Charlotte Gray, Sebastian FaulksSet in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war. It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love

Scott Adams skewered the absurdities of the corporate world

won’t be there to walk her down the aisle

An enormously influential 17th-century classic

like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet

and far to the north

and anything reclaimed from French factories

At the time

1936 in the Crown Colony of Singapore

else letter stamps might get jammed

The UK's best selling hardback debut novel of 2016 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Evening Standard

the result of reckless youthful mischief

they do—brightly