Having dropped out of university, Harmony returns to the site of the urban commune where she lived as a child, now divided into flats. She rents a room in the hope of uncovering the source of her nightmares about a redheaded woman who haunts the house and her obsession with lost objects from her childhood. As the London riots explode in the streets, the two hot summers converge, blurred by the drugs and sex and cheap wine, and Harmony begins to discover what really happened at Longhope 20 years ago. Can she grow up at last and build her own future?

One small, faded, leather-bound journal. One photograph in a newspaper. These two seemingly small items are set to change lives forever.Just when success seems set fair for Zeph’s writer husband Nick, she discovers that he has been having an affair. Wounded and angry, she turns to her mother for support, only to discover that the past has also come back to haunt Cora, a person who always seemed utterly flawless

While the celebrated opera singer Terri Ivory is in hospital, facing what could be the end of her career, her daughter Julie stumbles upon a long-buried secret that forces her to question her past and her place in her mother’s affection. In their empty house that no longer seems like a home, mother and daughter try to keep their closeness to each other and to the men they love.

Meg Fee plots a decade of her life in New York City - from falling in love at the Lincoln Center to escaping the roommate (and bedbugs) from hell on Thompson Street, from chasing false promises on 66th Street and the wrong men everywhere to finding true friendships over glasses of wine in Harlem and Greenwich Village. Weaving together her joys and sorrows, expectations and uncertainties, aspirations and realities, the result is an exhilarating collection of essays about love and friendship, failure and suffering, and above all hope. 

Antonia is ready for her life to start. A young woman from a small town in southern Italy, she wants to pursue her long-held dream of writing a novel. But when she moves to Milan and meets the alluring and charismatic Vittorio, he upends her world and changes her priorities. Their whirlwind relationship is as thrilling as it is painful: he doesn't share Antonia's faith in love and can't reciprocate her feelings.

From the best-selling author of The Weird Sisters comes an enchanting tale of self-discovery that will strike a chord with anyone who has ever felt they've lost their way. Chicago, 1999. Madeleine is trapped - by her family's expectations, by her controlling husband - in an unhappy marriage and a life she never wanted. But when she finds a diary detailing her grandmother Margie's trip to Jazz Age Paris, she meets a woman she never knew: a dreamer who defied her strict family and spent a summer living on her own.

Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection - that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in a form of a couple of policemen - for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day, and I would hate to forget anything....

A mesmerising literary story about a lost man in search of connection - a meditation on love, art and commitment, set against the backdrop of one of the greatest art events in modern history, Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Ester is yearning to fall in love again. Meanwhile, her ex-husband's past decisions are catching up with him, her sister is struggling through her own directionless life and her mother is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Every act has a past. Events don't just materialise from nowhere. The exile, the stolen painting and the most unlikely of witnesses - Elizabeth Saunders is trying to link the three things in order to defend her client, Ras, from a charge of terrorism. When Elizabeth's investigations lead her to the pampered, amoral Alex Benson she is baffled by the extraordinary story unfolding before her. From a draughty British prison cell Ras dreams of seeing his daughter and struggles to navigate the alien culture alone.

In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn’t stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends and a man - Charles Norton - who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell’s life, though they would never be together. 

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.

Spanning almost 30 years, My Other Life traces the journey of a fictional Paul Theroux from young bachelorhood in Africa, to his travels between continents, being in and out of marriage, and through affairs and various means of employment. From his early education at the knee of a highly eccentric uncle, until his years as a fledgling novelist in London under the wing of the rapacious Lady Max, this writer of different guises eventually returns alone to his hometown.

A stand-up with writer's block embarks upon his last gig as a Rodney Dangerfield impersonator. Reflecting on a childhood holiday, a father is faced with the limit to which he can keep his daughters safe. These characters search without knowing what they seek. At the heart of this work is Eva, whom we meet in childhood, locked in an enigmatic relationship with her mother; as a woman stumbling from youth into middle age; and in later life as the mother to a daughter of her own. Each story lays bare the emotional and psychic damage of life, love and abandonment.

Deep in the English countryside, Marshwood has always been much more than just a house. It has been the backdrop for elegant parties, a wartime hospital and an idyllic escape from trauma and unhappy marriages. When the roof starts to cave in and the money runs out, 80-year-old Bella resists the pressure to sell and instead begins to peel back the layers of the past.