When it comes to illness, sometimes the end is just the beginning. Recovery and convalescence are words that exist at the periphery of our lives - until we are forced to contend with what they really mean. Here, GP and writer Gavin Francis explores how - and why - we get better, revealing the many shapes recovery takes, its shifting history and the frequent failure of our modern lives to make adequate space for it.

Twyla Ridley, resourceful, optimistic, has just had her first child. It's what she and her husband, Dylan, have always wished for. However, Charlie is blind. For the first time in her adult life, Twyla feels truly tested. She cherishes her son, showering him with love and boundless affection, but there's a part of her that aches for him to see. So Twyla throws herself into motherhood with a very private agenda, because maybe, if she strives hard enough, she'll be able to find a way to fix him. But is it a risk worth taking?

As Britain is pulled towards war, the secrets within two families threaten to tear them apart, in the new novel from Juliet West, The Faithful.... July 1935. In the village of Aldwick on the Sussex coast, 16-year-old Hazel faces a long, dull summer with just her self-centred mother, Francine, for company. But then Francine decamps to London with her lover, Charles; Oswald Mosley's blackshirts arrive in Aldwick; and Hazel's summer suddenly becomes more interesting.

From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship, to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on her life's dream - to fly a Great Circle around the globe, pole to pole. But after a crash landing, she finds herself stranded on the Antarctic ice without enough fuel. 

Nine lives. Four generations. One family. The MacEntees are no ordinary family. Determined to be different to other people, they have carved out a place for themselves in Irish life by the sheer force of their own personalities. But when a horrifying act of violence befalls television star Alma, a chain of events is set in motion that will leave even the MacEntees struggling to make sense of who they are.

Harriet Goodman, brave, wry and handsome, is determined to triumph no matter what. With a decade of therapy under her belt and a new large inheritance, it seems there is nothing she cannot achieve. When she finds herself in charge of a school full of precocious little girls, rich in everything but care, she vows to make their childhoods amongst the happiest ever spent.

A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one best-selling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice and the power of place. Lose yourself in the story of a lifetime – the unforgettable Sunday Times best seller. A story of two siblings, their childhood home and a past that they can’t let go. Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. 

When Monica is offered a three-month placement in LA, she knows that for the sake of her career she must accept it - even though it means leaving behind nine-year-old Ruby, toddler Luca and her husband, Daniel. She hires Ursula as a housekeeper and nanny during her absence, although the older woman is oddly reluctant to agree to a childcare position. What is the dark secret in Ursula's past which has left her so closed off and reserved? Will her growing attachment to Ruby bring it to the surface?

Inspired by extraordinary true events, this remarkable debut novel reveals the enduring power of love and the strength of the human spirit in one woman's quest to find her son, and a little boy's dream to be found.

Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners. But the final wishes of the Keeper of Lost Things have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters....

Anna Craven grew up captivated by stories of her mother's childhood in Birmingham and of Kate's friend, Olivia. Theirs was a magical friendship and Anna always regretted that, with Olivia's tragic death during the war, she would never meet the woman her mother loved so deeply. But when Kate dies, she leaves her daughter one final story: the whole truth of her life with Olivia Kemp. Anna is shocked to discover how little she really knew about the mother with whom she once felt so close.

But what of Minty, the woman who snaffled Rose's husband and her job? Now married to Nathan and the mother of six-year-old twins, she has achieved what many women dream of, the life of a well-to-do Yummy-mummy. Yet, the transition from bright, kitten-esque, sexy office siren to a coddled dependent is not entirely satisfactory. What happens to a contemporary Becky Sharp when she has achieved her objectives?

It's 1969, and the summer of love still lingers in London, but Gilda is haunted by her wartime past. She walked out on her son, Reuben, when he was just a boy and fears he'll never forgive her. When he marries a small, blonde gentile, she takes it as the ultimate rejection. Her cold, distant son seems transformed by love. What does his new wife have that she doesn't? As Gilda's obsession builds, she starts to follow her daughter-in-law, copies her hairstyle and breaks into the newlyweds' home.

When 18-year-old Dot meets Sol, she feels that love has arrived at last. Soloman Arbuthnott is a man who can bring colour and warmth to her drab life in 60s London - and what's more, he is a young, handsome soldier with excellent prospects. They stroll hand-in-hand by the Serpentine, dance cheek-to-cheek in Soho's smoky bars, and begin to plan their idyllic future, growing old together in Sol's ancestral home on the island of St Lucia. But this is 1961. East End girls don't date West Indian boys, let alone fall in love with them and leave the country.

Mary has been nursing a secret. Forty years ago, she made a choice that would change her world for ever, and alter the path of someone she holds dear. Beth is searching for answers. She has never known the truth about her parentage, but finding out could be the lifeline her sick child so desperately needs. When Beth finds a faded newspaper cutting amongst her mother's things, she realises the key to her son's future lies in her own past. She must go back to where it all began to unlock...the Secret.