It is the height of summer. After she is expelled from boarding school, Anna Severell returns to the strict, orderly house of her father, a celebrated novelist. The family is soon joined by Oliver Canning, a talented young academic who urges her to take control of her future. As autumn begins and Anna enters university, the pair grow closer. A single mistake, however, could put her newfound independence at risk....

In Yorkshire, the Potter family are preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II’s arrival on the throne. Its three youngest members, however, are preoccupied with other matters. Stephanie has grown tired of their overbearing father and resolves to marry the local curate. Anxious teenager Marcus gains a new teacher and suffers increasingly disturbing visions. Then there is Frederica. On the brink of adulthood, a love affair with a young playwright may offer the freedom she desperately desires.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife and a seat in parliament. 

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi.   

Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other, for no one but Saunders could conceive it. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.

A story charting the events of the 20th century through the eyes of the Fielding family, whose fortunes are altered irrevocably. The Brian Aldiss collection includes over 50 books and spans the author’s entire career, from his debut in 1955 to his more recent work. On the glorious sands of the North Norfolk coast, Steve, the youngest member of the Fielding family, plays alone. But are these halcyon days War is looming, and things will never be the same again. This book, described by Brian as his magnum opus, charts the fortunes of the Fielding family throughout the 20th century.

The Hall family live under the brooding shadow of the Black Mountains, in the mining town of Hillsbridge. Charlotte, James and their seven children are independent spirits, united by strong family values. Living in a mining community is never easy, and when the shadow of impending war threatens, they must pull together to face the hardship to come. Can this close-knit family overcome whatever tragedy life throws at them? 

When Catherine Bolton arrives with her freshly-minted doctorate on Chaucer and the church, Dr. Loewe and his secretive group of students represent an irresistible challenge to her and her new friend Evie Kirkland. But just as Evie is not quite the friend she seems to be, so, too, the medieval passions of Dr. Loewe's group are more far reaching and intense than she could ever have imagined.

An old man is sleeping fitfully. It's too hot. The air is thick with Spanish jasmine floating in from his overgrown garden. And he's not sure whether he'll be woken by General Franco sitting on the end of his bed. It's 1975, and Francis McNulty is nearing the end of his life but feeling far from peaceful. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he is tormented by grief and guilt about a brief, terrible act of betrayal from that time, and he's started seeing his old nemesis on the street, in the garden and now in his bedroom. 

At the turn of the 20th century, two children play on an English beach. Eustace, a gentle, dreamy boy with a weak heart, relies on his older sister, Hilda. As young adults, Eustace and Hilda are unexpectedly invited to stay at the grand country house of the wealthy Staveley family. The weekend's events will haunt the siblings' lives as their story travels from Oxford colleges to Venetian palazzi.

Arthur and Waldo Brown are twins and destined never to grow apart. They share everything, except their views of things. This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood. 

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.

The Tree of Heaven follows the fortunes of the Harrison family as the children grow up in the shadow of the First World War and Dorothy's brothers go off to the trenches, while she becomes involved with the suffrage movement, and later joins a version of the Women's Social and Political Union. 

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change - this is the dilemma explored in The Living and the Dead. Patrick White's second novel is set in '30s London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.