Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love - and she's not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well.

Marigold Green calls herself “hideous, quaint and barmy”. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter. Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace, and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

It is a wet day in Dorset, and walking to a luncheon party is Sir Edward Feathers QC, followed by two elderly friends: his scruffy neighbour and sparring partner, Veneering, and Fiscal-Smith, the meanest lawyer ever to make a fortune at the Bar. Fans of Jane Gardam's bestselling novel, Old Filth, will be delighted to encounter Filth, now almost ninety, making his immaculate way to Privilege Hill.

At the end of a long and useful life, Penelope Keeling's prized possession is The Shell Seekers, painted by her father, and symbolizing her unconventional life, from bohemian childhood to wartime romance. When her grown children learn their grandfather's work is now worth a fortune, each has an idea as to what Penelope should do. But as she recalls the passions, tragedies, and secrets of her life, she knows there is only one answer...and it lies in her heart.

Set against the backdrop of an elegant Cornwall mansion before World War II and a vast continent-spanning canvas during the turbulent war years, this captivating story tells of an extraordinary young woman's coming of age, coming to grips with love and sadness, and in every sense of the term, coming home.... In 1935, Judith Dunbar is left behind at a British boarding school when her mother and baby sister go off to join her father in Singapore.

No one would have described Manningtree Grove as fashionable. Few would have found it especially interesting. But it was not an unpleasant place to live: the old railway line lay in a valley, and the gardens looked onto it. It was the kind of place where nothing ever happened. Yet it was here that Peter Yearman first sold his soul to the devil....

In this coming of age story, Dodie Smith introduces the visionary and eccentric character of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. The youngest daughter in a family of impoverished artists, it is her imagination and writing that takes us away from the ramshackle old English castle where they live, and towards an intriguing tale of husband-hunting and light-hearted sibling rivalry.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher, Winter Solstice (the basis for the TV movie) is the story of five unforgettable characters, lonely and haunted strangers who find love and loyalty as a reborn family of friends during the Christmas holidays.

At 27, Virginia Keile had been through the most intense experiences life had to offer - a magical first love ending in heartbreak, a suitable marriage, motherhood, and widowhood. All she wanted now was to take her daughter and son to a seaside cottage in Cornwall and help them recover. But Virginia's true love was there, waiting, hoping, praying that this time she would be strong enough to seize happiness, in The Empty House.

From a child’s first knowledge of death, through city and country, to an elderly woman's newfound freedom, Pilcher’s The Blue Bedroom & Other Stories is “breathtaking...a book you want to keep....” (Grand Rapids Press).

A place you will never forget. Rosamunde Pilcher's Scotland...where the fields flourish with greenery, the bills bloom with purple, and the lochs glitter with the bright blue of the sky. A time you will never forget. September...when the heather is in full flower, the first chill of autumn cools the air, and the countryside stirs with the hunt, balls, dinner parties, and dance. Rosamunde Pilcher's September...a story of homecomings and heartbreaks, friendships, betrayals, forgiveness, and love.

Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child. All that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed.

Oliver Dobbs was a writer first and a man second. To him other people were tools. Even though he had broken Victoria Bradshaw’s heart once, when he arrived on her doorstep with a two-year-old son, she found she could not refuse him, and the three of them set out for a castle in Scotland. There, Victoria meets the new laird and finds her crushed spirit awakening.

After years in the United States, Jane returns to the tranquil Scottish estate Elvie, where she spent a magical childhood. Memories of Elvie had always summoned the image of Sinclair, the rakish man Jane had once dreamed of marrying, but now that she is home, she finds Sinclair a different man. His charm has a purpose, and Jane can no longer trust him...or herself, in The End of Summer.

Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories collects sixteen of #1 New York Times bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher’s romantic tales set across Britain from the Scottish countryside to the city of London.

Fate has not been kind to Gemma Hardy. Orphaned then neglected, young Gemma seemed destined for a life of hardship and loneliness. Yet her bright spirit burns strong. Fiercely intelligent, singularly determined, Gemma overcomes each challenge and setback, growing stronger and more certain of her path. Now an independent young woman, she accepts a position as an au pair on the remote and beautiful Orkney Islands. But Gemma’s biggest trial is about to begin....

In this coming of age story, Dodie Smith introduces the visionary and eccentric character of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. The youngest daughter in a family of impoverished artists, it is her imagination and writing that takes us away from the ramshackle old English castle where they live, and towards an intriguing tale of husband-hunting and light-hearted sibling rivalry.

Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'

Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. Rose, a beautiful but naive bride-to-be, is anxious about leaving her family and marrying a man she hardly knows. Victoria, her bridesmaid couldn't be happier to get away from her overbearing mother, and is determined to find herself a husband. And Viva, their inexperienced chaperone, is in search of the India of her childhood, ghosts from the past and freedom.

In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.

A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.

Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.

In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook and a housemaid. They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors. She is happy there but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her. One day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door.

On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

It's 1939, and for Georg, son of an English academic living in Germany, life is full of cream cakes and loving parents. It is also a time when his teacher measures the pupils' heads to see which of them have the most 'Aryan'- shaped heads. But when a university graduation ceremony turns into a pro-Nazi demonstration, Georg is smuggled out of Germany to war-torn London and then across enemy seas to Australia where he must forget his past and who he is in order to survive. Hatred is contagious, but Georg finds that kindness can be, too.

The Story of Lucy Gault traces the repercussions of a child’s attempt to remain in her beloved home.Threatened with a move from Ireland to England, 9-year-old Lucy runs away, setting off a series of misunderstandings that will eventually touch each inhabitant of her village.

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.