The Dressmaker (Bainbridge novel) role. The Dressmaker (Bainbridge novel) The Dressmaker (US title The Secret Glass) is a gothic psychological novel written by Beryl Bainbridge. In 1973, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like many of Bainbridge's earlier works, the novel is semi-autobiographical. In particular, the story was inspired by a relationship that she had with a soldier as a teenager. The characters of Nellie and Margo were based upon two of her paternal aunts. Set in Liverpool and Lancashire during World War II, a repressed dressmaker and her sister struggle looking after their 17-year-old niece, who is having a delusional affair with
The Secret Lovers (novel) The Secret Lovers (novel) The Secret Lovers, published by E.P. Dutton in 1977, was the third of seven novels by the American novelist Charles McCarry to feature an American intelligence agent named Paul Christopher. It takes place in 1960 and '61, a year after the events in the first Christopher novel, "The Miernik Dossier", published in 1973, and three years before the beginning of "The Tears of Autumn", published in 1974, which was actually the second book McCarry wrote about Christopher. Later books by McCarry, ten in all as of 2013, expanded from focusing solely on Christopher into what might