The Darling Girls begins with the funeral of Leo Bruck, a world-famous conductor, and a man whose life was inevitably steeped in music. Victoria, his partner of more than twenty years and mother of his two children, believes that Leo listened only to classical music. Indeed, she herself was once a professional cellist.

For the funeral she chooses one of his own recordings, Mozart’s beautiful 'Requiem in D minor', followed by Bach’s moving ‘Ich steh mit einem Fuss im Grabe’ (‘I stand with one Foot in the Grave’).

In July, 2009, twenty-three-year-old Darlene Haynes, eight months pregnant at the time, was strangled to death with an electric cord.  Her abdomen was then cut open and the nearly full-term fetus removed.  The perpetrator turned out to be her close friend, Julie Corey, who had suffered a miscarriage three months earlier and evidently felt that the most efficient way of replacing her own lost baby was to murder her friend and rip the unborn child from her womb.

Political correspondent and bestselling author Stephen Bates tells us why 1846 was such a pivotal year for Britain and why he chose to write about it in his new book, Penny Loaves and Butter Cheap: Britain in 1846, which hits the shops tomorrow.

HoZ are excited to announce that two titles from our extensive non-fiction list have been nominated for The Paddy Power Political Book Awards, which seek to recognise the very best in political writing and publishing.

I had always thought of Lauren as tough, invincible almost, because she could beat the guys at pool and darts at our local pub The White Hart. Joe and I spent too much time in there and Lauren often joined us. She was very attractive and could have had any number of men but she seemed to revel in her single status. She could be sarcastic too and she kept most people at a distance.