Recommendation

Children's book. Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle. She is spoilt and contrary, but also very lonely. Then one day she finds out about a secret garden located in the ground of Misselthwaite Manor, locked and hidden for years, and discovers the most magical place...

In this book, Juliet Nicolson explores a fascinating moment in history, the years between 1918 and 1920, a painful reckoning for those who had lived through the peaceful Edwardian times and found themselves faced with a new and challenging reality.  Thanks to her insightful focus on daily life, Nicolson captures the fears and struggles of some as well as others' desire for a different future.

Green Knowe is a series of six children's novels written by Lucy M. Boston and illustrated by her son Peter Boston, published from 1954 to 1976. Based on Boston's home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, England, the books tell the story of the people who might have lived there in the past. Inhabited by spirits and supernatural entities, they are a children's classic for all ages.

With unprecedented access to official and private documents, Sarah Helm reconstructs the life of Vera Atkins, an intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. After the war, she was sent to find out what happened to the agents who were sent into Occupied France, many of whom had been killed, some of whom she had trained herself. But Vera Atkins lived a secret life, a life that even her closest family barely knew.

It's 1942 and Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, is embarking on a dangerous journey to Occupied France, officially to run an errand for British special operations, but unofficially to look for her missing lover, an English airman. When she arrives to the village of Lavaurette, she finds herself forced to confront the terrible truth of what had been happening in Europe as well as a terrible secret threatening her future.

In this insightful and fascinating book, Virginia Nicholson paints a portrait of the Bohemians in England, the artistic community that flourished in the early twentieth century, and their subversive social experiment.