Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son. A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull. Soldiers and lover...

What do you do when a girlfriend's 60th birthday party is the same day as your boyfriend's 30th? Is it wrong to lie about your age when online dating? Is it morally wrong to have a blow-dry when one of your children has head lice? Does the Dalai Lama actually tweet or is it his assistant? Is technology now the fifth element? Or is that wood? Is sle...

As Chief Executive of her local council, Robyn has just days to stop recycling being wiped from her ambitious environmental plans. But the credit crunch continues to put pressure on other priorities. Meanwhile, her daughter Afrah provides a safe house for a fiercely committed environmentalist from Eastern Europe.

Everyone knows the real Silvia, don't they? Silvia Shute lies in hospital in a coma. Family and friends gather at her bedside, each thinking they know the real Silvia. But do they? For Silvia hides a secret. One she can never tell. And as her visitors congregate so the truth about Silvia is slowly revealed. Again, and again and again . . .

The Seatons, affluent members of the Protestant gentry, own The Haven, a lush, opulent estate in the Scottish countryside. The Flynns, proud Catholics to the core, spend their working days in the factories and laundry houses of industrial Glasgow. Divided by class, wealth and religion, two families could not live more different lives. However, as t...

A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences. In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she fl...

Lifelong friends, now in their sixties, James, a teacher, and Hugh, a TV personality, both live with attractive women twenty-five years their junior. But the age difference is a time bomb, ticking away at the heart of both relationships. Kate's hunger for a life more in keeping with her own age threatens to bring her eight years with James to an en...

When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn't recognize him. In the four years since the siblings last saw each other, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. And it's not just the weight. Imposing himself on Pandora's world, Edison breaks her husband Fletcher's handc...

Hiram Granville, a modern Leonardo, secured more than a thousand patents during his lifetime, often just ahead of others who had already been working the same ideas. His son John, an economics genius, never lost a cent in the stock market-or any other financial deal-and was investigated for insider trading on more than one occasion. Now Cat, a docu...

The nine children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. Tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations, this is a novel about lov...

A one-time aspiring author has seen his life take a tumble down the ladder of literary aspirations: after prose came verse, then drama, then the ignominious wasteland of sitcom, and then, because failure's always ready to step in with another bottom rung, a badly paid job as a reader of other people's sitcoms. Then suddenly there's new hope. Hollyw...

An international bestseller and the novel of the year, 'Freedom' is an epic of contemporary love and marriage. This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life;...

When award-winning film maker Justine Nolan returns to her beautiful childhood home, she is intrigued by an envelope she finds in her absent mother's post. If genuine it will change everything she believes about her family's recent history, her mother and her adored grandmother, Gabriele. Resolving to uncover the truth, she must travel to Istanbul...

Barbara Taylor Bradford introduced the illustrious Harte family in her blockbuster A Woman of Substance. Now she has created an unforgettable new dynasty: the Deravenels. On a bitterly cold day in 1904, the Deravenel family's future changes forever. When Cecily Deravenel tells her eighteen-year-old son Edward of the death of his father, brother, un...

Bereft of the three people she has held most dear - her mother, her husband and her daughter - Celia is on the verge of suicide. Then one night on an exotic island she meets Larraby, a successful portrait painter, and through a long night of talk reveals how she is afraid to commit herself to a second chance of happiness with another person, yet is...

What do you do when your wife takes your child and leaves you alone in a city of ghosts? Dutch banker Hans ver den Broek chooses cricket. But New York cricket is a long way from the tranquil sport he grew up with. It's a rough, almost secret game, played in scrubby marginal urban parks by people the city does not see - people like Chuck Ramkissoon....

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother--a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang--and an influential father who runs Long Tomorro...

When Eva's film star sister Katrina dies, she returns to Cornwall to scatter Katrina's ashes. But the house where she stayed as a child is home not only to her friends the Halletts, but also to the people who lived there in the 18th century. When Eva accepts that she can slip between centuries, she begins to question her place in the present and co...

The unforgiving New England weather has taken a turn for the worse on the day Doyle drags his reluctant sons to a speech by Jesse Jackson. Fired by Jackson's rhetoric, he is perplexed by the boys' indifference. Tiff and Teddy are adopted. Teddy - open, affectionate, the gentle dreamer - thinks he has found his calling in the Catholic church. Tip is...

Ireland 1944. In a violent storm a German plane heading for Britain is blown off course. The pilot, completely disorientated, plunges down an Irish hillside and shatters a young family. The children who survive that terrible night try to leave the past behind, but the past will not let them go. Rescued by their Aunt Lucy, Amelia and Mattie need to...

On a beach in southern England a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The hand belongs to Henry, the homeless eccentric who has been wandering south west England for the last 30 years. A local policeman and his colleague, in piecing together his movements prior to his death, uncover an extraordinary life. But as their investigat...