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Available for over a year

Amy Tan, bestselling writer of The Joy Luck Club, the Kitchen God's Wife and three other novels, has a new book out after nearly eight years. The Valley of Amazement is an ambitious historical novel spanning nearly fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century through to the start of the Second World War. It moves between America and China but the main story is set in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, told through the voice of Violet Minturn, daughter of the American mistress of Shanghai's most exclusive courtesan house. The visual flamboyance and evolutionary tenacity of flowers inspire choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh's latest work, Strange Blooms, which has been commissioned by London's Southbank Centre to celebrate her company's 25th anniversary. Shobana and fashion historian Caroline Cox discuss the ways in which our depiction of flowers in culture and fashion have changed. François Mitterrand was one of the key architects of modern Europe but also a deeply ambiguous figure: a civil servant in the Vichy government but also a Resistance leader; a left-wing politician but not a socialist; a man who maintained a long-term mistress and the child they had together alongside his 'official' family. Anne talks to the author of a new biography, Philip Short. Image Credit: Chris Nash.