A Wild & True Relation opens during the Great Storm of 1703, as smuggler Tom West confronts his lover Grace for betraying him to...

Born in 1831, Isabella, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 'in search of health' and found she had...

A.L. Barker dissects the unnerving emotions of everyday life with the sly humour and exquisite feel for language that prompted...

The scene is Naples, against whose ancient and fantastic background the modern action takes place.

Among the protagonists is...

Caro, gallant and adventurous, is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted...

Centre stage in Angela Carter's unruly tale of the Flower Power Generation is Joseph - a decadent, disorientated rebel without a...

When the beautiful, ambitious actress Regina takes Fosca into her life and learns his amazing truth, she is obsessed with the...

Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless; a man's dream and a woman''s...

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young, and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears...

Shortly before the Second World War, a column by 'Mrs Miniver' appeared in
The Times, the first of many recounting the everyday...

To his parents' dismay, Colin Keith - out of the noble but misplaced sense of duty peculiar to high-minded young university...

It's August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy...

Annabel Christopher is every inch the star: a glamorous actress with a devoted, handsome husband. To keep the paparazzi and her...

On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining...

Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with an...

1570 in the Italian city of Ferrara. Sixteen-year-old Serafina is fipped by her family from an illicit love affair and forced...

Pretty, impecunious Mary Preston, newly arrived as a guest of her Aunt Agnes at the magnificent wooded estate of Rushwater, falls...

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church - the only available...

Meet Penelope O'Shaughnessy, Harvard freshman.

Armed with her Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights poster and party conversation...

Seventeen-year-old Alan can't stand rows. But, though the Second World War has ended, peace hangs by a fine thread at home: his...

'The motto was Pax but the word was set in a circle of thorns. Peace, but what a strange peace, made of unremitting toil and...

Harriet is caught between two worlds: her older sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a little boy. And the...

High in the Himalayas near Darjeeling, the old mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. When it was the General's 'harem' palace,...

Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary,...

On the banks of the River Avon, five sisters are born. The seasons come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree,...

By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched only by its brutality and corruption. When...

Set in London and Monmouth in the late 1700s, this is an extraordinary novel about Mary Saunders, the young daughter of a poor...

When newly orphaned Cassandra Dashwood arrives as governess to little Sophy, the scene seems set for the archetypal romance...

Spending the holiday with friends, as she has for many years, Camilla finds that their private absorptions - Frances with her...

Rose Aubrey is one of a family of four children. Their father, Piers, is the disgraced son of an Irish landowning family, a...