Böcker av Janis Spehr

Danger. Imprisonment. Death. This is the fate in store for anyone who dares defy the German authorities during their occupation on the island of Jersey during World War II. Undeterred, Lucy Schwob ('Claude') and Suzanne Malherbe ('Marcel') embark upon a campaign of rebellion. By day, the two women present to the world as quiet, cat-loving sisters; in reality they are lovers and saboteurs, using surrealist-inspired artworks to undermine and destabilise a tyrannous regime's power in an environment where no one is to be trusted. Captured in 1944 and faced with the threat of execution or deportation to a concentration camp, Lucy and Suzanne must draw on all their reserves of courage, imagination and tenacity, as well as their deep love, to survive separation, starvation and their own faltering will to live. Bowed but never broken completely, they greet freedom with ambivalence, knowing the price which has been paid for it by so many. Set against a backdrop of surveillance and fear, told in gleaming evocative prose which brings the ever-changing oceanic landscape to life, Claude & Marcel is a story of bittersweet triumph by twinned spirits, the shadow to her light, the electron which dances with her proton, the one seed of a dicotyledon which nestles next to the other.

Ladies, a plate please charts the life of Elizabeth Macguire, from childhood to middle age, in her quest for identity and selfhood. Activist, lover, sister, friend, Elizabeth follows her own rebellious star, beginning in rural sixties Australia in a family fractured by a child's death and the damaging silence of unexpressed grief. Her journey takes her through youthful romances to a complex and volatile relationship with Sarah, who seeks to reconcile her own family history of loss in a way which inevitably conflicts with Elizabeth's desire for autonomy. Wry, evocative and humorous, Ladies, a plate please is about struggle, change and the secrets people keep, from themselves and each other.