Alison Jean Lester – författare

After a life marbled with exploration, academia, and domesticity, the writer Valerie Lester retired to a residential hospice and set about enjoying the final act of her life. Yes. Enjoying. She knew just where she wanted to be, with whom, doing what, and she communicated this to her family and friends with clarity and consistency. She died nine weeks later, having engaged in dying with equanimity, curiosity, and even amusement.Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying describes the months novelist Alison Jean Lester spent with her mother. Motivated to write the book because of how her mother faced the fact that her cancer was terminal, and how she chose to approach the end of her life with the same positive energy with which she had lived, Lester shares the emotional, medical, logistical and social aspects of this extraordinary experience. The book also includes a chapter on the death of her father, who faced his own terminal illness, ALS (motor neurone disease), with a similar rejection of extreme life-prolonging measures and with the desire to spend his final days in peace, nine years before. There is a chapter, too, on Lester's aunt, who died three months after her mother, having taken a very different approach to the idea, and the reality, of dying. Woven into the narrative are poems both by the author and her mother, as they shared the impulse to grapple with life's challenges through poetry. The book is interspersed with diverse, emotional illustrations by artist and graphic designer Mary Ann Frye. A good friend of both the author and her mother, Frye processed the death of her friend in drawings while the author was processing it in words.

It's November in Massachusetts. Leo Coffin is making a birthday cake for his wife, Liv, due home soon from a trip to Norway, when a stranger comes to the door claiming to be Liv's half-brother, Morten. Too polite to make the stranger wait until Liv is home before letting him in, Leo unleashes a troubling, fascinating force into his quiet life. When Liv returns, unable to separate fact from fiction, Leo is forced to live with mystery upon mystery, as well as a secret he's been keeping himself. Can his marriage survive the fiction? Can it survive the truth?

When Su, a divorced mother of one daughter, falls in love with Jeremy, a widowed father of two sons, they want to build a life together, but neither of their houses in Worcester is big enough for a family of five. They decide to build a dream house in farmland outside the city, in which to live happily ever after. For sound designer Su, it's an opportunity to create an embracing home and heal past wounds, while Jeremy sees a chance to impress his overbearing father. The Sound of It looks at parenting and at step-parenting, when expectations are high, dreams are big, and the Internet is very dangerous.

'I absolutely loved it. A delight . . . so fresh and clever and subversive' Kate Atkinson'I completely loved Lillian on Life. What a great voice, what energy and wit . . . very original and often extremely funny' Karen Joy FowlerLillian, a single, well-travelled woman of a certain age, wakes up next to her married lover and looks back at her life. It's not at all the life she expected.Walking the unpaved road between traditional and modern options for women, Lillian has grappled with parental disappointment, society's expectations and the vagaries of love and sex. As a narrator she's bold and witty, and her reflections - from 'On Getting to Sex' to 'On the Importance of Big Pockets' or 'On Leaving in Order to Stay' - reverberate originally and unpredictably.In Lillian on Life, Alison Jean Lester has created a brutally honest portrait of a woman living through the post-war decades of change in Munich, Paris, London and New York. Her story resonates with the glamour and energy of those cities. Charming, sometimes heartbreaking, never a stereotype, Lillian is completely herself; her view of the world is unique. You won't soon forget her.

'A mystery, a love story and a fascinating encounter with a different culture, Yuki Means Happiness is an outstanding novel' John Boyne Diana is young and uneasy in a new relationship when she leaves America and moves halfway around the world to Tokyo seeking adventure. In Japan she takes a job as a nanny to two-year-old Yuki Yoshimura and sets about adapting to a routine of English practice, ballet and swimming lessons, and Japanese cooking.But as Diana becomes increasingly attached to Yuki she also becomes aware that everything in the Yoshimura household isn't as it first seemed. Before long, she must ask herself if she is brave enough to put everything on the line for the child under her care, confronting her own demons at every step of the way. Yuki Means Happiness is a rich and powerfully illuminating portrait of the intense relationship between a young woman and her small charge, as well as one woman's journey to discover her true self.