The irrepressible Russell "Buffy" Buffery has upped sticks from London and moved to Knockton, Powys, to a B&B inherited from an old flame. With his future spread before him, and a string of failed marriages behind him, Buffy decides it's time for a new challenge. Meanwhile: Harold's wife has run off with a younger woman leaving him alone with his as-yet-unwritten novel narrated by Mary Pickford's cat; Amy's weedy boyfriend has turned out to be not so needy after all; and Andy's partner's corset-and-suspender-clad attempts at seduction are having anything but the desired effect.

Nobody in the world knows our secret...that I’ve ruined Bev's life, and she's ruined mine. Petra’s romantic life has always been a car crash, and even in her sixties she’s still capable of getting it disastrously wrong. But then she falls in love with Jeremy, an old chum visiting from abroad. The fatal catch? Jeremy is her best friend’s husband. But just as Petra is beginning to relax into her happy ever after, she finds herself catapulted to West Africa and to Bev, her best friend whom she’s been betraying so spectacularly.

It is the year 1916, and pretty young Eithne Clay runs a shabby but genteel South London boarding house while her husband is off at war. Her 14-year old son Ralph dotes on his mother, but has adolescent thoughts he'd rather hide from her. Winnie, the young maid, is a homely, good-hearted country girl, rejected by Archie, the cheeky butcher's boy before he too is called up. And when the dreaded telegram arrives at the house, things turn from difficult to desperate for the two young women....

From the best-selling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Tulip Fever, a deliciously funny, poignant and wry novel, full of surprising twists and turns. James is getting on a bit and needs full-time help. So Phoebe and Robert, his middle-aged offspring, employ Mandy, who seems willing to take him off their hands. But as James regales his family with tales of Mandy's virtues, their shopping trips and the shared pleasure of their journeys to garden centres, Phoebe and Robert sense something is amiss.

Take an ordinary, well-off family like the Prices. Watch what happens when, one Sunday, 17-year-old Hannah disappears without a trace. See how the family rallies when a ransom note demands half a million pounds for Hannah's safe return. But it's when Hannah comes home that the story really begins. Now observe what happens to a family when they lose their house, their status, all their wealth. Note how they disintegrate under the pressures of guilt and poverty and are forced to confront their true selves.

When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, is driven beyond endurance by his disgusting and difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: "Can't we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away." His prayer seems to have been answered when his entrepreneurial cousin, Sonny, sets up a retirement home, recreating a lost corner of England in a converted guesthouse in Bangalore.

She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge), she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they always had done, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her. When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B - a shrewd and tricksy woman in her 90s - she meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the keeper of stories, she doesn’t have a story to tell. 

Louise and Rebecca, good friends since their BBC days in Belfast, work for a film company and are scouring the south of England for a suitable location to shoot a movie about Elizabeth I. As they stumble across Wooldene House, they meet Diana and Henry, who own the property. Diana, widowed, feels her life is slowly crumbling along with the house, and yearns for new romance. Diana spends her time looking after their aunt Lucy who, as she senses time is running out, begins to share the startling secrets in her past.

Susan and Norma have been best friends for years, at first thrust together by force of circumstance (a job at The Pin Cushion, a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire) and then by force of character (neither being particularly inclined to make friends with anyone else). But now, 30 years later, faced with a husband seeking immortality and Norma out of reach on a wave of professional glory, Susan begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, work and, most importantly, friendship.

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to an unexpected homecoming. And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake.

My best friend warned me that it was too soon to marry Edward, a widower with an adorable but troubled little boy. She said we were moving too fast. But all I could see was a kind, loving man, struggling with grief, who needed my help. Yet as storm clouds gather above our small wedding ceremony, my hopes and dreams fall apart. None of my husband’s family turns up to support us. Instead of a honeymoon, we have a quiet night in. My wedding bouquet is placed on his first wife’s grave. And then my new stepson tells me he’s sure his mother is still alive.

Nine lives. Four generations. One family. The MacEntees are no ordinary family. Determined to be different to other people, they have carved out a place for themselves in Irish life by the sheer force of their own personalities. But when a horrifying act of violence befalls television star Alma, a chain of events is set in motion that will leave even the MacEntees struggling to make sense of who they are.

At the end of her first unsuccessful season out in society, Lady Georgiana has all but given up on attracting a suitable man - until she receives an invitation to a masked Halloween ball at Broxley Manor. Georgie is uncertain why she was invited, until she learns that the royal family intends to marry her off to a foreign prince, one reputed to be mad.

It’s been 25 years since Gus and Monica left England to start a new life in Spain, building a vineyard and wine business from the ground up. However, when Gus suffers a stroke and their idyllic Mediterranean life is thrown into upheaval, it’s left to their three grown-up children in London to step in.... Sebastian is busy running his company with his wife, Anna, who’s never quite seen eye to eye with her mother-in-law. Katie, a successful solicitor in the City, is distracted by the problems with her long-term partner, Nic, and the secretive lives of their three daughters. 

Drawing from reams of historical data, laboratory experiments, field research, and eyewitness accounts, this comprehensive guide is the only book you'll need to face the greatest challenge mankind has ever encountered. Granted, you probably already know that skills such as wilderness survival, leadership, and basic first aid are important when fighting off hordes of the undead.