It is 1939, and great changes come running to meet them all, snatching at their innocence and steadfast convictions and tossing them far away. Alice, Ben and Guy travel overseas, serving in the same war but on very different battlegrounds. For those who stay behind, Judith, Louise, Claire and Daphne, the struggle is to preserve the home, to keep things going, no matter what. But the sudden insecurity of the war confuses them. it gives them new strengths and fresh dreams, but leaves them still fu...
Tom Norris has problems of his own, and chief among them is: who is he? It is a time of general stress and strain, for Tom is Assistant Education Officer to the South Sussex Council, and the County Hall, long threatened by wind and rain on its bleak headland, is about to meet its destruction at the hands of a Boundaries Commission. Where can its strange and unnerved inhabitants find another refuge? While Tom pursues his quest for identity and purpose, he reluctantly takes into his office Phoebe...
FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE LAST PEARL AND THE CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER, this is a beautiful and dramatic novel about family secrets, wartime betrayal and redemption. When Isobel Morton takes over the café in Lichfield’s market square, she has big plans. Soon renamed The Victory Café, with a menu that delights despite rations, the girls who work at the Vic are swept away by Belle’s lust for life. Among the regular customers is a trio of soldiers from the nearby American base and waitress D...
The Four Swans is the masterful sixth novel in Winston Graham's hugely popular Poldark series, which has become a television phenomenon starring Aidan Turner.Cornwall 1795-1797. Although Ross Poldark – now something of a war hero – seems secure in his hard-won prosperity, a new dilemma faces him in the sudden infatuation of a young naval officer for his wife Demelza.All four women – the four swans – whose lives touch Ross’s, face a crisis in these years. For his wife Demelza, his old love Elizab...
First published in 1924, "C" is arguably Maurice Baring's most famous book and best novel. In it, Baring looks back affectionately, to what he calls, the 'golden swan-song of European life before the First World War', drawing a picture of exclusive family life clouded only by the distant rumblings of the Boer War. Against this pageant of an age, Baring presents Caryl Bramsley (the 'C' of the title), a young man of great promise, of culture but not achievement, an aspiring writer, whose life is a...
Continuing the saga begun in Annie Murray's Chocolate Girls, and set in 1960s Birmingham, The Bells of Bournville Green is a story of families whose lives are entwined, of belonging and loss . . . and of a young woman's search for transforming love.Pretty seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father, and loathing her mother's latest boyfriend, Greta finds life hard at home and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory.Greta soon decides that her...
Book Three in the gorgeous Girls in Blue series by bestselling author Fenella J. Miller London, 1942: Charlotte Fenimore is back home on a week's leave from the Women's Auxiliary Airforce. She had planned for a week of rest and recuperation. She hadn't planned to fall deeply in love with an irascible detective called Dan Chalmers, a severely wounded hero of Dunkirk who believed no woman would ever look at him again. DI Chalmers is in London to arrest a gang of dangerous East End criminals and...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equati...
A heart-warming and atmospheric Christmas novella set in the heart of wartime London, from the Queen of East End sagas Jean FullertonIt's December 1940 and East London is expecting snow. But after months of nightly visits from the Luftwaffe, it will take more than a white Christmas to turn the bombed streets of Stepney festive. Young Eleanor Jolly, newly widowed after her husband stopped a German bullet on Dunkirk beach, is trying to pull through for the sake of her baby James. Her mother-in-law...
The New York Times bestselling author of the Six Tudor Queens series explores the private side of the legendary king Henry VIII and his dramatic and brutal reign in this extraordinary historical novel. “A delightful yarn . . . an all-around fun read about a king and a cad.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Having completed her Six Tudor Queens series of novels on the wives of Henry VIII, extensively researched and written from each queen's point of view, Alison Weir now gives Henry himself a vo...
A heartbreaking saga of true love against all odds. A tragic house fire kills both her parents, but Constance Shelton escapes, rescued by her eight-year-old neighbour, Matt Heath. She is brought up by her grandparents, but the two children become inseparable and, as she enters her teens, these strong feelings turn into love. But Matt sees her only as a sister and Constance can do nothing when he proposes to another girl. When Constance discovers that the fire that killed her parents wasn't an ac...
The second and continuing story of the Cartarett family. World War Two is over, the children are growing up and leaving home, and Esther finds it hard to adjust to having just the youngest, April, left at home. Tensions build at number twelve Kestrel Road in Portsmouth with a series of worrying events, and it looks as if Harry and Esther are drifting apart. The arrival of another grandchild, and April's success with her singing, help them come to terms with their changing lives. David, Alex,...
