Set in 1941 during the Blitz, A WORLD OF OTHER PEOPLE traces the love affair of Jim, an Australian pilot in Bomber Command, and Iris, a forthright Englishwoman finding her voice as a writer.The young couple, haunted by secrets and malign coincidence, struggles to build a future free of societys thin-lipped disapproval. The poet TS Eliot, with whom Iris shares firewatching duties, unwittingly seals their fate with his poem Little Gidding, one of the famous Four Quartets.

Three stories, three secrets, three marriages.

In a coastal village in Cork in 1969, a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife write letters to one another as they try to come to terms with a fatal illness.

On Australia’s west coast in 2011, a bookseller writes to her estranged partner in an attempt to understand what has happened to their relationship.

In Bournemouth in 1948, a retired English doctor writes letters to the love of his life, a German artist he lived with in Vienna during the 1930s.

The simple domestic lives of these three couples are set against conversations about intimacy, art, war and loss. Told in a series of unforgettable letters, this is a novel about love and what it means when it might be coming to an end.

In these thirteen short stories, Georgia Blain examines human nature in all its richness: out motivations, out desires and our shortcomings. The men in these tales frequently linger at the edges – their longings and failures exerting a subterranean pull on the women in their lives. In ‘The Secret Lives of Men’, a woman revisits her hometown and learns a long-held secret about her first boyfriend. In ‘The Bad dog Park’, a man’s devotion to his dog ultimately forces him to confront his true hopes and fears. And in ‘The Other Side of the River’, we watch as a woman makes a snap decision about her life’s future direction, with devastating consequences for her family. Written in Blain’s trademark unadorned yet powerful prose, these stories resonate long after they are finished.

‘A haunting, unsentimental exploration of the vexations and joys of modern life, family, love and desire.’ Kirsten Tranter