Anne and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a charming house. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll. Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral - and, as they find out, beautiful and loving.With her elegant prose the author traces the web of love and desire that entangles these three; but it is Arabella who finally loses out.

April 1951. It is twenty years since the death of Rebecca, the beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter. It is twenty years since the inquest, which famously - and controversially - passed a verdict of suicide. Twenty years since Manderley, the de Winters' ancient family seat, was razed to the ground. But Rebecca's tale is just beginning... This is Sally Beauman's companion to Daphne du Maurier's classic tale, Rebecca.

As spring comes to Scotland and the hills burst into life, a dance is planned for September. The invitations summon home the group of people Violet Aird has cared for most in her long life. The oldest, strongest and wisest of them all, she sees Alexa, her vulnerable granddaughter, find love for the first time while the decision to send her little grandson away to school is driving parents Edmund and Virginia even further apart.

Merrion Palmer has been Judge Guy Stockdale's mistress for the last seven years and his wife and two grown-up sons know absolutely nothing about her. Up until now, Guy and Merrion have enjoyed a blissfully, uncomplicated relationship in stolen moments in Merrion's flat, and to the rest of the world, Guy has played the part of model husband, father and grandfather. But now the time has come for things to change.

The Long View is a portrait of a contemporary marriage which gives a real view of the shifting relationship between two people. The author's other novels include Cazalet Chronicle, The Light Years and The Sea Of Change.

At Home Place, the windows are blacked out and food is becoming scarce as a new generation of Cazalets takes up the story. Louise dreams of being a great actress, Clary is an aspiring writer, while Polly, is burdened with knowledge and the need to share it. This is the sequel to "The Light Years".

Published in 1874, it tells the tale of Gabriel Oak, one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and the respectable, middle-aged Farmer Boldwood. And while their fates depend upon the choice Bathsheba makes, she discovers the terrible consequences of an inconstant heart.

This, the third volume of the best-selling The Cazalet Chronicles, takes up the story of the Cazalet family in the spring of 1942 and follows them through the war to VE Day. Polly and Clary have left Home Place for London where Archie Lestrange keeps a close eye on them; Louise, surprisingly, has married; Polly makes a painful discovery; Zoe, despairing of Rupert's return, stumbles on solace; and Edward's duplicity demands a reckoning.

For philosophically-minded Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, getting through life with a clear conscience requires careful thought. And whilst juggling the arrival of baby Charlie, a passionate relationship with his father Jamie, a truce with her furious niece Cat, and struggles for authority over her son with her formidable housekeeper Grace, Isabel finds herself drawn into the story of a painter's mysterious death off the island of Jura.

Nestled in the heart of the Cotswolds, Thrush Green is normally a peaceful place. But as autumn turns to winter, feelings are running high in the village. Miss Fogerty, a respected teacher at the village school for over thirty years, is troubled by the methods of the new young teacher. Dotty Harmer takes up driving, much to the concern of others, and it isn’t long before she is involved in an accident and a threatening court case.

Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. While his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications.

Like father like son....But heredity seems to have gone a gene too far when Pal Maciver's suicide in a locked room exactly mirrors that of his father 10 years earlier. In each case, accusing fingers point towards Pal's stepmother, the beautiful, enigmatic Kay Kafka. But she turns out to have a formidable champion: Mid-Yorkshire's own super-heavyweight, Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel.

Mysteries of love, romance, and truth-telling lie at the heart of Isabel Dalhousie's concerns in Alexander McCall Smith's new Sunday Philosopher's Club novel. Isabel's niece, Cat, is still worshipped by the young musician, Jamie, but Cat has a new and unsuitable love interest. Meanwhile Isabel's Texan cousins have arrived in Edinburgh and are provoking a quite separate set of dilemmas.

One of the wittiest and most scathing of Henry James' novellas, The Aspern Papers chronicles the attempt to extract the valuable letters of the famous and recently deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern from the hands of his past lover and formidable adversary in the battle Juliana Bordereau. The plot was reputedly suggested to James by a story he heard of an illicit attempt to get hold of several of Lord Byron's letters.

The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'.