The Invitation

Everyone's invited. Everyone's a suspect. In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year. The beautiful one. The golden couple. The volatile one. The new parents. The quiet one. The city boy. The outsider. The victim. Not an accident - a murder among friends.

Olivia Sheldon has travelled across the world to marry a man she does not love. Reluctant to leave England but coerced into the marriage, Olivia's reward is being reunited with her estranged sister, Clara. Her punishment is falling impossibly and illicitly in love with the enigmatic Captain Edward Bertram. Then one scorching day Clara is abducted from Alexandria's busiest street. Desperate to find her sister - and the truth about her disappearance - Olivia becomes embroiled in Egypt's shadowy underworld, risking both her life and future with Edward.

In many ways, my life has been rather like a record of the lost and found. Perhaps all lives are like that. It's when life started in earnest. Hertfordshire, 1928. The paths of Tom and Alice collide against a haze of youthful, carefree exuberance. And so begins a love story that finds its feet by a lake one silvery moonlit evening... It's when there were no happy endings. Paris, 1939. Alice is living in the City of Light, but the pain of the last decade has already left its mark.

Summer 1935. Best friends Kate Shelton, Ella Tetley and Daphne St. Maur are on the cusp of a new life, having graduated with classics degrees. Kate is desperate to start work on an archaeological dig straightaway, and she is thrilled to be given a position at the famous Knossos palace site in Crete. However, she doesn't bargain for working with gruff site director Lewis Sinclair - nor for her own complex feelings towards him. In Yorkshire, Ella's family expect her to marry Sam, her steady friend who is training to be a doctor....

When Zoe and Win move into their new home it's meant to be a fresh start. But pushed to the back of a cupboard is a suitcase - inside is a wedding dress, letters and a diary all belonging to a woman called Libby. Zoe follows Libby's trail across Europe, but when Libby's story takes a darker turn, Zoe becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering what really happened all those years ago.

It's 1911. Aged just 15, Mary Kirk and Wallis Warfield meet at summer camp. Their friendship will survive heartbreaks, continents, and the demands of the English crown until it is shattered by one unforgivable betrayal.... In 1997, Kendall's romantic break in Paris is shattered when the taxi ahead of them crashes suddenly. The news soon follows: Princess Diana is dead. Trying to forget what she has witnessed, Kendall returns home, where the discovery of a long-forgotten link to Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, will lead her to the truth of a scandal....

Kings Cross station, 1943: As the bombs fall, Rose loses her heart to a pilot but will lose so much more before the war has done its worst. Las Vegas, present day: A beautiful woman in a wedding dress walks into a seedy bar and asks the first man she sees to marry her. So when Jane meets Rose, now a formidable older lady, there's no love lost between them. But with time running out, can Rose and Jane come together to make peace with the secrets that have haunted their lives?

Constantinople, 1921. Each day Nur gazes across the waters of the Bosphorus to her childhood home, a grand white house, nestled on the opposite bank. Memories float on the breeze - the fragrance of the fig trees, the saffron sunsets of languid summer evenings. But now those days are dead. The house has been transformed into an army hospital, it is a prize of war in the hands of the British. And as Nur weaves through the streets carrying the embroideries that have become her livelihood, Constantinople swarms with Allied soldiers - a reminder of how far she and her city have fallen.

1995, London. When Sir James Harrison, one the greatest actors of his generation, passes away at the age of 95 he leaves behind not just a heartbroken family but also a secret so shocking, so devastating that it could rock the English establishment to its core. Joanna Haslam is an ambitious young journalist assigned to cover the legendary actor's funeral. The great and the good of the celebrity world are there. But Joanna stumbles on something dark beneath the glamour: the mention of a letter James Harrison has left behind, the contents of which others have been desperate to conceal for over 70 years. 

In the beautiful village of Vernazza, the Mazzone family have transformed an old convent overlooking the glamorous Italian Riviera into the elegant Lemon Tree Hotel. For Chiara, her daughter, Elene, and her granddaughter, Isabella, the running of their hotel is the driving force in their lives. One day, two unexpected guests check in. The first, Dante, is a face from Chiara's past, but what exactly happened between them all those years ago, Elene wonders. Isabella is preoccupied with the second guest, a mysterious young man who seems to know a lot about the history of the old convent.

It's 1974, and Elena Damiani lives a gilded life. Born to wealth and a noted beauty, no door is closed to her, no man can resist her. At 26 she is already onto her third husband when she meets her love match. But he is the one man she can never have, and all the beauty and money in the world can't change it. It's 2017, and Francesca Hackett is living la dolce vita in Rome, leading tourist groups around the Eternal City and forgetting the ghosts she left behind in London.

Gracie Burton is a grandmother living quietly in Devon. She has rarely left the village over the past 40 years. Her daughter, Carina, is immensely high-powered, with her own fast-paced business in London. She has very little time for her 17-year-old daughter, Anastasia, away at boarding school, and even less time for her ageing mother. In many ways, the three of them barely know each other. 

Sweeping from the Great War, through the Jazz Age to the 1940s, this unforgettable tale follows the entwined lives of the Fentons, an aristocratic family from Yorkshire. Set against the rich canvas of the first half of the twentieth century, A Season of Secrets is an unforgettable tale of passion and betrayal, love and war from the ever popular Margaret Pemberton.

Running from heartbreak, Chloe Marston leaves her old life in London for a fresh start in New York. Working at a luxury concierge company, she makes other people’s lives run perfectly, even if her own has ground to a halt. But a terrible accident forces her to step into a new role, up close and personal with the company’s most esteemed and powerful clients. Charismatic Joe Lincoln is one of them, and his every wish is her command, so when he asks her to find him a secluded holiday home in the Greek Islands, she sets about sourcing the perfect retreat.

After the death of her father - Pa Salt, an elusive billionaire who adopted his six daughters from around the globe - Tiggy D’Aplièse, trusting her instincts, moves to the remote wilds of Scotland. There she takes a job doing what she loves: caring for animals on the vast and isolated Kinnaird estate, employed by the enigmatic and troubled Laird, Charlie Kinnaird. Her decision alters her future irrevocably when Chilly, an ancient gypsy who has lived for years on the estate, tells her that she possesses a sixth sense, passed down from her ancestors....