FURTHER READING

I read countless works of non-fiction whilst writing this book to help with detail, fact, atmosphere, layering – some of my favourites are listed below.

I read countless works of non-fiction whilst writing this book to help with detail, fact, atmosphere, layering – some of my favourites are listed below

The Long Weekend: Life in the English country
house between the wars, Adrian Tinniswood
The Story of the Country House: A history of places and people,
Clive Aslet 
The London Rich – Peter Thorold
Lost London, 1820-1945 – Philip Davies
Anything Goes, A biography of the Roaring 20s
– Lucy Moore
The Damned and the Beautiful, Paula S Fass (US in 20s)
S Children Etc, under Fass, Paula
Inventing the French Riviera, Mary Blume
Chanel’s Riviera, Anne de Courcy
The Riviera Set, Mary S Lovell
The West End Front by Matthew Sweet
Queen Bees by Sian Evans
Living Well is the Best Revenge, Calvin Tomkins
Everybody was so young, Amanda Vaill
The Crazy Years – Paris in the Twenties, William Wiser

A moveable feast, Ernest Hemingway
The Splendid and the Vile Erik Larson
Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After,
Honoria Murphy Donnelly
London at War, Philip Ziegler
Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 Juliet Gardiner
London War Notes, Molly Panter Downes
F.Scott Fitzgerald, Andé le Vot
Save me the Waltz Zelda Fitzgerald
Americans in Paris (1921-1931): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed
Citizens of London, Lynne Olson
Road to Divorce – Lawrence Stone
Marriage & Morals, Bertrand Russell, 1929,
The Red Devils – GC Norton
Ready for Anything Julian Thompson
The Paras – John Parker
The Second D Day Jaques Robichon
Kick: the true story of Kick Kennedy, JFKs forgotten sister, Paula Byrne
Requisitioned: the British Country House in the Second World War by John Martin Robinson

PLAYLIST

Spotify

I’ll be seeing you – Billie Holiday
Any Billie Holiday is perfection in my mind, but I always imagine Jean listening to this particular song as she waits on her terrace to see David that last time at the house in France.

Let’s Do It – Cole Porter
Cole Porter and his wife Linda were very much part of that first set of fashionable Americans to stay on in the south of France beyond the previously acceptable spring season. This song always makes me smile.

Ain’t Misbehaving – Fats Waller
Written at the end of the 1920s, Waller’s lazy voice and the gathering beat brings to mind drinks somewhere beautiful, with the sea sparkling beyond and an evening ahead whose end is enticingly undecided….

Paris, Paris, Paris – Josephine Baker
Paris and the Folies Bergere when it got going: what could be more exhilarating? And Josephine Baker with her iconic banana skirt and necklace, shimmying her hips and singing takes you right there to the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties.

Lady be Good – Django Reinhardt
His upbeat, carefree jazz guitar music conjures up the heat and the tempo of those early 30s years between the wars; when life was good and the gathering clouds still seemed far off.

I ain’t got nothing but the blues
– Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald
I think of this playing in the buzzing Antibes of the mid 1930s (being a little elastic with my timings, but hey, it’s in my head so I can!) or possibly in the Stork Rooms in New York – that swing and the brass sound and Ella Fitzgerald’s unbeatable voice….

Woncha come on home – Joan Armatrading
Pinching this song from the brilliant soundtrack to Emily Mortimer’s adaptation The Pursuit of Love. If you’ve read my novel, you’ll know its final part carries some real sadness for my central character and so I think this song, and though she’d have to have got in a time machine to hear it, would
be in sympathy with her mood at the novel’s end.