Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. 

In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors - from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson - at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. 

Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests. 

Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism. Encompassing all this rich history, this is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany.

A harrowing and beautiful novel of the travails of West African immigrants in France, this is the story of three women who say no: 

• Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another victim of his paternity
• Fanta, who leaves a contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her boyfriend back to France, where his depression and dislocation poison everything
• Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband's family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin in France

As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against those who have made themselves the fastest-growing and most-reviled people in Europe. 

In Marie NDiaye's stunning narration we see the progress by which ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength.