A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

Published 27 March 1986
Like most families they had their secrets. And they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors, even murder. 'A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel' - P. D. James.

King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

Published 19 August 1991
Eccentric Jarvis lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives. Damaged, dispossessed, outcasts, they are brought together in violent and unforeseen ways by London's dark and dangerous underground system.

No Night Is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

Published 26 May 1994
Set in Alaska and Suffolk, this story involves a brother (Ivo) and sister (Isabel), each of whom has a sexual relationship with Tim. When Ivo is left for dead on an Arctic island, the way seems clear for Tim and Isabel. But nothing plays itself out in the way one might expect.

Asta's Book

by Barbara Vine

Published 25 March 1993
This work is set in 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to east London from Denmark with their two sons. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder, to the quest for a missing child and to the enigma surrounding Asta's daughter, Swanny. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.