Emma, a young wife and mother living in London at the end of the Swinging Sixties, has been offered an exciting job - she is to be one of the first female newsreaders. Intelligent and attractive, with a passion for facts and a mild yearning for notoriety, she can't wait. But then her husband David, an egocentric actor, demands that she accompany him to Herefordshire for a season at a provincial theatre festival. Faced with seven months of rural tedium, Emma begins to look elsewhere for entertainment, and finds her eyes settling on producer Wyndham. Full of charm and scandal, broken props and nasty bruises, The Garrick Year is a dazzling portrait of a marriage in crisis, and a woman determined to have a life of her own. 9781474611350 £8.99 [W&N classics logo].