Chalfont Hall, Dorset, 1936, and as the dressmaker puts the last pins in her dress, 13-year-old Kit is wondering why she has to go through the charade of seeing her sister, Lily, presented at Court. With her waves of auburn hair and her piercing green eyes, Kit knows that her sister's place on the social scene is guaranteed regardless of her dress, and as the door to a life of parties and eligible young men opens for Lily, Kit must make do with tiptoeing around the gallery of Chalfont, eavesdropping on the conversations of the grown-ups.

In a beachfront mansion in Martha's Vineyard, Annick and Rebecca relax, safe in the knowledge that their young children are in the care of lifelong friend Tash. But by the end of the afternoon, one of the children will have vanished.... Annick, daughter of an actress and an assassinated president, has spent her life running from the truth of her family's wealth. Rebecca has always done the right thing. Perfect daughter. Perfect wife. Perfect mother. She's beginning to wonder if she'll ever get chance to live for herself.

Max Sall is powerful, wealthy, and utterly ruthless. A man without a past. Max's women are very different, but they all demand his attention. While Amber and Paola are growing up in the 1970s, their mothers somehow find a way to share Max between them. But when Amber and Paola fall in love with the same man two decades later, they're determined that this time there will be no sharing.

Rose Fell's friends think she's taking a big risk when she leaves the security of home and career to move to the beautiful but isolated village of Grosso, near Genoa. But after a year of emotional turmoil Rose no longer has any ties back home, and she relishes the challenges of a new start. Making a home, however, in the ravishing, haunted landscape of Italy's Riviera coast turns our to be lonelier than Rose had anticipated. And it is only when she is asked to write a profile on one of her reclusive neighbours, the once-glamorous film star Elvira Vitale, that Rose feels her new life is really beginning.

If war is madness, how can love survive? Growing up in the borderlands between Croatia and Serbia, Miro's blissful childhood is shattered when his best friend is horribly wounded by a land mine, a legacy of conflicts gone by. Moving to the Dalmatian coast, where his parents start a small hotel, he thinks he has left this all behind - he falls in love and starts a family with his childhood sweetheart, Dina.

Romy and Thea, two beautiful baby girls, their futures sealed with the flip of a coin. One will enter a life of privilege, surrounded by only the best money can buy. The other will fight for survival in an orphanage, against an evil regime that seeks only to exploit her. Throughout the years their paths will cross, neither knowing who the other one is, their lives overflowing with secrets, blackmail and murder.

Johnny Seymour has seen too much war and seeks solace photographing East African wildlife. But when isolated white families are slaughtered by Mau Mau gangs, the British respond brutally, and Johnny is reluctantly pulled into the horror. After his African driver, Macharia, disappears, Johnny is forced to confront shocking truths about his own country and ask how far he'll go to help a friend.

A woman wades into the waters of Morecambe Bay in a drunken bid to commit suicide. She finds herself instead saving the life of a young Chinese cockle picker, a survivor of a tragic mass drowning. Wen and Angie share neither language nor experience, but she agrees to let him stay with her and disappear. Within a short time their unlikely pairing blossoms into something darkly passionate.

Saul Dawson-Smith can memorise the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute; he can recite pi to a thousand decimal places and he remembers every conversation he's ever had. He is 10 years old. Howard McNamee is 28: lonely, overweight and poorly-educated. He lives in the north of England, far from the scene of his difficult Glasgow childhood, in the home he shared with his mother before she died.

Helen is married to Angus, the younger of the Ballintyre brothers. They met as students and Helen fell in love, not just with Angus but with the romantic Ballintyre family and their beautiful house on the edge of a loch. But marriage to Angus has not proved happy. Now, years later and with a family, Helen and Angus have been forced to move back to live at Ballintyre with his older brother, Charlie. Helen is surprised to find that Sylla, Charlie’s wife, has disappeared and no one seems to know where she is. 

From the London pop scene, to the opera stages of Europe; from a tiny Greek island, to a stifling manor house full of secrets and deceptions; from the sun-drenched Queensland coast, to the silent outback; Angela and Ellie are two women both looking for something. One in search of her identity and her memory; the other in search of the love that she had and lost; theirs is a duet whose last note will not be sung until the heart-stopping climax, when a shadow from the past returns to claim them both.

There are some friends you'll never forget...no matter how hard you try. Before: Edie is the friend that Heather has always craved. But one night it goes terrifyingly wrong. And what started as an innocent friendship ends in two lives being destroyed. After: Sixteen years later Edie is still rebuilding her life. But Heather isn't ready to let her forget so easily. It's no coincidence that she shows up when Edie needs her most.

The last time Katy saw Jude was on a school trip: Jude was attacked by a stranger, and Katy ran away. Twenty years later, Jude is back, and her reappearance coincides with a series of unsettling incidents: a stranger appears in the downstairs flat, Katy's house is vandalized, her mother is mugged, and her home ransacked. Jude also seems to know an uncomfortable amount about Katy's current life.

This Love is an emotional family drama for fans of Jojo Moyes and Dorothy Koomson, from the best-selling author of Fractured. Sophie stopped believing in happy endings a long time ago, but could this love change all of that? Sophie Winter lives in a self-imposed cocoon - she's a single 31-year-old translator who works from home in her one-bedroom flat. This isn't really the life she dreamed of, but then Sophie stopped believing in dreams when she was a teenager and tragedy struck her family.

Komméno Island, Greece: I don't know where I am, who I am. Help me. A woman is washed up on a remote Greek island with no recollection of who she is or how she got there. Potter's Lane, Twickenham, London: Eloïse Shelley is officially missing. Lochlan's wife has vanished into thin air, leaving their toddler and 12-week-old baby alone. Her money, car and passport are all in the house, with no signs of foul play. Every clue the police turn up means someone has told a lie....