Joy

Since bursting onto the scene in the mid '70s, the pop duo Captain and Tennille have long defined the sparkling, optimistic idea of everlasting love, both in their music and through their image as a happy and, seemingly, unbreakable couple. They were an irresistible pair to millions of fans all over the world, further underscored by the rousing "yes, we can!" gospel of their biggest hit, "Love Will Keep Us Together". But underneath the image was an entirely different story that the fans never saw.

Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, "How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl." Deborah's effervescent memoir chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire.

"Running Casualty is really very simple: you have to love everybody, you have to listen to everybody; and when in doubt you do just what Sister O'Hanlon tells you.” Mr William Rutherford, A & E Consultant. Kate O'Hanlon spent 16 years as sister in charge of A & E at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, working through the worst days of the Troubles. Told with her trademark blend of warmth, compassion and humour, this is her fascinating and extraordinary story of nursing on the front line.

Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature". More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered 21 children between them. More than a biography of the twins, this is a study of 19th-century American culture and society that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

The life of the Duchess of Windsor came to an end in Paris on 24 April 1986. She was almost 90. Many people assumed that she had died years before, since she disappeared from public view for over a decade. Sebastian Faulks wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘She is seen as no more than the star of an old romantic film that most French have forgotten. ’But the world did take note, describing her death as the final curtain on one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century. Embers of the feud between the British Royal Family and the Windsors in exile were fanned once more....

In a work unlike anything she's written before, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unveils a poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of her husband of 46 years and its wrenching, surprising aftermath.

It was the most influential marriage of the 19th Century - and one of history’s most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chronicler Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen, and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family.