Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her San Francisco life. She is twice divorced and her three children are grown and scattered. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. Catherine finds in Vermont not only the ghosts of her own past but those of Georgia's as well. Georgia's diaries, discovered in the at...

Richard James, a hitherto unpublished author, has lived, breathed or drunk in most cities around Britain and is currently working on his first novel. Is Richard James, the narrator, alive or not? What is the Halfway-House Hotel? Where do Jessica and Melanie fit into Richard's life - or death? Does such a place exist for us all? And what part does t...

The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born 1947 in a shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late Sixties, again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War es...

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confiden...

This is the sequel to 'The Power of One' (book number 0267 & 0267CD). Tandia is a child of all Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent, she is only sixteen when she is first brutalized by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to joining the black resistance movement. With her in the fight for justice is the one white...

This audiobook is set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving. CONTAINS ADULT...

Inspired by real events, Bryce Courtenay tells the story of three people from vastly differing backgrounds. All they have in common is a tough beginning in life. Jack McKenzie is a harmonica player, soldier, dreamer and small-time professional fisherman from a tiny island in Bass Strait. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan is a strong-willed woman hiding from an...

It is the year of the Queen's Coronation and Joanna, Kate and Poll are living in a London suburb with their mother and stepfather, Boyd, the local doctor. Accepting unquestioningly his unstinting love, they are not curious about their vanished natural father - but the safety of their lives is tenuous. The past arrives to upset the present in the pe...

In this piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if some outcomes had been otherwise?' What if her family's flight from Egypt in 1942 had taken a different route? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was eighteen? If she had married someone else? If she had become an archaeol...

This novel tells the story of an innocent idealist, whose gentle rearing by his widowed mother causes him to take too gallant a view of women. Tracing the path of the young man's life, first as a scholar, and then through years of change into someone more mature and knowing, this novel uses the sweep of time to show its characters in shifting persp...

At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man begins the tale that has led to his fateful meeting with an uneasy American stranger... Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. He thrives on the energy of New York, his work at an elite firm, and his budding relationship. For a time, it seems that nothing will stand in the way of his meteoric r...

Sophie's marriage was perfect, but now it's all gone wrong. Mark works late; she's left with the baby, domestic drudgery, her own career to keep on the go and the growing feeling that Mark is having an affair. When he fails to come home one night it's the last straw. Sophie wants a divorce. But Mark doesn't. He hasn't been unfaithful, just thoughtl...

In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves... CONTAINS ADULT THEMES.

The town of Rossmore is a special place, full of character charm. Nestled beside the Whitethorn Woods, the town has grown since the days when it was small and friendly and everyone knew everyone else; now it has chain stories and traffic problems and housing estates. But still, there are the woods, full of spiky bushes and criss-crossed with paths;...

The protagonist of this novel is Sophie, a woman aerialist with wings. The setting is turn of the century London, St. Petersburg and Siberia. An American journalist, Jack Walser, has been sent to interview Sophie, known as Fevvers to her friends, and is so intrigued by her account of her childhood that he joins the circus as a clown.

Angelfield House stands abandoned and forgotten. It was once home to the March family - fascinating, manipulative Isabelle, brutal, dangerous Charlie, and the wild, untamed twins, Emmeline and Adeline. But Angelfield House hides a chilling secret which strikes at the very heart of each of them, tearing their lives apart...Now Margaret Lea is invest...

'Who died?' I said, 'Or is it a secret?'. 'My mother, Vianne Rocher.' Seeking refuge and anonymity in the cobbled streets of Montmartre, Yanne and her daughters, Rosette and Annie, live peacefully, if not happily, above their little chocolate shop. Nothing unusual marks them out; no red sachets hang by the door. The wind has stopped - at least for...

A young divorcee returns to the remote island of her childhood in Northern Canada to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she is gradually drawn back into her past as the wild island exerts its elemental hold.

Sofka Dorn, matriarch of a prosperous German family living in England, rules her four children with a strong hand. Frederick, the eldest son, is a 'disgracefully charming' ladies' man, adored and indulged by his mother, as is his flirtatious sister Betty. Alfred and Mimi, steady and solitary, are a disappointment, for their mother values boldness a...

Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks, eager for a scapegoat.

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera...