PICCADILLY PICKS

LADY IN WAITING

Lady Anne Glenconner Hodder & Stoughton, $25 A fascinating autobiography by Lady Anne Glenconner, the eldest child of the Earl of Leicester. Anne led a privileged life, mixing with aristocratic families and becoming friends with the royal family. She became lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, and the two had a lifelong friendship dating back to their childhood. The telegram in which she was asked to be a maid of honour at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was a turning point in her life.

Her marriage to the eccentric and unpredictable Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconnor) was turbulent. They had five children, sadly losing two adult sons. Anne spent years nursing another son after his motorbike accident.

Upon his death in 2010, Colin left his sizable fortune to a former employee. Anne had to resurrect herself after this revelation. She has done so with courage and fortitude. An amazing story of a sometimes difficult privileged life.

I’m looking forward to reading Lady Anne’s candid sequel of her life story, Whatever Next? Lessons from an Unexpected Life.

- Helen Templeton

ACT OF OBLIVION

Robert Harris

Penguin, $37

Robert Harris has written more than a dozen bestsellers, with plots accurately based on historical events in eras ranging from Roman times to the 20th century. Here, it is 1660. Cromwell has been defeated and Charles II is on the throne. Parliament has resolved to try all signatories to the sentence of death on Charles I. Most will be hung, drawn and quartered. Richard Nayler has been given the responsibility of bringing all signatories to justice, dead or alive.

Two real life regicides, Colonel Edward Whalley and son-inlaw Colonel William Goffe, succeed in escaping England and reaching Cambridge, north of Boston, Massachusetts and to the care of fellow Puritan communities.

As the Royalist hunt for them intensifies they are forced north from family to family, from bedrooms to caves and hiding holes. Nayler has his own personal reasons for obsessively pursuing this hunt for more than a dozen years from his office in London.

Harris describes this period in detail, the political scene on both sides of the Atlantic, the rivalries among the Royalists, the fates of Londoners and the Whalley/Goffe families enduring a time of “Death, War, Famine and (awaiting) the Antichrist”.

- Neville Templeton