Emma Tennant Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Colour of Rain (1964)
  2. The Time of the Crack (1973)
  3. The Last of the Country House Murders (1974)
  4. Hotel de Dream (1976)
  5. Bananas (1977)
  6. The Bad Sister (1978)
  7. Wild Nights (1979)
  8. The Boggart (1980)
  9. Alice Fell (1980)
  10. The Search for Treasure Island (1981)
  11. Queen of Stones (1982)
  12. Woman Beware Woman (1983)
  13. The Ghost Child (1984)
  14. Black Marina (1985)
  15. The Adventures of Robina (1986)
  16. The House of Hospitalities (1987)
  17. A Wedding of Cousins (1988)
  18. The Magic Drum (1989)
  19. Two Women of London (1989)
  20. Sisters and Strangers (1990)
  21. An Unequal Marriage (1991)
  22. Dare’s Secret Pony (1992)
  23. Faustine (1992)
  24. Tess (1993)
  25. Pemberley (1993)
  26. Elinor and Marianne (1996)
  27. Emma in Love (1996)
  28. Princess Cinderella and the Beautiful Sisters (1996)
  29. Girlitude (1999)
  30. The Children of Paradise (1999)
  31. Midnight Book (1999)
  32. Sylvia and Ted (2001)
  33. The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001)
  34. Adele (2002)
  35. Felony (2002)
  36. Heathcliff’s Tale (2005)
  37. The Harp Lesson (2005)
  38. The French Dancer’s Bast*ard (2006)
  39. The Amazing Marriage (2006)
  40. Thornfield Hall (2007)
  41. Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (2007)
  42. The Autobiography of the Queen (2007)
  43. Seized (2008)
  44. The Beautiful Child (2010)
  45. Hitler’s Girls (2014)

Omnibus

  1. Queen of Stones / Alice Fell (1987)
  2. Travesties (1995)
  3. Pemberley Revisited (2005)

Non fiction

  1. Hooked Rugs (1995)
  2. Strangers (1998)
  3. Burnt Diaries (1999)
  4. A House in Corfu (2001)
  5. Corfu Banquet (2003)
  6. Diana (2008)
  7. Waiting for Princess Margaret (2009)
  8. Did We Meet On Grub Street? (2014)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Emma Tennant Books Overview

The Bad Sister

Brings together for the first time three of Tennant’s most acclaimed works that share a spiritual affinity. ‘The Bad Sister‘ and ‘Two Women of London’ investigate two Scottish masterpieces of the macabre ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.

An Unequal Marriage

The Darcys have two children, Miranda and Edward. Miranda is a model daughter, well attuned to life at Pemberley and, were it not for her sex, would make a perfect heir. Edward, alas, would not. Awful questions arise about the sucession at Pemberley.

Faustine

A reworking of the Faust legend in which a 48 year old grandmother walks into a TV store and is given a contract by the salesman offering her a lease of beauty and youth. The novel examines how a woman’s view of the world can be altered beyond recognition. The author also wrote ‘The Bad Sister’.

Pemberley

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a son and heir…
Thus begins Emma Tennant’s inspired sequel to Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice. With wit and style and genuine insight into character, Pemberley brilliantly delineates the perils and pleasures of a marriage between two people as strong willed and prickly as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.A year after wedding, Christmas approaches. As happy as she has been living in relative seclusion with Mr. Darcy and his sister Georgiana at their magnificent Derbyshire estate, Pemberley, Elizabeth is sensible that the time has come to invite her mother and sister to visit her. What begins as a small and manageable family party although any party any includes the regrettable Mrs. Bennet will take considerable managing soon grows all out of proportion. A gathering including the Bennets, the Bingleys, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh as affable and condescending as ever can only mean missteps, gaffes and hurt feelings. When Darcy becomes increasingly distant and Elizabeth falls prey to vicious gossip, the forces of pride and prejudice are at work once again.

