Soundtrack Jonny Greenwood: There Will Be Blood (LP)

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way • For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, but will she be able to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation? Or will her daughter, Zoe, only see Joyce as similarly trapped? • A poignant tale of navigating mothering and womanhood in twentieth century Britain, Everything Will Be All Right is yet another work of the finest beauty from Tessa Hadley

Christmas: a time of year when emotions run high and long-held secrets can unexpectedly surface… • This Year It Will Be Different powerfully evokes the lives of wives, husbands, children, friends and lovers. As the festivities take hold, there are step-families grappling with exes; long-married couples faced with in-law problems; a wandering husband choosing between the other woman and his wife; a child caught up in a grown-up tug-of-war

It is April 1793 and the final power struggle of the French Revolution is taking hold: the aristocrats are dead and the poor are fighting for bread in the streets. In a Paris swept by fear and hunger lives Gamelin, a revolutionary young artist appointed magistrate, and given the power of life and death over the citizens of France. But his intense idealism and unbridled single-mindedness drive him inexorably towards catastrophe. Published in 1912, The Gods Will Have Blood is a breathtaking story of the dangers of fanaticism, while its depiction of the violence and devastation of the Reign of Terror is strangely prophetic of the sweeping political changes in Russia and across Europe