Vanessa Curtis – författare

This is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational friendships with the key women in her life, including the caregivers of her Victorian childhood who instilled in her a lifelong battle between creativity and convention: her taciturn sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West; and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth.

This biography concentrates exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life. Vanessa Curtis looks both at the effect of these relationships on her emotional life and the inspiration that each woman provided for the female protagonists in her fiction.

My name is Inge. I am sixteen. I live with Mama and Papa in Munich. Food is still rationed, though the war ended over ten years ago. My boyfriend is Jewish. I have to hide this from my parents. I think they are hiding something from me, too. Letters arrive every year on my birthday, but they are not addressed to me. They are for a girl named Kasia. This is her story.'Powerful and harrowing' Mail on Sunday'A haunting beauty of a novel' Irish Times

Winner of the Young Quills Historical Novel Award. Longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. My name is Hanna Michelson. I am 15. I am Latvian. I live with my mother and grandmother. My father is missing - taken by the Russians. I have a boyfriend. When he holds my hand, everything feels perfect. I'm training to be a dancer. But none of that matters now. Because the Nazis have arrived, and I am a Jew. And as far as they are concerned, that is all that matters. This is my story.