Falling Blossom Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams (Century, £12.99) It was the year of the Tokyo Olympics, 1964, when I married my Japanese bride and I thought at the time that I was among the first Englishmen to bring together the West and the Orient. I am therefore intrigued to discover a much earlier romance between a British Army officer and a beautiful Japanese woman an enduring love that bridged cultures, defied family opposition and survived the tragedy of the First World War. The book is written with the sensitivity that always permeates the artistic life of Japan, following the discovery of a treasure trove of letters written in calligraphy by the officer to Masa Suzuki during his various postings to Europe, India, Burma and Manchuria. The letters kept the flame alive. He called her the "supreme woman in the world". Masa's abundant patience over the decades of his absence, while she raised two sons alone, is a tribute to Japanese womanhood. The story goes beyond that, however. It crosses a great divide when such a deep liaison was unthinkable. In the authors' sure hands, this tale of devotion comes alive as an epic Madame Butterfly.

Lost Voices Of The Edwardians Max Arthur (HarperCollins, £20) So much has been written about the First World War and the Victorian empire that the first decade of the 20th century the time of many of our grandparents is an unexplored landscape. It was an age of great splendour or greater misery, according to the class into which one was born upstairs, downstairs in all its rich and rigid history. Max Arthur is a researcher with a huge appetite for the almost forgotten. A military historian, he has brought to the surface the memoirs of Royal Navy and Air Force and now has moved into the realm of social history with a highly creative study of the Edwardians. It was, of course, an era of technological progress, but also of grinding poverty, criminality and suffragettes, and at the other end of the scale the epicentre of leisure and pleasure. Then the brutal curtain came down on it all. Lost Voices penetrates to the core of Edwardian life with images in words and pictures a marvellous evocation of a neglected era.