It is a wet day in Dorset, and walking to a luncheon party is Sir Edward Feathers QC, followed by two elderly friends: his...

At an inn in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, seven former schoolmates gather for a wedding. Nora, the owner of...

The Secret Purposes, David Baddiel's third novel, takes us into a little-known and still somewhat submerged area of British...

The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency introduced the world to the one and only Precious Ramotswe - the engaging and sassy owner of...

Rob and Jamie are great friends from childhood. They have grown up together and become top climbers, but have since become...

Rich or poor, five people, seemingly very different, find their lives in the capital connected in undreamed-of ways. There is...

When Polly and Theo Noble book the Casa Luna, near Cortona, for their summer holiday they plan a civilised Anglo-American...

The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of...

According to Queeney is a masterly evocation of the last years of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters. The...

Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter....

Set 100 years ago in Boston, Fortune's Rocks is a classic of literary and romantic storytelling.
Fourteen-year-old Olympic...

The murder of a media moghul in his country mansion appears to be the result of him disturbing a gang of would-be thieves. The...

For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with...

Marnus is terrified he will not fulfil the expectations of his elite Afrikaner family who are certain of their superiority. But...

Sir Alfred Munnings, retiring President of the Royal Academy, chooses the 1949 Annual Banquet to launch a savage attack on Modern...

As the wife of a Resistance member in German-occupied Belgium, Claire Daussois has grown used to hiding strange men in her attic....

History is gossip,' says a protagonist in Washington, D.C., 'but the trick is determining which gossip is history.' It is a trick...

Gore Vidal's fictional recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an...

A wonderful bittersweet story about a misguided do-gooder

Eliza Peabody is one of those dangerously blameless women who...

For gauche young apprentice Milos Hrma, life at the small but strategic railway station in Bohemia in 1945 is full of complex...

Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong...

The beautiful, spoiled and bored Olivia, married to a civil servant, outrages society in the tiny, suffocating town of Satipur by...

Atlanta, 1948. In this city, all crime is black and white.

On one side of the tracks are the rich, white neighbourhoods; on...

Feckless, unwashed, charming, penurious Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, Trinity College Law student, Irish American with an English...

Throughout her career, prize-winning novelist Jane Gardam has been writing glorious short stories, each one hallmarked with all...

She was found hanging in a dingy London bedsit with a blood orange in her mouth. Diane Heybridge, a young woman without a past or...

On a Tuesday in May, in her thirty-fifth year, Rachel shot her husband dead. He stumbled backward with an odd look of...

Sam Morpeth is growing up way too fast, left to fend for a younger sister when their mother goes to prison and watching her...

'Beyond the fact that it was, in face of a vivid and calamitous ending, to reveal from his own experience the ardent splendours...

The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry, two children who find...