Sylvia and Ted

A fictional re creation of the turbulent courtship, marriage, and separation of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In intense, dramatic prose, Emma Tennant unfolds a story of passion, conflict, and betrayal. Creating a series of unforgettable images she reconstructs the twentieth century’s most famous literary love affair and the tempestuous triangle between Hughes, Plath, and Assia Wevill. Filled with mounting suspense and lurking danger, Sylvia and Ted is a tale that culminates in tragedy, leaving in its wake a hundred unanswered questions. Tennant was drawn to the subject partly as a result of her past relationship with Hughes and because of the legs that surround him and the two women who loved him. Though imaginative fiction, her novel vividly evokes the social and literary circles in which Plath and Hughes traveled and with the complexities, needs, and desires of three talented yet tortured people whose story continues to capture the imagination of readers.

Adele

The daughter of the celebrated Parisian actress C line Varens, Ad le is a homesick, forlorn eight year old when she is first brought to Thornfield Hall by Edward Fairfax Rochester, her mother’s former lover and though the grand estate’s brooding lord refuses to acknowledge it quite possibly Ad le’s father. Lonely and ill at ease in the cold, unfamiliar English countryside, the sad, precocious child longs to return to the glitter of Paris…
and to the arms of the mother who has been lost to her. But a small ray of sunshine brightens her eternal gloom when a stranger arrives to school and care for her: a mousy and serious yet intensely loving young governess named Jane Eyre. As the years pass, Ad le watches with wonder as an unexpected romance blossoms between her governess and her guardian even as her curiosity leads her deeper into the shadowy manor, toward the dark and terrible secret that is locked away in a high garret. And on Jane and Rochester’s planned wedding day, it is Ad le who is instrumental in bringing about the fiery catastrophe that shatters her ‘family’ and sends her fleeing, frightened and alone, back to France. But Paris is no longer the glamorous ideal she remembers. Intent on finding her mother, Ad le is soon lost in a world of sham sparkle and ruthless exploiters. Yet her will remains strong as she grows and learns, determined to follow her solitary odyssey to its inevitable conclusion, as she like Jane Eyre and the tormented Edward Rochester searches for salvation and love amid the ruins of misfortune. A novel of wondrous imagination and vivid intensity, Emma Tennant’s Ad le brilliantly captures the nuances and spirit of the cherished classic that inspired it, while being a bold and original literary work that stands firmly and gloriously on its own.

The Harp Lesson

Set in Revolutionary France, this atmospheric novel explores the life of La Belle Pamela’. As a child Pamela Sims is taken from England to the French court, where she is brought up in luxury as the illegitimate daughter of Madame de Genlis. Exploring how her past shaped the extraordinary lives of Pamela and her daughter, this novel captures the atmosphere of 18th century France and the complexity of a world where your origins are everything.

Thornfield Hall

Adele, the daughter of a celebrated Parisian actress, is a homesick, forlorn eight year old when first brought to Thornfield Hall by Edward Fairfax Rochester, her mother’s former lover. Lonely and ill at ease in the unfamiliar English countryside, she longs to return to the glitter of Paris…
and to the mother who has been lost to her.

But a small ray of sunshine brightens her eternal gloom when a stranger arrives to care for her a serious yet intensely loving young governess named Jane Eyre even as young Adele’s curiosity leads her deeper into the shadowy manor, toward the dark and terrible secret that is locked away in a high garret…
.

Includes fascinating in depth background material about Charlotte Bront and the Jane Eyre legacy

Confessions of a Sugar Mummy

What do older women want? And older than what, anyway? Love, flattery, an end to baby sitting, a night out without falling asleep in the soup? Or the very last chance of gratifying desire, of finding a soul mate, even if it means paying over the odds…
? It’s awful, really to admit to some of the stupid things we do…
Confessions of a Sugar Mummy‘ provides the frequently hilarious answer to the most pressing questions for women who have reached A Certain Age: Am I past it? Am I invisible, and if so what can I do about it? And why is the pursuit of happiness an acceptable goal for all members of the human race except Old Bags? Money, as so often, turns out to be the solution. And when a sixty something with frankly limited prospects, finds her London flat is worth a fortune, she jumps at the chance of entering the world of property with the glamorous younger Frenchman, Alain. Until, to her horror, she realises she can’t turn back, until the final question is answered: Can Money Buy Me Love? ‘Confessions of a Sugar Mummy‘ provides laughs and a few tears all the way to the Bank.

