From the author of Between the Stops and Toksvig's Almanac. London, 1897. A young girl, Valentine Grey, arrives in England. She's been brought up in the remote and sunny climes of India and finds being forced into corsets and skirts in damp and cold country insufferable. The only bright spot: her exciting cousin Reggie. Reggie and his lover, Frank,...

1914 Spindrift House, Cornwall. Edith Fairchild's good-for-nothing husband, Benedict, deserted her when their children were babies. Now that the children are almost adult, Edith and Pascal, her faithful lover of two decades, are planning to leave their beloved Spindrift artists' community and finally be together. But an explosive encounter between...

1902. Spindrift House, Cornwall. Edith Fairchild, deserted by her feckless husband, Benedict, eight years before, has established the thriving Spindrift artists' community by the sea and found deep and lasting love with Pascal. They have accepted that they cannot marry, but when Benedict returns unexpectedly to Spindrift House, all Edith and Pascal...

On May 30th, 1593, a celebrated young playwright was killed in a tavern brawl in London. That, at least, was the official version. Now, let Christopher Marlowe tell you the truth: that his 'death' was an elaborate ruse to avoid his being hanged for heresy; that he was spirited across the channel to live on in lonely exile, longing for his true love...

A richly atmospheric portrait of women's agency and the timelessness of love, Time Squared explores the enduring roles of rights, responsibility, and devotion throughout history The game will change when you remember who you are Robin and Eleanor meet in 1811 at the British estate of Eleanor's rich aunt Clara. Robin is about to leave to fight in...

Meet Depression-era newlyweds Bennie and Stella. He's reckless, she's naive. Longing for freedom from tough times, they rob a bank, setting off a series of events that quickly spin out of their control Under an Outlaw Moon is based on the true story of Depression-era bank robbers Bennie and Stella Mae Dickson. She's a teenage outsider longing to f...

THERE'S NOTHING STRONGER THAN A GOOD STORY. THE QUESTION IS: WHO GETS TO TELL IT? The clock is ticking on Hollywood actress Edie O'Dare's contract with FWM Studios. Her acting career is going nowhere, and she's running out of time to find a new role in the industry - other than providing salacious details of the latest party or premiere to the pres...

The remarkable stories of the world's most famous body parts. Louis XIV's rear end inspired the British National Anthem. Queen Victoria's armpit led the development of antiseptics. Robert Jenkin's ear started a war. All too often, historical figures feel distant and abstract; more myth and legend than real flesh and blood. These stories of bodies a...

A spellbinding debut set in Pakistan during the anarchic late '60s - a multi-layered tale of family, identity and the politics of power in a caste-ridden society. As riots erupt on the streets of Lahore, Inspector Faraz returns to his birthplace, the red-light district in the ancient walled city where women still pass on the profession of courtesan...

When Lucy wins a place at university, she thinks London will unlock her future. It is a city alive with pop up bars, cool girls and neon lights illuminating the Thames at night. At least this is what Lucy expects, having grown up seemingly a world away in working-class Sunderland, amid legendary family stories of Irish immigrants and boarding house...

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen and he is a young army lieutenant. Before long, Zelda has fallen for him, even though Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fa...

At the close of the First World War, two sisters' battles are only just beginning... The Leaving of Liverpool is a poignant saga about the friendship between sisters, the threat of dangerous men and the promise of true love in post-World War I Liverpool. It is 1919. Liverpool has been devastated by World War I. But at last the war is over. Emily Pa...

In 1824, Lyme Regis is as tumultuous as the sea that surrounds it. When twenty-four-year-old Ada Winters - poor, peculiar and brilliant - uncovers a set of unusual fossils on the cliffs, she believes she has found the answer to her scientific frustrations and her family's financial struggles. Meanwhile, Doctor Edwin Moyle has come to Dorset in sear...

A lush, sweeping queer historical romance from the best-selling author of Boyfriend Material—perfect for fans of Bridgerton, Evie Dunmore and Lisa Kleypas! When Viola Carroll was presumed dead at Waterloo, she took the opportunity to live, at last, as herself. But freedom does not come without a price, and Viola paid for hers with the loss of...

The year is 1845, and Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte are sat around the dining room table, laughing merrily as the rain of their Yorkshire summer falls outside. When their brother, Branwell, returns from The Bull Inn, he brings with him the most shocking revelation: that Elizabeth Chester, wife of Robert Chester and mistress of Chester Grange, ha...

Germany, 1907 Aristocrat Frieda von Richthofen has rashly married English professor Ernest Weekley. Visiting her sisters in Munich, she is captivated by a city alive with ideas of revolution and free love, and, goaded by sibling rivalry with her sisters and the need to be more than mother and wife, Frieda embarks on a passionate affair that is her...

Life is sweet for Flavia Albia and her soon-to-be husband Faustus. But his new job as a building contractor runs into a problem: At the Garden of the Hesperides a barmaid went missing years before; now the workmen start unearthing her bones. Albia takes on the task of finding out what happened. Five more skeletons are discovered. Despite the fact t...

In the blazing July heat of imperial Rome, Flavia Albia inspects a decomposing corpse. It has been discovered in lots to be auctioned by her family business, so she's determined to identify the dead man and learn how he met his gruesome end. The investigation will give her a chance to work with the magistrate, Manlius Faustus, the friend she sadly...

From renowned author Lindsey Davis, creator of the much-loved character, Marcus Didius Falco and his friends and family, comes the second novel in her all-new series set in Ancient Rome. Flavia Albia is a remarkable woman in what is very much a man's world: Young, widowed and fiercely independent, she lives alone on the Aventine Hill in Rome and ma...

Falco: the new generation - Introducing Flavia Albia. Flavia Albia is the adopted daughter of a famous investigating family. In defiance of tradition, she lives alone on the colourful Aventine Hill, and battles out a solo career in a male-dominated world. As a woman and an outsider, Albia has special insight into the best, and worst, of life in anc...

Brought to you Penguin.Cristabel Seagrave has always wanted her life to be a story, but there are no girls in the books in her dusty family library. For an unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, there is no place at all for her in a traditional English manor.But from the day that a whale washes up on the beach at the Chilcomb...