Bethan Roberts

It is in 1950s' Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier and Marion is smitten - determined her love will be enough for them both. A few years later in Brighton Museum Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted with Tom and opens his eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is safer for him to marry Marion. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

My Policeman

A Novel

Víctor Ruiz Aldana

Mi policía

What happens when your only son becomes The King of Rock 'n' Roll? From the moment she first holds him, after his twin brother is stillborn, Gladys Presley loves her son Elvis ferociously. She will be his greatest influence, the love of his life. She will be the one by his side, when Elvis is a boy and his father is in the jail house; as the family move from house to house, skirting poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi; as Elvis's obsession with music grows; as they move to Memphis and he begins his whirlwind rise to never-seen-before success... And he will love her back, even as his heart is turned by the blues, clothes and girls. But while he makes it big in Hollywood, brings audiences across the land to their knees and achieves unimagined wealth and fame, there is another story - of drinking and diet pills, loneliness and loss. While the heat and music of the American South in the 40s and 50s play in the background, a heartbreaking portrait of a mother's love and a son's devotion takes centre stage. When Elvis reaches the height of his power, he buys his family the ultimate mansion on the hill, Graceland, where he hopes his mother will be happy. The reality, though, is very different, and Elvis finds that even kings must go on alone.

Graceland

O LIVRO QUE DEU ORIGEM AO FILME COM HARRY STYLES, EMMA CORRIN E DAVID DAWSON Uma trágica história sobre como a fúria do desejo humano leva a uma realidade frustrada, inspirada nos acontecimentos da vida de E. M. Forster Brighton, Inglaterra. Anos 1950. Marion avista Tom pela primeira vez. A partir de então, ela soube: seu amor seria suficiente pelos dois, perdurando até alguns anos mais tarde, quando o rapaz volta do exército e a ensina a nadar na sombra do píer. Patrick, experiente curador do Museu de Brighton, conhece Tom e mostra a ele um novo mundo, glamoroso e liberal. Patrick também se apaixona por Tom. Nessa época, é mais seguro para todos que Tom, um jovem policial, se case com Marion. Os dois amantes terão, então, de compartilhá-lo – até que um deles se rebela e três vidas começam a ser destruídas.

Meu policial

Marion ist hingerissen von Tom, dem großen Bruder ihrer besten Freundin, einem unverschämt gutaussehenden jungen Mann mit blonden Locken und blauen Augen. Gleich bei der ersten Begegnung, da sind sie noch Teenager. Für sie ist er der Mann ihres Lebens, und so übersieht sie alle Zeichen, jeden Hinweis, dass Tom sich nicht für sie interessiert. Nicht für sie als Frau. Trotzdem hofft sie auf einen Heiratsantrag, und als er ihn endlich macht, ist sie glücklich. Ihre Liebe wird für sie beide reichen. Aber Tom hat ein anderes Leben, ist in andere Gefühle verstrickt. Sein ganzes Interesse gilt Patrick, dem Kurator des Museums in Brighton, der sich in Tom verliebt hat und ihm eine vÖllig neue Welt erÖffnet. Für Tom ist die Ehe das sichere Versteck in einer Zeit, in der Homosexualität gesellschaftlich und gesetzlich geächtet ist. So teilen ihn die beiden Liebenden, bis einer es nicht mehr aushält und drei Leben ruiniert. Bethan Roberts erzählt diesen Roman aus Marions und aus Patricks Perspektive, zärtlich und mit großer Empathie. Es ist eine Geschichte verschwendeter Jahre, unmÖglicher Liebe und durchkreuzter Hoffnungen in den 60er-Jahren, als sich die radikale Veränderung, wie man lebt und liebt, schon ankündigte, aber noch lange nicht lebbar war.

Der Liebhaber meines Mannes : Roman

O LIVRO QUE DEU ORIGEM AO FILME COM HARRY STYLES, EMMA CORRIN E DAVID DAWSON Uma trágica história sobre como a fúria do desejo humano leva a uma realidade frustrada, inspirada nos acontecimentos da vida de E. M. Forster. Brighton, Inglaterra. Anos 1950. Marion avista Tom pela primeira vez. A partir de então, ela soube: seu amor seria suficiente pelos dois, perdurando até alguns anos mais tarde, quando o rapaz volta do exército e a ensina a nadar na sombra do píer. Patrick, experiente curador do Museu de Brighton, conhece Tom e mostra a ele um novo mundo, glamoroso e liberal. Patrick também se apaixona por Tom. Nessa época, é mais seguro para todos que Tom, um jovem policial, se case com Marion. Os dois amantes terão, então, de compartilhá-lo – até que um deles se rebela e três vidas começam a ser destruídas.

