When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to an unexpected homecoming. And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake.

One summer, a teenager disappears from Deep Valley, Pennsylvania. She is beautiful, intelligent, richer than most in those parts - and black. The cops search for her, but not as hard as they would if she were a white girl. Watching this drama unfold is Cindy, a younger girl from a white trash family. She has idolised Jude for years, yearning for her glamour, her popularity, her loving home and decent chance in life. And so, in the absence of anyone to give a damn where she goes or what becomes of her, Cindy starts to slip out of her own skin and into the space Jude left behind.... 

By a frozen lake, 10-year-old Jesse waits for his father. It's New Year's Day, and his dad promised a fresh start. But Jesse messed it all up. And that's when he meets the woman. In the months ahead, the woman's sudden disappearance sets off a chain of events in Whale Bay, spanning out like fracture lines into the lives of her husband, the detective trying to solve her case and Jesse and his family - a young boy cracking like ice under the weight of a terrible secret.

A nurse at the Family Planning Clinic in Montgomery Alabama, Civil Townsend is passionate about putting choice into women's hands. She brings the option of birth control to their doorsteps, and with it the right to determine their own destinies. Or so she believes. When she is assigned to administer birth control to two school-age Black girls, the Williams sisters, who live off an old unpaved road in a shack without running water, Civil can't help but feel uneasy. She grows close to the family and becomes fiercely invested in their well-being.

 Writers & Lovers established Lily King as one of our most beloved authors of contemporary fiction. Now, for the first time ever, King collects 10 of her finest short stories, opening fresh realms of discovery for avid and new listeners alike. 

Meet Lady Toad, Mistress Badger, Miss Water Rat and Mrs Mole as they go about their adventures, messing around on the river, gallivanting in Lady Toad’s shiny new toy and fighting valiantly to save Toad Hall from unruly squatters. In this retelling by Dina Gregory, The Wind in the Willows becomes a story about a group of female animals to be admired for their close sisterhood and fierce independence. Featuring original music and songs by Rosabella Gregory and sound effects captured on location, put your headphones on, sit back and lose yourself in the British countryside.

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family. Even after all these years, former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are still winning tournaments, and now that they've sold the family business they have all the time in the world to learn how to 'relax'. Their four adult children are busy living their own lives, and while it could be argued they never quite achieved their destinies, no-one ever says that out loud.

1957, Clayton Valley, Ohio. Ellie has the best grades in her class. Her dream is to go to nursing school and marry Brick McGinty. A basketball star, Brick has the chance to escape his abusive father and become the first person in his blue-collar family to attend college. But when Ellie learns that she is pregnant, everything changes. Just as Brick and Ellie revise their plans and build a family, a knock on the front door threatens to destroy their lives.  

As America recovers from the Second World War, two families’ journeys begin. James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish American family, escapes his parents’ turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on a date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx.

Chesapeake Bay, 1980. Eighteen-year-old Verity Vergennes is the captain of the USS Nepenthe, and her seven younger siblings are her crew. The ship - an oyster boat transformed into a make-believe destroyer - is the heart of the Vergennes family, a place both to play and to learn responsibility. But Verity’s had it with being tied to the ship and secretly applies to a distant college. If only her parents could bear to let her go. Maeve and Arthur Vergennes already suffered one loss when, five years earlier, their eldest son, Jude, stormed out and never returned.

Laurel Hill and her precocious daughter, Skye, have always been each other's everything. The pair lives on Lake Superior, where the local school has classes of just four children and the nearest hospital is a helicopter ride away. Though they live frugally, eking out a living with Laurel's patchwork of jobs, their deep love for each other feels like it can warm them even on the coldest of nights. What more do they need? One otherwise normal afternoon, their landlord decides to evict them in favor of a more profitable summer rental, and they are pushed farther to the margins. 

Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation...until one night her granddaughter rows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these.

As her Pappi fights to save his family during the Holocaust, Irene's childhood is lost. Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene's father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler's Germany. By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene's first-person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times.

Sean was a seventh-grade drop-out, a dishwasher then a construction worker to help his mother and sister scrape by, and a self-described "nobody with a sad story behind him." Yet he cannot deny the glimmers of life's goodness even amid its rough edges. Such goodness becomes even harder to deny when Sean meets the love of his life at a fried chicken church potluck, and harder still when his lifelong love of storytelling leads him to stages across the southeast, where he is known and loved as "Sean of the South."

Dover, Massachusetts, 1969. Ginny Richardson's heart was torn open when her baby girl, Lucy, born with Down syndrome, was taken from her. Under pressure from his powerful family, her husband, Ab, sent Lucy away to Willowridge, a special school for the "feeble-minded". Ab tried to convince Ginny it was for the best. But two years later, when Ginny's best friend, Marsha, shows her a series of articles exposing Willowridge as a hell-on-earth - its squalid hallways filled with neglected children - she knows she can't leave her daughter there.