By the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Lie. Forbidden love, intimate betrayal and the devastating power of exposure drive Helen Dunmore's remarkable new title. London, November 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets and arrested.

Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young doctor and Anna, a school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of 16-year-old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights.

Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter.

Cornwall, 1920: A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lies the terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?

Finland, 1901. Eeva, the young orphaned daughter of a revolutionary, is sent from the orphanage to work as housekeeper for Thomas, a widowed country doctor. Her enigmatic presence disturbs Thomas as much as it fascinates him, shattering all the certainties of his life. Eeva longs to be back in Helsinki with the comrades of her childhood, particularly Lauri. But life there is full of danger.

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window.

Sent abroad to Egypt in 1922, 11-year-old Lucy is caught up in the excitement that surrounds the hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb. When she meets Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist, the two girls spy on the grown-ups and a lifelong bond is formed. Haunted by the ghosts of her past, the mistakes she made, Lucy disinters her past. And she finally comes to terms with what happened after Egypt, when Frances needed Lucy most.

A chilling and atmospheric ghost story by the Orange Prize winning Helen Dunmore. In the winter of 1952, Isabel Carey moves to Yorkshire with her husband Philip, a GP. With Philip spending long hours on call, Isabel finds herself isolated and lonely. Woken by intense cold one night, she discovers an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard. Sleeping under it for warmth, she starts to dream. And not long afterwards, she is startled by a knock at her window...

Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor.Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this diverse collection of short stories.

Edie is struggling. She’s increasingly confused, but she can’t let the women in the village find that out - they’d only talk. But she’s forgetting so much - forgetting to wear matching clothes, forgetting to bake one of her walnut cakes for the church sale...and forgetting to lock the front door...until one day she wakes to find Jonah in her house and herself in her past. Jonah is struggling. The journey to England was illegal and dangerous, and he’s the only one who survived - and he still hasn’t made it to London.

Raimund Gregorious - Mundus, as his students affectionately call him - is a predictable character. A bookish Latin professor, well-respected but perhaps a little boring. One stormy morning, he encounters a beautiful, distraught Portuguese woman in a red leather coat... Later that day Raimund will realise: that moment changed everything. All of a sudden, nothing in his life feels right. His restlessness is further fuelled when he finds a book by a little-known Portuguese writer, Amadeo de Prado.

In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realizes that the musicians perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, Peter Clair understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death.

London 1893: When Cora Seaborne and her son Francis reach Essex, rumours spread from further up the estuary that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced that it may be a previously undiscovered species. As she sets out on its trail she meets William Ransome, Aldwinter's vicar.

Laurel Lefkow reads the stunning new novel from the bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. When modest Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol with her sister, she is fleeing heartache for a new life in America, far from home. But tragedy leaves her alone and vulnerable, torn between two worlds and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Life in 1850s Ohio is precarious and unsentimental. The sun is too hot, the thunderstorms too violent, the snow too deep. The roads are spattered with mud and spit. The woods are home to skunks and porcupines and raccoons.

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young lives are atomised in an instant. November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the 20th century. Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.