The Autobiography of the Queen

Queen Elizabeth has gone AWOL from Balmoral and no one can find her. Where has she gone and why? This winsome, if unlikely, account of the Queen’s disappearance, recounts the monarch’s solo journey to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, to take possession of her recently purchased home in the idyllic sounding Joli Estate. Here, after more than half a century on the throne, she will recall the years of her reign in peace and tranquility, in the guise of her new identity as Gloria Smith. But the house is no more than a muddy hole in the ground, and the Queen must punt. She is not used to asking for anything, carrying cash, fending for herself, introducing herself, or being ignored. The story of the sovereign’s sojourn in her former colony is a funny and touching account of the sometimes contentious and occasionally baffling friendship between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and a scruffy young St. Lucian, Austin Ford. How this radical change of life and circumstance affects the Queen and how she changes as a result make for a hilarious and moving tale, in which her need for her subjects is as marked as their dependence on her staying on the throne.

Seized

15 year old Alice is sent to Corfu for the summer holidays to stay with Cara, a family friend. She finds herself isolated and vulnerable and soon suspects that all is not as it appears. Is she being held a prisoner, and will she discover what really happened to her parents? Emma Tennant perfectly captures the voice of a teenager today in a thrilling mystery which will appeal to adults and young people

Strangers

A delightful and elegant literary memoir about the Scottish novelist’s eccentric family.

Selected as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year and shortlisted for the prestigious Scottish Saltire Literary Award, Strangers is a literary memoir by Emma Tennant, the Scottish novelist whose eccentric family is described here in a pristine and elegant style. The story begins in 1912, as the world is about to break into war. Emma’s grandmother, the dreamy and beautiful Pamela, maintains an ongoing feud with Emma’s great aunt Margot wife of Britain’s Prime Minister. Pamela’s son Bim dies on the Somme, and his sacrifice is accepted ‘as if death lies in the faint outline of garden where it merges with rushes and reedbeds.’ Gradually, we encounter Emma herself, a lonely child left at the enormous family estate, Glen, during World War II, witnessing the mysterious comings and goings of her extended family including her aunt, the wayward, thrice married Clare.

Deeply evocative and atmospheric, and written with stunning detail, Strangers is, as The Guardian explains: ‘a historical chronicle but also a reverie on where you put your family inside yourself.’

A House in Corfu

The story of an unspoiled island and an English family making a home by the Aegean Sea. In the early 1960s Emma Tennant’s parents, on a cruise, spotted a magical bay and decided to build a house there. This book is the story of that house, Rovinia, set above the bay in Corfu where legend has it Ulysses was shipwrecked and found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. It is also the story of the couple who have been at Rovinia since the feast in the grove that followed the roof raising Maria, a miraculous cook and the presiding spirit of the house, and her husband, Thodoros and of the inhabitants of the local village, high on the hill above the bay. Tennant offers us the delights of quotidian adventures salt water in the well, roads to nowhere, collapsing walls all hilariously presented. That the house is still lived in and loved, with new generations coming to understand the delights of Corfu, is a tribute to the people and a special landscape which is distinctly Greek. Full of color and contrast, A House in Corfu shows the huge changes in island life since the time of the Tennants’ arrival, and celebrates, equally, the joy of belonging to a timeless world: the world of vine, olive, and sea.

Diana

What happens when a person returns, unrecognized, to place and situation they left long ago? Will some see a ghost, or perhaps a threat? Can the past be altered, or the future changed? When Prince Harry arrives at Balmoral to convalesce after a bungee jumping accident in Bali, he is accompanied by Sister Julia, a plain looking nurse who dotes on her charge. Julia’s behavior provokes instant dislike and suspicion in two senior royal servants, the formidable housekeeper Janet McDuff and Prince Charles’s equerry David Baron. Julia seems to know her way around the castle when she first arrives, and the famous corgis tumble at her feet in a loving pack. Furthermore, she greets Prince William as if she has known him all his life. When a sapphire engagement ring, recently bestowed on Camilla, is discovered under Prince Harry s bed, Julia acts as though she recognizes it. The arrival of an unscheduled visitor at the Queen’s wild boar sausage barbecue tests Her Majesty’s royal composure, and Julia is accused of spying on Charles and Camilla. This witty and sympathetic account of Sister Julia s experiences among the castle s frosty inhabitants provides merriment and insight.

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