Joan Tate Livres

Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents' house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.

The wonderful women are Bella, married, mother of seven-year-old Thomas, and Rosa, married, mother of two daughters, including the enterprising Renee. The story opens in the summer of 1961, and covers the years in which their children grow into young adults through to the 1970s.

The man who founded Ikea at the age of seventeen in 1943 reveals how he built his business into the largest and most well-known furniture manufacturer in the world.

A crime novel about the murder of two people in Lapland during the winter.