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A dramatic and emotional story of one woman’s story to keep her family together. For fans of Dilly Court and Kitty Neale.When Meg’s mother dies in childbirth, she is determined to keep the promise made on her mother’s deathbed – keep the family together. But her father has descended into drink and resents the baby, Ruth, who he believes cost him his wife.Though struggling financially, Meg resists the offer of help from their unscrupulous and sinister landlord, Richard Flatterly. Things get worse when her father returns home one night with a woman called Doris and announces he intends to marry her. When war breaks out three of the children are evacuated to the country while little Ruth must stay with Meg’s father and his new wife as she is too young.Meg and her friend Joy sign up for the Land Army and go to work on the farm where she meets Stephen, home on leave after fighting the Nazi’s – the attraction is instant and she and Stephen fall in love. But when she returns to the family home for a visit, she is horrified to discover the house in squalor and that worst of all, Little Ruth has been sent to an orphanage. With no options, Meg must turn to the only man who can help her, Richard Flatterly, but in return for his help, she must pay a very high price…

A world on the brink of war, a murder to alter the course of history, ‘A Game of Soldiers’ is a brilliant, atmospheric thriller, perfect for all readers of Fatherland.What if Serbian terrorists had not managed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo?What if their uprising was fuelled and supported by the new Russian oligarchs?What, if amid all the conspirators running through the chaos of Europe, there were one honest government agent whose determined pursuit of the killer of a child prostitute changed the course of history…?In St Petersburg, beside the glittering court life of the Romanovs, the people are seething. It is not only the Bolsheviks but also the new men, the tycoons grown wealthy in the booming economy and the more vigorous aristocrats who are impatient with the idle, incompetent Romanovs.Pyotr Ryzhkov, probing the murder of a child prostitute, suddenly finds his enquiries deliberately hampered. As the investigation widens, financiers, policemen, government officers, foreign diplomats, even the Minister of Justice, seem to be involved in an ever larger circle of fraud and violence. Then a killing gives him the final clue and leads to the desperate journey to Serbia…

From one of the most admired literary voices of our time, a magical, riveting story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia's last Tsar.St. Petersburg, 1917: as the New Year dawns, a diver pulls the murdered body of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, from the icy waters of the Neva River. Hours later, his daughters are taken to the Tsar's palace, where the Tsarina makes a shocking request: would Masha, 18, take on her father's role as healer at the sickbed of the Tsarevitch Alyosha? Shaken, Masha agrees to do what she can for the young prince, haunted as she is by questions about her father's powers and her future in a country accelerating toward political apocalypse.Two months later, the Bolshevik Revolution forces the Tsar to abdicate, and the whole royal family is placed under arrest in the Alexander Palace. Trapped together in increasingly harsh living conditions, Masha and Alyosha find themselves taking increasing solace in one another's company. The two teenagers, with radically different experiences of Russia, of Rasputin, and of Alyosha's parents' unlucky reign, create a private realm of magic and of love, as Masha introduces the young Tsarevitch to a wild and beautiful land he will never live to rule.An unusual love story, stitched delicately into the rich tapestry of Russian history, Enchantments brings to life the final days of Rasputin and the Romanovs. It is a breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most acclaimed writers.

A sparkling saga from the author of Platinum Coast.Lucinda Frazer-West: daughter of Lord Nicholas and Lady Serena, a young actress with a glittering future beckoning.Luna Fergusson: daughter of West Indian businessman Royole, reluctantly accepted by his wife Caron, and developing a high-flying business career.Two successful young women, unaware of the bond that links them. They are twins, the product of a one-in-a-million biological chance, following a liaison between Serena and Royole: twin sisters, one white, one black.Now, twenty-seven years later, events are destined to bring them together, and to unmask the secret of their birth.

Orange Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Carol Shields’ tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life.Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: her eccentric husband, her secretive children and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet. While Judith analyses the minutiae of lives past and present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. As their mother’s wedding approaches, both sisters must come to terms with the paths they have chosen.Originally published as two companion novels: Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden.

From the bestselling author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes’ Welcome, Louisa Young's Devotion is a novel of family, love, race and politics set during the electric change of the 1930s.Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini.Ideals and convictions are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. For Tom and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents Nadine and Riley, though, the ground is still shifting underfoot.Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini.Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again together in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.

FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL PRIZE FOR HISTORY‘Not only deserves the description “epic”, in its true sense, but the term “masterpiece” as well’ IndependentThis gripping epic tells the story of one of the world’s most critical failed nation-states: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Interweaving his own family’s history with the voices of a diverse range of individuals – charismatic dictators, feuding warlords, child soldiers, and many in the African diaspora of Europe and China – Van Reybrouck offers a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective and returning a nation’s history to its people.

A saga of life in the Northern Territories and the clash of white and Aborigine cultures – one of Australia’s all-time best-selling novels and an inspiration for Baz Luhrmann’s lavish film ‘AUSTRALIA’.Capricornia has been described as one of Australia's 'great novels', a sharply observed chronicle about life in the Northern Territory of Australia and the inhumane treatment suffered by Aborigines at the hands of white men. The story is immense and rambling, laced with humour that is often as bitter and as harsh as the terrain in which it is set, and follows with irony the fortunes (and otherwise) of a range of Outback characters over a span of generations. Through their story is reflected the story of Australia, the clash of personalities and cultures that provide the substance on which today's society is founded. Above all, however, this is a novel of protest and of compassion – for the Aborigines and half-bloods of Australia's 'last frontier'.Sprawling, explosive, thronged with characters, plots and sub-plots, Capricornia is without doubt one of the best known and widely read Australian novels of the last 70 years. When it was first published it was acclaimed as 'a turning point', an 'outstanding work of social protest'. Its message is as penetrating today as it was in the 1930s when Herbert himself was official 'Protector of Aborigines' at Darwin.

The passionate love story that led to The Bronze Horseman.They gave up everything to be together, but love was just the beginning …Italian immigrant Gina, independent, compassionate and strong, desperately wants a family. Boston blue-blood Harry, idealistic and political, wants to create a better world. Bound together by tormented passion, they rail, rage, and break each other’s hearts, only to come face to face with a stark final choice that will forever determine their destiny.Their journey takes them through four decades and two continents, through triumph and turmoil, from the wooden planks of the troubled immigrant town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the marble halls and secret doors of a mystical place called … Bellagrand.From internationally bestselling author Paullina Simons comes the passionate love story that led to The Bronze Horseman.

A unique novel, looking at one the greatest battles, a battle that was a turning point in history, from many points of view, by a master storyteller.Bernard Cornwell has been thinking about this subject for years. He has long wanted to write a book about a single battle, the events that lead up to it, the actual days in the battle and the aftermath from multiple viewpoints.Agincourt, fought on October 25th 1415, on St Crispin's Day, is one of the best known battles, in part through the brilliant depiction of it in Shakespeare's Henry V, in part because it was a brilliant and unexpected English victory and in part because it was the first battle won by the use of the longbow. This was a weapon developed in this form only by the English – parishes were forced to train boys from as young as eight daily – and enabled them to dominate the European battlefields for the rest of the century.Lively historical characters abound on all sides but in Bernard Cornwell's hands the fictional characters, horsemen, archers, nobles, peasants are authentic and vivid, and the hour by hour view of the battle is dramatic and gripping.