1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. When the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in...

"She stood at a crossroads, half-aware that her choice would send her down a path from which there could be no turning back. But instead of two choices, she saw only one-because it was all she really wanted to see ... Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for...

In London, 1946, the two women who recently started The Right Sort Marriage Bureau find their new livelihood endangered when one client is arrested for the murder of another. In a London slowly recovering from the ravages of World War II, two very different women join forces to launch a business venture in the heart of Mayfair--The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. Miss Iris Sparks, avuncular and unmarried, and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, practical and widowed...

In 1923, devout Eva English and her not-so-religious sister Lizzie embark on a journey to be missionaries in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.

Paula O'Neill, beloved granddaughter of the legendary Emma Harte and the guardian of her vast business empire, believes that everything Emma left to the family is secure. Beneath the surface, however, sibling rivalry and discontent flare. -- from inside cover.

A novel set in 1944 London imagines the lives of five children who perished during a bombing at a local store, tracing their everyday dramas as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of twentieth-century London.

Back in the Thirteenth Century, King Henry III granted a plot of land in the heart of London to an order of Friars known as the Carmelites. In return, they entered into a compact with God to guard a holy object. This sanctuary became a refuge for many of ill-repute, as the Friars cast no judgment and took in all who were in search of solace. Known as Alsatia, it did not suffer like the rest of the world. No Plague affected it. No Great Fire burned...

"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes...

"Nancy Wix, daughter of stage impresarios Eliza and Devil, is a born performer. But she is set apart, even from her unusual family, by the visions she has seen since she was a child. When a gifted medium reveals a way for Nancy to harness her troubling powers to keep the Wix's struggling theatre afloat, she grasps the opportunity with a desperate intensity. This is the age of spiritualism, and Nancy will see her star rise in a time when families decimated...

"Aileen. Maureen. Oonagh. The private lives of the Glorious Guinness Girls fascinated a nation. But privilege always has its price... Granddaughters of the first Earl of Iveagh, the three daughters of Ernest Guinness are glamorous society girls, the toast of Dublin and London. Darlings of the press, with not a care in the world. But what beautiful ruins lie behind the glass of their privileged worlds? Inspired by fascinating real events and a remarkable...