Stanley Price, who died in 2019, in his 88th year, could simply pick up the phone and take anyone to lunch - whether it be Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren. Roger Price reviews My Lunch With Marilyn And Other Stories.
NEW FICTION
- MUST READS Gwen is celebrating her 38th birthday by eating one of the best sticky toffee puddings she's ever tasted. But she has no one to share her day with.
- LITERARY FICTION Mae and Ari meet at the sticky end of a tequila-blasted night out. She is gay, confident and flits merrily from one affair to the next; his sexual preference is harder to pin down.
- PICTURE THIS Emma Thompson (pictured with her mother, Phyllida Law) keeps hers in her loo. John Legend has it in his piano bar.
- CLASSIC CRIME A hard-boiled, middle-aged gumshoe with time on his hands is persuaded to track down a missing dog, presumed stolen.
- CHILDREN'S This sequel to Welford's best-selling, moving and funny debut, Time Travelling With A Hamster, reunites us with Al Chaudhury, who travelled back decades to save his father.
- Antics of my war hero aunts This is the story of Archie and his hilarious aunts, Penny and Josephine. Nonagenarian war heroines, they're plastered with medals and are off to Paris to accept yet another.
Was my father the Nazis' last victim? In 1938, 11-year-old Robert Borger escaped Vienna thanks to a newspaper ad and a kindly British couple. But he could never escape the terror unleashed on Austria's Jews...
Among the listings for houses, stamps and musical instruments for sale in the summer of 1938, the Manchester Guardian carried a series of advertisements from Austrian parents seeking homes in Britain for their children. In the space of five months, the newspaper ran a total of 80 of these ads. Just a few lines long, and written in stilted English, there was no disguising the desperation in them. 'Fervent prayer in great distress' read one appeal, asking for a home for a 'healthy, clever, very musical' 13-year-old. Another begged for a philanthropist to take 'a much gifted girl' as a foster child. Journalist Julian Borger grew up with a vague impression that his father Robert had come to Britain from Vienna as a result of a newspaper ad, and after his father's death he managed to track it down. It read simply: 'I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.'