Meu Policial

My policeman. Storia di un amore impossibile

Der Liebhaber meines Mannes. Das Buch zum Film.

Mano policininkas

Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 2014.

Mother Island

Stille Wasser

A melodious paean to the natural history and symbolic meaning of the most prized, poetized, and mythologized of songbirds. The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and it is also the most mythologized of birds. Nightingale juxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth, and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers, and natural historians—from Aristotle, Keats, and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan—Nightingale charts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale’s disappearance from British breeding grounds and the implications this has for nightingale conservation.

Nightingale

This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its 'place' - in multiple ways - in literary history as a work celebrated for 'making it new', yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith's sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith's sonnets - across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers - are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith's verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith's career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith's place in posterity, as a popular poet - influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable - who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith's reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century

Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet

It's summer 1936, and the world is on the cusp of change, but there's little sign of this in rural Sussex. So when Kitty Allen answers an advert looking for 'a good plain cook', she has no idea what she's in for. For starters, her employer is an American called Ellen Steinberg who believes in having the staff call her by her first name and sunbathing in the nude. Then there's Ellen's eleven-year-old daughter, Geenie, a bright, unhappy little thing, and Mrs Steinberg's gentleman friend, Mr Crane, who's said to be a poet - even though he doesn't have a beard and doesn't actually write much poetry. Rich bohemians imagining themselves as communists, Steinberg and Crane see themselves as champions of 'the people' - not that they know the first thing about how the people actually live. Kitty is in no position to criticise - after all she claimed to be a good plain cook, despite hardly knowing how to boil an egg. Utterly out of her depth, she is relieved to have the gardener, Arthur, to talk to. Otherwise she'd never last a summer in this madhouse. Ellen Steinberg wants life to run as smoothly as the love story she imagines her lover George Crane to be writing. But as Kitty arrives, the dream is on the edge of falling apart.

The Good Plain Cook

How does it feel to come home from work one evening and find your two-year-old son gone? How does it feel to steal another woman's child? To take a boy from his mother, and try to make him yours, make things right? This is the story of two women, Nula and Maggie, joined by old family history and love for the same little boy. This is a taut, powerful novel about a nanny who abducts the young child she looks after.

A melodious paean to the natural history and symbolic meaning of the most prized, poetized, and mythologized of songbirds. The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and it is also the most mythologized of birds. Nightingale juxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth, and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers, and natural historians--from Aristotle, Keats, and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan--Nightingale charts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale's disappearance from British breeding grounds and the implications this has for nightingale conservation.

This is the story of two women, Nula and Maggie, joined by old family history and love for the same little boy. Nula, struggling with her new baby and feeling alone in her marriage, employs her cousin Maggie as a nanny when she returns to work. But it's not long before Nula finds herself theatened by Maggie's close bond with her son, Samuel. Nula's outwardly perfect house crackles with unspoken jealousies and rivalry until Maggie's intense love for Samuel tips into obsession and she decides her only option is to abduct the child. As Maggie makes her desperate bid for safety, the women's shared past of trauma and loss comes to the fore once more. WINNER OF THE JERWOOD FICTION UNCOVERED PRIZE 2015.

Middle England, mid-1980s. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. Except something has happened. A fifteen year old boy called Robert has been killed, down by the pools. And half a dozen lives will come unravelled. There's Kathryn and Howard, Rob's parents. Kath has been making the best of her second marriage after the love of her life died young. Howard has been clinging onto a family life he hardly expected to have. There's Joanna, the teen queen of nowheresville. She's been looking for a way out, escape from her parents' broken marriage. She thought Rob might take her away from all this, but lately she?s started to think Rob might have other plans. And then there's Shane, with the big hands and the fixation on Joanna. Bethan Roberts' strikingly assured debut novel subtly reveals the tensions and terrors that underpin apparently ordinary lives, and can lead them to spiral suddenly out of control.

Bethan Roberts

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