Dolores is the youngest of six daughters. Growing up in the 1960s in Cardiff's poverty stricken Tiger Bay, her life is cursed from the start when, on the day of her birth, her father gambles and loses everything on a bet that Dolores will be a boy. As Dolores grows older, we see this strange underworld through her eyes: Tiger Bay is a place of gaming rooms and cafes, of crumbling houses and burning secrets, and for Dolores and her sisters, their home is a dangerous place, filled equally by fear and love.

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

A heartwarming novel about the surprise of second chances in the autumn of your life. Gor is keeping busy. He has a magic show to rehearse, his new assistant to get in line and a dacha in dire need of weeding. But he keeps being distracted by a tapping on his window - four floors up. Is old age finally catching up with him?

Raped then murdered in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, Lin Shui’s “Hungry Ghost” clings tenaciously to life. Just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is 12-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on The Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, entangled in the Safford family’s web of secrets and lies, unleashes chaos. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly.

Yesterday, Sally was living in an idyllic South African farmstead with her teenage daughter, Gigi. Now Sally is dead, murdered, and Gigi is alone. But Sally lingers unseen in her daughter's shadow. When Gigi moves in with her aunt, Sally comes, too. When Gigi's cousin develops an obsession with African black magic. Now Sally must find a way to stop her daughter from making a mistake that will destroy the lives of everyone.

Anna knows what lies look like. She can see untruths spill from heads and turn the air bright orange. Only her sister knows about Anna's synaesthesia and how she can read a person's emotions - even when they're trying to hide them. When she gets a job as a Mother's Help to a family whose niece, Lily, is missing, Anna is given the lost girl's room, and the mystery around Lily begins to haunt her. 

Nineteen forty-four, Nazi-controlled Austria: For 13-year-old Ursula, life in her village remains almost as it was. But when Russian prisoners escape from the local concentration camp, her friend goes missing and her brother's allegiance to the Hitler Youth emerges in shocking ways, Ursula finds herself alone and surrounded by threat. Ursula is forced to recognise that danger comes not only from the enemy at the door but from the enemy within....

1957: within a year of arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the loving, law-abiding Delaney family is destroyed. Did they know something they weren't allowed to know? Did they find something they weren't supposed to find? Hedy is the only one left standing, a rebellious girl cast adrift in a world of postwar anxiety - a girl who has the courage to question what really went on behind military closed doors. 

When Colin discovers his son is on a murder charge in France, he trails his small boat, The Dragonfly, across the Channel to help. There he meets his granddaughter - the irrepressible Delphine - for the first time. They embark on a boat journey through the picturesque French canals, heading south through Burgundy, 'until the butter melts'. Along the way, they catch up with Tyler, a spirited American, and land big fish, cultivate new loves and uncover a burning secret. But can Colin help his son get off the hook?

Mavis Gaunt spent time in the village of Shipleigh, as a wartime evacuee, finding it a heavenly retreat. But it is not until her 20s that she decides to head back. Frances, Tom and Robert Upcott are reclusive siblings from a local farm. When Mavis returns to the village, she and Frances strike up an unlikely friendship. But a tragic sequence of events is set to turn her heaven into a living hell. Mavis is 70 when Eve and her young son, Archie, turn up in the village. In revealing the truth about what happened, she is able to answer Eve’s questions about her own family and, in summoning them, Mavis can finally begin to lay her own ghosts to rest.

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to handcraft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.

On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the Home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the youngest brothers, the regime is without hope, and when he inherits a small legacy he defies his elders and runs away, taking with him a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. Radio Eireann call it a kidnapping. For Michael the act is the beginning of Owen's salvation.

The last time Dodie sees her mother alive, Stella is unusually busy and wearing an old red velvet dress. Soon after this, Dodie’s brother Seth goes missing: the only trace of him through postcards signed ‘Yours in the Lord’ addressed from New York State. When Stella hangs herself, Dodie must leave her baby Jake at home and cross the Atlantic to bring Seth back from the mysterious Soul Life Centre. And when baby Jake unexpectedly arrives at Soul Life events take a shocking turn for Dodie.

For 13 years Pen and Cara have had a tumultuous relationship crammed with bickering and intimacy, recrimination and desire. When Cara dies in a car crash, Pen is left to cope with a secret widowhood. Along with that burden comes a hidden story of painful and pleasurable memories. With humour and poignancy, Hood follows Pen through the week of Cara’s death; through the paralysis of grief and the ecstasy of nostalgia to a point where mourning and making a new life melt into one.

'The scar drew her whole face sideways, and even in profile, with the hideous thing turned away, her face was horribly lopsided, skin, features and all, dragged away from the bone. She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago.' And yet the men still hover around her, more out of curiosity than lust, and none more so than the wildly seductive, dangerous funny man Honeybuzzard; lithe as a stick of liquorice, he is the demonic puppet master at the swirling centre of the tale.