Rosemary Hayward's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2024
• 2025

In The Sleepwalkers acclaimed historian and author of Iron Kingdom, Christopher Clark, examines
the causes of the First World War.

SUNDAY TIMES and INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012

The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed… show more.

How do you find someone who wants to be lost?

Sisters Alice and Natalie were once close, but adolescence has wrenched them apart. Alice loves books and birds in equal measure whilst Natalie, the beautiful one, is sexy and manipulative, effortlessly captivating men.

On their lakeside family holiday, Alice falls under the thrall of the enigmatic next-door-neighbour, a struggling young painter. Natalie seems strangely unmoved by the charismatic stranger in their midst. She tolerates the family sittings for the portrait Thomas is painting with a barely disguised distaste. But as the family portrait nears completion, the family dynamics shift irrevocably.… show more.

...Three Muses captivates the reader from the first page to the last.” —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and Enon

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls: a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path… show more.