One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid. As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock's marvel. Its arrival spins him...

1553. King Edward is on his deathbed, and the future of the Tudor dynasty swings perilously. Forced out of Spain by the Inquisition, Hannah Green arrives in a volatile kingdom. She is identified as a seer and sworn into the service of Robert Dudley, the son of King Edward's protector and a key player at court. Her task: to keep watch on Princess Ma...

When a new empire rises, and old one must fall After 16 years of bloody war against Rome, Hannibal Barca is on the verge of defeat. On the plains of Zama, Felix and his brother Antonius stand in the formidable Roman legions, ready to deliver the decisive blow. Victory will establish Rome as the preeminent power in the ancient world. But in northern...

In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye... From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is different. Her discovery of strange fossilized creatures in the cliffs of Lyme Regis sets the world alight. Mary must face powerful prejudice from a m...

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a miniature version of their neighbourhood so she can memorise it. But when the Nazis invade, they flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan destined to labour in the mines, until he discovers a knack for engineering. As Europe is engulfed by war and lives collide unpr...

One cold January morning, two young sets of eyes... One pair belongs to smartly dressed Lavinia Waterhouse, whose mother clings to the traditional values she sees slipping away; the other to Maude Coleman, whose mother longs to escape the grip of Victorian society. Thrust together by the girls' friendship, these two very different families embark o...

Honor Bright is a sheltered Quaker who has rarely ventured out of 1850s Dorset when she impulsively emigrates to America. Opposed to the slavery that defines and divides the country, she finds her principles tested to the limit when a runaway slave appears at the farm of her new family. In this tough, unsentimental place, where whisky bottles sit a...

A thrilling BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation based on the third novel in C. J. Sansom's bestselling Tudor crime series featuring hunchback lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake. Autumn, 1541. Henry VIII, accompanied by his young bride Catherine Howard, has embarked on a Great Progress from London to York, to establish his power and authority with h...

When seventeen-year-old Mary O'Connor collapses one Sunday in church she is taken to live with Dr Roberts and his wife in a beautiful Yorkshire village for her health. Though initially employed as a maid, Mary soon becomes the daughter the couple were never able to have. With Britain at war, unable to remain idle, Mary finds employment in the local...

On a bitter winter's day, an unnamed girl lies dangerously ill in hospital. When two coarse, rough-speaking individuals come to claim her, she can remember nothing of the events that brought her to her present state, not even her name. According to the men, she is their young sister, Lucy. As her health improves and her memory gradually returns, sh...

It is April 1939 and unaware that the German war machine is advancing towards the Channel Islands, seventeen-year-old Meg Colivet and her sister are enjoying a holiday in Oxford with their aunt. Here Meg meets charismatic German undergraduate Rayner Weiss and the couple fall passionately in love. But all too soon, Britain is at war with Germany, Gu...

With unapologetically sensual prose, Nalo Hopkinson, the Nebula Award-winning author of Midnight Robber, explores slavery through the lives of three historical women touched by a goddess in this "electrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers" (Junot Diaz).

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Nightfall Berlin by Jack Grimwood, read by Daniel Weyman. In 1986, news that East-West nuclear-arms negotiations are taking place lead many to believe the Cold War may finally be thawing. For British intelligence officer Major Tom Fox, however, it is business as usual. Ordered to arrange the smooth repatria...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Remember Me by Lesley Pearse, read by Kerry Howard. She made one mistake, and now she'll never see home again . . . Mary, a Cornish mariner's daughter, makes the biggest mistake of her short life when she steals a silk hat. Convicted and sentenced to be transported to Australia, she endures horrific conditi...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Secrets by Lesley Pearse, read by Sophie Ablett. Without her mother she is alone in the world . . . Twelve-year-old Adele is placed in a bleak, cruel children's home after a family tragedy drives her mother to madness. But when trust is betrayed Adele has no choice but to run away . . . Alone and friendless...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Tomorrow by Damian Dibben, read by George Blagden. Tomorrow tells the story of a 217-year-old dog and his search for his lost master. His adventures take him through the London Frost Fair, the strange court of King Charles I, the wars of the Spanish succession, Versailles, the Golden Age of Amsterdam, 19th...

Two young sisters sent far, far from home ... When tragedy deprives little Dulcie Taylor and her sister May of their parents, they are sent first to an orphanage and then shipped off to begin a new life in Australia. But the 'better life' the sisters are promised in this new and exciting country turns out to be a lie. It seems everyone who ever sto...

The number of women my brother Matthew killed, so far as I can reckon it, is one hundred and six... 1645. When Alice Hopkins' husband dies in a tragic accident, she returns to the small Essex town of Manningtree, where her brother Matthew still lives. But home is no longer a place of safety. Matthew has changed, and there are rumours spreading thro...

They told him everything. He told everyone else. Over countless martini-soaked Manhattan lunches, they shared their deepest secrets and greatest fears. On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucat n beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never...

London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth's band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage mi...

The second book in Philippa's stunning new trilogy, The Cousins War, brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, a shadowy and mysterious character in the first book of the series - The White Queen - but who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses. The Red Queen tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, wh...