As a librarian, Imogen read a lot of books, but none of them covered real life on the Riviera. Her holiday with tennis ace, Nicky, and the whole glamorous coterie of journalist, playboy, photographer, was a revelation. But the path of a jet-set virgin in that lovely wicked world was a hard one. Imogen began to wonder if virtue really was it own rew...

Three brothers, one death, a fenceline stretching to the horizon. Two rbothers meet at the border of their cast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of outbakc Queensland. They are at the stockman's grave, a landmark so old, no one can remember who is bruied there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for the middle brother...

As a young widow left badly off, and with three children to bring up, Fiona Nelson had come to know all the problems of trying to make ends meet. So despite the inevtably disapproving comments of her own mother, she advertised for a lodger to help pay for some of the bills. The result was Bill, somewhat rough around the edges perhaps, but nobody's...

Bill Bailey, the rugged Liverpudlian, was now a fully-fledged Tyneside building contractor, as staunchly loyal to his squad of workmen as they were to him. He had also met and married Fiona, a young widow with her own loveable family, to which she and Bill shortly added with the adoption of the orphaned Mamie. Life was good, but the economic climat...

Catherine Cookson was the original and bestselling saga writer, selling over 100 million copies of her novels. Just before her fifteenth birthday Jinnie Howlett is offered a position as maid-of-all-work at a farm near the Cumbrian border. She hopes this will be a welcome relief from the workhouse she knows too well. But when she meets her brutish e...

Hannah and Humphrey Drayton were regarded by all who knew them as the perfect married couple. However, all was not as it appeared on the surface, and after years of tyranny and loneliness, Hannah could no longer bear this stuffy City broker. The only relief she had was from his absence on Thursday evenings, when pleayed bridge with a group of acqua...

As a favour to her rock journalist boyfriend, private detective Kate Brannigan agrees to track down a missing song-writer, Moira Pollock; a search that takes her into some of the seediest parts of Leeds and Bradford. But little does she realise that finding Moira is only a prelude to murder. Juggling her other cases, including a search to incover t...

Kate Brannigan, feisty Manchester-based PI, is back, investigating the bizarre case of the missing conservatories. Before long she's up to her neck in crooked land deals, mortgage scams, financial chicanery - and murder. But when a favour for a friend puts Kate's own life in danger, bizarre is not the first word she thinks of.

There was only one reason Manchester-based private eye Kate Brannigan was prepared to let her boyfriend help out with the investigation into a car sales fraud - nothing bad could happen. But by now Kate should know that with Richard you have to expect the unexpected. With the unexpected being Richard behind bars, Kate seems to be the obvious choice...

Forty years may have passed, but the death of Maria Turquand still preys on John Rebus' mind. Murdered in her hotel room on the night a famous rock star was staying there, Maria's killer has never been found. Meanwihle, the dark heart of Edinburgh remains up for gabs. A young pretender may have staked his claim, but has old-time crime boss Big Ger...

One family, two holidays, one devastating secret. To new nanny Amanda, the Temple family seem to have it all: the former actress; the famous professor; their three successful grown-up children. But like any family, beneath the smiles and hugs there lurks far darker emotions. Sixteen years earlier, little Niamh Temple died while they were on holiday...

Thirty years ago, somethings terrible happened to Luna's mother. Something she's only prepared to reveal after her death. In settling her mother's affairs, Luna funds more questions than answers, until something impossible and magical happens... Luna meets her mother as a young woman back in the summer of 1988. If she can truly travel back in time,...

Growing up in a Yorkshire village, Roxanne Cartwright couldn't wait to escape. Now, thiry years later, when Roxanne finds her glamorous career as a fashion editor under thereat, she feels herself pulled back to the quiet village. As Roxanne reacquaints herself with life on Rosemary Lane, she discovers that the people who live in Burley Bridge are,...

Beth Martin is 31, newly divorced and wondering just what life holds for her... Best-friend, Heidi, is adamant that all the answers lie in Corfu - the island where the girls partied away their youth. So cue a trip to a sun-drenched Greek isalnd, ouzo cocktails, a trip down memory lane... and alex Hallas, the man Beth has never quite forgotten. As t...

The second volume of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed. Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm; once a boy with...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of An Almost Perfect Christmas written and read by Nina Stibbe. "I vowed from a young age never to cook a turkey and I never have - unless you count turkey mince (which you don't). I've seen the damage turkeys can do and the tyrannical hold they have over otherwise robust, rational people and my mother. My mot...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter - and he always works alone. But when he is engaged to find a child who disappeared three years ago, he must break his own rules, joining a group of eight very different mercenaries working together to find the...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford, read by Kristin Atherton. The formidable fox-hunting obsessed Lady Bobbin has put together a Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin, including her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, the girl's pompous suitor, a couple of children obsessed with newspaper death notices, and...

Ashley Davison is desperate to spend the holidays with her mother in Seattle. Dash Sutherland has an interview for the job of a lifetime in Seattle and must arrive by 23 December. Both frantic to book a last-minute flight out of California, Ashley and Dash collide at the airport to learn that there are no flights and only one rental car available....

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born - a history whose epicentre is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of i...

It's Christmastime again in Christmas River. And all hell is breaking loose. Pie baker Cinnamon Peters has plenty on her plate this season. Between running her popular pie shop, planning her upcoming wedding to the town's sheriff, and trying to lose weight to squeeze into her oh-so-perfect and oh-so-tight wedding dress, it's all Cinnamon can do to...