out . . . Kit Audrey Butler is the manager of the Orange, a dilapidated independent cinema. Estranged from her father, undermined by her boyfriend, and with her third screenplay recently rejected Kit finds herself badly adrift. Her favourite therapy, renting the appropriate video and scrutinizing the footage for clues on how to behave, no longer provides her with all the answers. But when new ownership threatens the Orange, Kit is forced to confront reality and discovers that help and heroes come in the unlikeliest forms . . .

The Daydream Girl

A Richard and Judy Book Club selection. The Summer of the Bear is a beautiful story of a family recovering from loss on a remote Scottish island, from Bella Pollen, author of Hunting Unicorns. In the summer of 1979, a tamed grizzly bear is tempted by the lure of freedom and the wild open sea . . . Meanwhile, the sudden death of British diplomat Nicky Fleming has left his wife closed down with shock. Relocated from Cold-War-riven Germany to a remote Hebridean island, Letty Fleming is haunted by the unthinkable – was it an accident, murder or suicide? And how can she ever begin to explain to her three children that their father may have betrayed his country? Struggling to find solace in a place she loves, Letty begins to unravel the mystery of Nicky's death, but her determination to protect the children from the truth blinds her to the demons they are already battling. As the family’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, it is only the strange but brilliant Jamie who manages to hold on to the one thing he knows for sure: his father has promised to return, and Nicky Fleming was a man who never broke a promise . . .

A Richard and Judy Book Club Selection

Manageress of the Orange Cinema in Shepherd's Bush, Kit lives on the fringe of creative London. Demoralized by her boyfriend and her third screenplay rejection she withdraws into a world of dreams, until faced with the closure of the Orange.

B Movies, Blue Love

To the south lies Mexico. To the north you can see the flat plains and snow tipped peaks of the Patagonia Mountains . . . and in between is a strange and wild landscape representing a freedom so great that for a long moment, I find it hard to breathe. On the run from her claustrophobic marriage in London, Alice Coleman moves her two small children to the Arizona desert with the intention of renovating an abandoned mining town on the Mexican Border - and there finds an escape and solitude she hadn’t thought possible. But in the dusty, alien atmosphere, where it seems that everyone – from Benjàmin, the town’s Mexican caretaker to the laconic cowboy, Duval – has something to hide, Alice is uncertain whom to trust. As winter moves to scorching summer, what seemed idyllic turns deadly as Alice is drawn deeper into an obsessive quest for revenge, until finally she must decide how far she is willing to go to cling on to her freedom and what exactly she will have to sacrifice. Fierce and compelling, Midnight Cactus explores the territory between unrealized dreams and the pull of family. In a blistering climax Alice discovers it is only by risking everything that you learn what is really worth living for.

Midnight Cactus

A restless London wife escapes to the Arizona desert to find passion and danger in an “impassioned blockbuster” of a love story (The Independent). Jumping at the chance to spend a year away from her claustrophobic marriage to a workaholic British developer, Alice Coleman takes her two small children to the American desert lands between Arizona and the Mexican border. But the unpredictable southwest has room for the dreams of more than one fugitive. There’s Benjamin, the kindly Mexican caretaker of an abandoned mining town; the desperate immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border; and the laconic cowboy Henry Duval, whose rugged charms are as irresistible to Alice, as his secrets are dark. But when Alice’s husband arrives, the sun-scorched sanctuary turns dangerous. Now Alice must decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to preserve not only her freedom, but Benjamin and Duvall’s as well. Both a perilous love story and a compelling exploration of the tension between unrealized ambitions and the pull of family, Midnight Cactus is an “absorbing . . . lively meditation on how far people will go to escape the past” (Entertainment Weekly).

American Maggie Monroe is a journalist for New York's hard-hitting current affairs show Newsline. Independent and fearless, the more cutting-edge the story, the happier she is. But when her next assignment turns out to be an in-depth documentary on the decline of England's ruling classes, she's furious at being sent to cover a bloody tea party. Meet the Earl and Countess of Bevan, eccentric, maddening and with family secrets to hide. Meet Daniel Bevan - their eldest son. Funny, attractive and hopelessly alcoholic. Meet Daniel's responsible brother Rory - angry, self-mocking and strictly teetotal. When Maggie discovers Rory to be an uninvited chaperone on the first stop of her journey the two look set to clash. Maggie finds herself torn between her journalist ideals and coming to terms with a greater understanding. This unlikely romantic comedy paints an endearing portrait of a family, which like so many others, holds itself together despite its evident frailties. ‘Hilariously accurate . . . A gifted writer with a pithy, poetic style’ Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

Bella Pollen

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