Product details
- ISBN 9781068661365
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 05 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Manderley Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Susan Ertz was a popular novelist of the interwar years, best known for her novel Madame Claire, which was chosen as one of the first ten Penguin Books paperbacks in 1935; she also wrote In the Cool of the Day - later adapted into a film of the same name in 1963 - starring Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury.
However, one of her earlier titles - Woman Alive - is an important work in the canon of speculative fiction, until now largely forgotten among the works of her contemporaries such as George Orwell, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley.
Woman Alive is set in 1985 and is at once a satire and a commentary on the rising threat of nationalism in 1930s Britain. The novel is cinematic in structure, conjuring a world in which feminisim and pacifism are woven together to tell the story of Stella - an accidental survivor who became queen of England and the hope of humankind.
The relevance of this novel to 21st-century society is of course heightened post-Covid-19. But at its heart it is a love story, a romance of sorts and a page-turner extraordinaire.
Graham Norton began his broadcasting career as comedian and panellist on the BBC Radio Four show Loose Ends in the early 1990s. He has hosted various radio and TV shows, including the multi-BAFTA-winning The Graham Norton Show. Norton has written two memoirs, So Me and The Life and Loves of a He Devil. In 2016, he published his debut novel, Holding, followed by the bestselling A Keeper which tells of a New York-based academic returning to her Irish hometown after the death of her mother. Norton's third novel, Home Stretch, is a moving exploration of guilt and the search for a place to belong. He discovered Susan Ertz's novel Madame Claire at a church fete in West Cork, and was instantly smitten with her work.
Tom Gauld was born in Aberdeen and studied at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal College of Art. He is a cartoonist and illustrator with weekly comic strips in The Guardian and New Scientist. His comics have been published in the New York Times and on the cover of the New Yorker. He is the author of Goliath, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Mooncop, Baking with Kafka (winner of an Eisner Award), Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, Revenge of the Librarians and Physics for Cats. He lives with his family in London.
