Rose Tremain Books in Order

A concise history of the struggle for women’s rights in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, tracing campaigns for the vote, legal reforms and workplace equality through vivid sketches of key activists and battles.

A short, accessible biography of Joseph Stalin that follows him from his provincial childhood and revolutionary plotting to his absolute rule of the Soviet Union and wartime leadership, highlighting both his political skill and the immense human cost of his dictatorship.

Fat, fifty and desperate, Ruby Constad is caring for a husband paralysed by stroke and feels her life has narrowed to grief and duty. In letters to Sister Benedicta, the nun who raised her in India, she slowly uncovers past betrayals and an unexpected strength of her own.

Elderly novelist and political firebrand Erica March has decided to compose herself to die in a cupboard, certain that young journalist Ralph Pears will one day find her. As he pieces together her story, one stubborn secret tied to that cupboard refuses to be explained away.

This slim volume brings together three modern stories in which an aging clergyman’s uneasy marriage, a woman trapped in an affair and a troubled teenage girl each reach a moment of reckoning and must decide what kind of future they dare to claim.

When George’s Sicilian mother snatches him from his London school and flies him to her family home on the slopes of Mount Etna, he feels exiled in a strange land. As the volcano stirs and finally erupts, old rifts in the family are tested and a new loyalty is forged.

After their swimming‑pool business collapses, Larry and Miriam Kendall retreat from England to a quiet French village, hoping to rebuild their lives. While Miriam returns to Oxford to face her difficult mother’s death, Larry dreams up one last, perfect pool, drawing two communities into a web of longing and regret.

In the title story, Colonel Browne paddles in a Swiss hotel pool while, back in England, his daughter Charlotte breaks into the family home. Around this, other stories explore fathers and daughters, husbands and wives and the small lies that slowly warp ordinary lives.

Robert Merivel, a pleasure-loving physician in the service of King Charles II, is rewarded with a Norfolk estate and a sham royal marriage, then abruptly disgraced. Driven into plague‑ridden London and a hospital for the mad, he must finally practise medicine and learn what kind of man he wants to be.

Seventy‑six‑year‑old Jack Sadler lives alone with his dog in the neglected Norfolk mansion he once served as butler. On a day that may or may not be his birthday, memories of wartime evacuees, unspoken love and a lifetime of loyalty rise up and demand to be faced.

Eleven wide‑ranging stories move from a dreamlike Regency London, where an Italian clockmaker pursues a miraculous invention, to contemporary landscapes shaped by debt, error and desire, each tale revealing how chance encounters and stubborn hopes can redirect a life.

In 1950s Suffolk, six‑year‑old Mary Ward realises with startling clarity that she is really a boy. Sacred Country follows Mary’s long struggle to become Martin, and the intertwined journeys of family and neighbours who are all, in their own ways, searching for a truer self.

This omnibus volume gathers stories from three earlier collections, ranging across English villages, European cities and far‑flung coasts. In concise, sharply drawn pieces, Tremain shows people at small turning points when love, grief or chance forces them to choose a different path.

Thirteen‑year‑old Lewis Little spends the summer in Paris while his mother translates a new novel by glamorous Russian émigré Valentina Gavrilovich. When Valentina disappears, his infatuation and imagination pull him into a dangerous quest through the back streets of the city.

Set around the discipline of cooking, this compact story uses lessons in handling knives and food as a mirror for its central character’s desire to cut away old habits, confront buried anger and attempt a riskier, more honest future.

In 1629, English lutenist Peter Claire joins the royal orchestra of Christian IV of Denmark, playing unseen in a freezing cellar beneath the king’s chambers. As he falls in love with Emilia Tilsen, maid to the king’s estranged wife, court intrigue, war and the consolations of music entwine their fates.

Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from England to New Zealand in the 1860s with Joseph’s formidable mother, hoping for prosperity on a remote farm. When Joseph secretly discovers traces of gold, greed and shame drive him into the goldfields and threaten to destroy the fragile family they have built.

These stories move from a dying Wallis Simpson brooding in her guarded Paris flat to a redundant East German border guard bicycling toward a vanished homeland. Throughout, ordinary people find their lives twisted by obsession, exile and sudden, sometimes uncanny, shifts of fortune.

When the sawmill in his Eastern European village closes and his wife dies, Lev heads for London with a handful of money and a few English phrases. Drifting through exploitative jobs, fragile friendships and first love, he struggles to imagine a future that connects his new life with the family he left behind.

In a secluded valley in the Cévennes, alcoholic Aramon Lunel lets his farmhouse decay while his sister Audrun broods in a shack on the boundary line. When ageing London antiques dealer Anthony Verey arrives, dreaming of a last refuge, old abuses and resentments flare into a single, shocking crime.

Renowned tenor Antonio Mollini sets out to create the most beautiful garden in Italy, only to find his grand project warping the lives of his lovers and staff. Other stories follow a farmer’s son, an aspiring arsonist and a pressured teenager, all caught between hope and catastrophe.

Wildtrack brings together four atmospheric stories, many set in East Anglia, where tidal flats, marshes and quiet towns shape characters who are haunted by old choices and pulled between the safety of home and the risky promise of escape.

Years after his earlier adventures, an ageing Robert Merivel is restless at Bidnold with his beloved daughter Margaret. He travels to the glittering court of Louis XIV and a Swiss refuge before plague, politics and family troubles draw him back to England and a final reckoning with his past.

In these twelve stories a British writer remembers a doomed 1960s affair with an American in Paris, a Russian stationmaster witnesses Tolstoy’s last days, and other characters revisit betrayals, obsessions and brief ecstasies, testing whether the tales they live by can still be believed.

Growing up in a small Swiss town after the war, serious Gustav Perle befriends brilliant, anxious Jewish pianist Anton Zweibel. As the novel moves back to his parents’ wartime choices and forward into the men’s uneasy middle age, it probes friendship, neutrality, guilt and the possibility of forgiveness.

This Vintage Minis volume selects two of Tremain’s most memorable portraits of friendship, drawn from *Restoration* and *The Gustav Sonata*, to explore loyalty, desire and the blurred boundary between deep companionship and love over the course of a lifetime.

In her memoir *Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life*, Tremain recalls a London and Hampshire childhood marked by privilege, emotional neglect and the kindness of a beloved nanny, tracing how boarding schools, family upheavals and small acts of rebellion slowly shaped her into a writer.

In 1860s Bath, tall, gifted nurse Jane Adeane, nicknamed the Angel of the Baths, rejects a respectable proposal and escapes to her bohemian aunt in London, where she falls for the beautiful Julietta Sims. Far away in Borneo, an eccentric English “rajah” and a young naturalist wrestle with desire, power and the wreckage of empire.

Found as a newborn near a London church in 1850 and taken to Coram’s Foundling Hospital, Lily Mortimer enjoys a brief, loving foster childhood in Suffolk before being wrenched back to the institution. Now a skilled wigmaker, she narrates the story of the abuse she suffered and the revenge killing she has calmly carried out.

At fifteen, Marianne meets charming, ambitious Simon at a country-house party in the 1950s and promises to love him “absolutely and forever”. When disaster derails his future and he disappears to Paris, she drifts into a kind marriage yet remains haunted by that first, consuming love.

On his sun‑bleached Greek island, seventeen‑year‑old Petros Castellanos seems destined to inherit his father’s small taxi fleet, while his English mother urges him toward education abroad. Sent to London, he is dazzled and overwhelmed, and must finally choose whose dreams, and which home, will define his life.