Unbound: A Tale of Love and Betrayal in Shanghai is the sweeping, multigenerational story of two women-a grandmother and granddaughter-who fight to carve out a place for themselves as women in Shanghai society. Mini Pao lives with her sister and two parents in the British-occupied Shanghai of the 1930s, renowned for its vibrant night life, stunning architecture, and repressive social mores. Mini's struggle to provide for herself and her family while grappling with her desire for romance and in...
The Glendon family seek a new home and fortune in The Lucky Country after Patrick's farm in Ireland is bankrupted by a freak storm. Their journey traverses the epic landscape of Australia and their fate collides with a cast of equally lost souls on the vast wheat and sheep station in Western Australia owned by Jack Anderson, a man as tough and ruthless as his pioneering father. Australia in the early 1960's was a world on the brink of change. The Lucky Country strained under its White...
Sold into marriage, can she prove her true worth? Another heart-wrenching, gripping story from the Queen of Sagas. Banished from her father's sight and home since the age of four, wheelchair-bound Esther Kerral is horrified when she is forced into an arranged marriage with Morgan Cosmore, the son of a local factory owner. Both fathers hope the union will save their ailing businesses; little do they know that each is as bankrupt as the other. Now trapped in a loveless marriage, Esther is deter...
In the Cornish mining village of Meryen, a secret never stays a secret for very long...No one knows this better than the beautiful yet distressed Tara Nankervis, who is forced to share a devastating secret with her much older and destructive husband, Joshua. Out of options, she plans to leave once and for all, taking her daughter Rosa Grace with her. But will she have the courage to leave everything behind, or is home truly where the heart is?Note: previously published as Out of Shadows
Vienna is an acclaimed saga covering three generations of a partly-Jewish Viennese family. Although it progresses from the female narrator's father's birth to the end of his life, there is constant movement backwards and forwards in time, while each chapter tends to concentrate on one particular family member or group. Grandfather married out, to the sandy-haired beauty Frieda, and his sister Gustl married nice-but-dim 'Dolly' Konigsberger, the non-Jewish bank manager beloved for his malapropi...
Scandal, drama, sexual obsession, dissent, rivalry - these potent ingredients make for an engrossing and passionate tale set against the dramatic scenery of Cornwall, the turbulent criminal underworld of London and the climactic events of the French revolution. In this seventh novel in the series, life with the Lovedays is not confined to England and France. America has won its independence but the Lovedays have connections in Virginia and the new penal colony in Australia has become the residen...
For decades they have remained close, sharing recipes and customs, and shaped by ancient ways. They are the Hindi-Bindi Club, a nickname given by their daughters to the mothers who left India to start anew daughters now facing struggles of their own. For Kiran, Preity and Rani, adulthood means balance, from the ways they tweak their mothers' cooking to rejecting their parents' beliefs. But will they have the courage of the Hindi-Bindi Club to hold on to their dreams - or create new ones?
The second in the bestselling new Conqueror series on Genghis Khan, it is a wonderful, epic story which Conn Iggulden brings brilliantly to life. The gathering of the tribes of the Mongols has been a long time in coming but finally, triumphantly, Temujin of the Wolves, Genghis Khan, is given the full accolade of the overall leader and their oaths. Now he can begin to meld all the previously warring people into one army, one nation. But the task Genghis has set himself and them is formidable. He...
On the eve of World War II in a place called Half-Village, a man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. Using his 'golden hands' he decides to turn her family's modest hut into a beautiful home, and build his way into her heart. But war arrives, cutting short their charming courtship and bringing with it terrible events. Fifty years on, young Baba Yaga leaves her village to make a new life in Krakow. What she finds is not the city of her grandmother's tales...
Lovers are torn apart in World War Two and a mother and daughter separated by guilt and shame in a stunning new novel from the author of DANCE WITH WINGS When the Second World War breaks out, Carrie Chapman rebels against her controlling husband to work at a local hospital. Amidst the chaos of the Bristol blitz, Carrie finds herself falling in love with a young doctor, Dev. Carrie's willing to defy convention and leave her stifling marriage for Dev, but one summer evening, horrific events change...
At 18 Danny Dunn has everything going for him: brains, looks, sporting aptitude and luck with the ladies. His parents run The Hero, a favourite local watering hole, and Danny is a local hero. Luck changes for Danny when he signs up to go to war. He returns home a physically broken man, to a life that will be changed forever.