Redhill & Reigate Social Group

This is a 2002 novel, set in Victorian London.

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raises her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby also hosts a transient family of petty thieves — fingersmiths — who live in the same London slum as the children.

One day, Gentleman, who is an elegant con man, makes an enticing proposition to Sue: if she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance.

But nothing is as it seems in this novel of thrills and reversals.

The novel was adapted by the BBC as a three-part costume drama in 2005 (image above). It features Sally Hawkins as Sue Trinder and Imelda Staunton as Mrs Sucksby, with many other well-known actors and actresses such as Elaine Cassidy, Charles Dance and Patrick Troughton.

Warwickshire in the 1580s.

Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the couple have three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith.

The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play entitled Hamlet.

Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, and at its heart, the loss of a beloved child.

Above all, this novel is a stunning portrait of a mother’s grief. As Agnes prepares for Hamnet’s burial, when she goes to his grave or can’t bear to part with his clothes, we all feel the depth of her grief.

Hamnet has won many awards, including the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, and has garnered enormous literary acclaim.

It’s Belfast and the year is 1975, at the height of sectarian violence.

Cushla Lavery is 24 and works as a primary teacher in a school on the outskirts of the city. She also does the odd shift in the family pub, which is frequented by leering and aggressive British soldiers. Here she meets Michael Agnew: handsome, middle-aged, sophisticated, but married.

Michael is a Protestant barrister who defends young Catholic men who have been unjustly arrested. He invites Cushla to an “Irish language evening” with his bourgeois-bohemian friends, liberals who toy with pro-Republican politics.

Thus commences an affair that Cushla must keep secret from everyone, on pain – literally – of death.

This novel was a number one best-seller (The Times) and winner of numerous awards over 2022 and 2023.