Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house for their...

Ada Williams was once an ambitious woman who believed money and power would bring her happiness. But now, she is all alone in the world, except for her greedy, bitter son Peter, who despises her...

Rose Beechworth is mistress of a charming country house - her own, left to her by her wealthy father. In the summer of 1914, Alice Weatherly turns Rose's world upside down. The young heiress longs...

As the golden Edwardian Age turns into the bloodbath of World War One, a valiant suffragette finds both tragedy and true love. Driven by her idealism and courage, Alex Goodwin will make any...

Tempestuous Briar Macauley’s single-minded stubbornness to prove to the world that she is the equal of any man leads her into so many disastrous circumstances that her parents despair of ever...

A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s...

Stephen Hawking is one of the most remarkable figures of our time, a Cambridge genius who has earned international celebrity as a brilliant theoretical physicist and become an inspiration and...

This novel is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary tale of a geisha - summoning up a quarter of a century, from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan's dramatic...

Lally Fraser, widowed at twenty, with two sons to raise and little more than debts to live on, seeks comfort with dashing young mill-owner Roly Sinclair. Then he goes off to America and she...

Now in her eighty-ninth year, Mary Soames is the only surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill. Younger than her siblings, she went to day school and enjoyed an idyllic childhood at...

Amy Pearson’s family is desperately poor, even by the standards of Edwardian Liverpool. But they have each other; until Amy is torn from her home by her rich aunt, a woman obsessed by religion...

Kelly had always known Barney would leave, but she could never have envisaged how his leaving would turn her whole world upside down. But now he was gone, and she wondered if she would ever see...

Celia, housewife, mother and wonderful cook, is celebrating her fortieth birthday in Bedford Park, London, where the major worries are dailies, private schooling and the misplaced zeal of...

Briony Marsden has led a hard life, forced to do the work of a grown man while enduring her drunkard father’s taunts and blows. But, when he goes too far, life becomes even worse as she makes...

In 19th-century Liverpool, Lily Elliott is not so much spoilt as loved – a little girl for whom nothing is too good, petted and indulged by her adored Ma and Pa, dreaming of the day when she...