Hope Clearwater, a young ethologist, sits alone on an African beach reflecting on two upheavals in her life: the disintegration of her marriage to an obsessive mathematician in England, and her work at a chimpanzee research project in Africa caught in the middle of a civil war. Witnessing violent behaviour among chimps that contradicts her famous supervisor's published theories, Hope is forced to confront difficult truths about science, power, and human and animal nature. A landmark novel by William Boyd, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

"I sat alone on Brazzaville Beach and thought about the nature of things."

When actress Nelly Ternan met Charles Dickens in 1857, she was eighteen and he was forty-five, a celebrated and married author. Their relationship lasted thirteen years and destroyed his marriage, while erasing Nelly from the public record. Drawing on diaries, correspondence and photographs, Claire Tomalin reconstructs the hidden life of a Victorian woman and provides fresh insight into the greatest novelist of the age. Winner of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.

A scholarly detective story that restores a forgotten woman to her rightful place in literary history.