New Release Books by Lisa Appignanesi

''The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.'' After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry. In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Appignanesi uses all her evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society''s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives. With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the terrain of childhood, the way it forms our feelings of love and hate, and steers us towards a less tumultuous version of the everyday. This book may be short, but life, death, madness, love, and grandchildren, are all there - seen through the eyes of a writer who is ever aware of the historical and current vagaries of woman''s condition.

With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives. ‘We hear so many of the wrong words about refugees – ugly, limiting, unimaginative words – that it feels like a gift to find here so many of the right words which allow us to better understand the lives around us, and our own lives too.’ – Kamila Shamsie All profits go to the Gatwick Detainee Welfare Group and Kent Help for Refugees.

A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.

‘The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.’

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents'' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew. This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author''s own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

Half a century after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, have women really exchanged purity and maternity to become desiring machines inspired only by variations of sex, shopping and masochism - all coloured a brilliant neuro-pink? In this volume, fifty women young and old - writers, politicians, actors, scientists, mothers - reflect on the shades that inspired them and what being woman means to them today. Contributors include: Margaret Atwood, Joan Bakewell, Bidisha, Lydia Cacho, Shami Chakrabarti, Lennie Goodings, Linda Grant, Natalie Haynes, Siri Hustvedt, Kathy Lette, Kate Mosse, Pussy Riot, Bee Rowlatt, Elif Shafak, Ahdaf Soueif, Sandi Toksvig, Natasha Walter, Timberlake Wertenbaker Jeanette Winterson - alongside the three editors.

Thrilling and terrifying by turns, this is the gripping account of a young Jewish woman who survived World War Two by going to ground in Berlin. All around her Jews are being rounded up for deportation. Marie decides to survive. She takes off the yellow star, turns her back on the Jewish community, and vanishes into the city.

“[A work of] wit, wisdom and richness. . . . A grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia.” —John Leonard, Harper’s This fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries. Lisa Appignanesi charts a story from the days when the mad were considered possessed to our own century when the official psychiatric manual lists some 350 mental disorders. Women play a key role here, both as patients—among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe—and as therapists. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that women have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they have also inadvertently highlighted new patterns of illness.

Paris, 1900. Comte de Landois has ordered his wife Marguerite to travel from Paris, to join him in the Loire valley. Her journey into the pastoral quiet is shattered by the appearance of a dead man on the railway tracks. Who is he, and why does Marguerite''s young travelling companion pale when he sees him? When the Comte presents Marguerite with an adopted baby, and his sudden friendship with local clerics imposes new rules and regulations on her behavior, things start to take a sinister and troubling turn. A girl goes missing and so Marguerite calls in Chief Inspector Durand to help hunt her down. Intriguing, chilling, and lyrical, Sacred Ends is a rich and complex page-turner of a thriller that brings the Belle Epoque to life before soaring to its astonishing conclusion.

This daring debut novel explores the depths of the erotic psyche, telling the tale of a beautiful woman, the complex web of truths and lies that make up her life, and the outrageous act whose consequences will echo through several generations and span over two continents. "A saga of passion and heartbreak that will keep you guessing . . . superbly plotted".--Cosmopolitan.

A gripping psychological period thriller, presenting a hotbed of vice and murderous entanglements against the atmospheric backdrop of deeply troubling historical events.

Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan''s construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendored thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws on history, philosophy, psychology, literature, popular culture, and her own experience in order to tangle with love''s paradoxes through the span of our lives. Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, the passions of triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendship, illuminating the expectations, the joys and difficulties that accompany each stage.

Accessible and affordable illustrated biography about a famous feminist

WINNER OF THE 2005 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE AWARD. SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS'' PRIZE

In this sequel to the very successful Paris Requiem, Marguerite de Landois again finds herself embroiled in a mystery - this time involving her husband, the Count de Landois. She again calls upon Chief Inspector Durand to help her unravel the mystery. The setting of fin-de-siecle France is fascinating and atmospheric.

From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Théroigne de Méricourt, the Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untameable insanity in La Salpetrière asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan''s construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

The author presents a comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians and theatre directors have gathered since 1881. This edition is enriched with materials that have become more accessible in the post-Soviet era.

Being a singleton of thirty-something may have its problems. Being one as you approach fifty and have a teenage daughter to boot, would provide a challenge even to Jane Austen. Enter Jude Brautigan, divorcee, bookshop owner, daughter, mother, friend and fierce letter writer. Kicking fifty, Jude finds herself sandwiched between a demented mum and a rarely sensible daughter - whose hormones rage in a direction opposite to her own, though not always with dissimilar consequences.Jude doesn''t like to confess it, even to her old (and thus inevitably, feminist) self, but she still harbours perverse urges: she wouldn''t mind a lover; she wouldn''t even mind something a little more sentimentally permanent, though to speak of permanence at her waning age feels a little like tempting fate. Which is precisely what takes over in this warm and witty novel. After all, a sense of humour may be the only sense we''re finally left with.

Jack the B.

No modern writer has affected our views on women as powerfully as Sigmund Freud. And none has been so virulently attacked for both his theories of femininity and for his alleged elevation of personal prejudice to universal pronouncement. FREUD''S WOMEN examines that bold collaboration with his female patients which made psychoanalysis as much their creation as the young Viennese doctor''s. It explores Freud''s family life, his relations with daughter Anna, his ''Antigone'', and his friendships with his followers. From the writer and turn of the century ''femme fatale'', Lou Andreas Salome, to the socialist feminist, Helene Deutsch, early theorist of femininity, to Princesse Marie Bonaparte, who moved from couch to royal court with amazing facility and became head of the French psychoanalytic movement, Freud''s women friends and pupils were extraordinary.

Suspecting infidelity, Tessa decides to follow Stephen when he leaves for a conference in Paris. She discovers a different Stephen, one which has a number of contacts, both overt and covert, through which information has been disseminated since the Cold War.

Documents all sides of the Rushdie controversy, providing an international chronology of events, early reviews of the book, and articles giving differing viewpoints