Summer 1939 and five cousins gather at the house with the camomile lawn for what, for many of them, will be the last summer of their youth.

For the whole of Rose's respectable married life, she had kept faith with two men. To Ned she was a perfect wife, mother of his son, and elegant hostess of Slepe. To Mylo, Rose was an impetuous and unconventional mistress, answering his erratic and impassionate calls throughout 50 years of tactful duplicity. After Ned's funeral Rose looks back on a life of dual constancy, passion, humour, and the ambiguities of love - and chooses her future.

A traveller on a train returning to London smells the burn of brakes as it hisses to a stop in the middle of the countryside. He sees a white-faced woman leap from the train and race to the aid of a sheep stranded on its back, unable to rise, in a field. Righting it, she turns, and he sees her face is full of tragedy. Considering tragedies of his own, he does not intrude, but the image lodges in his mind: a strange but familiar despair, unable, despite itself

Juno Marlowe hurries away from the thundering planes overhead, having just said goodbye to the two men she has always loved. She finds herself rescued by a stranger, frail and older than his years, who offers the protection of his house and a little more.

Matilda Poliport, recently widowed, has decided to End It All. But her meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is foiled, and when she later foils the suicide attempt of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police - life begins again for both. But life also begins to throw up nasty secrets and some awkward questions: just what was Matilda’s husband Tom doing in Paris?

Henry Tillotson, a generous, genial man, rescues Margaret from a disastrous marriage in Egypt and brings her home to the West Country as his new wife. On the threshold she gives him a black eye and retires straight to bed where she remains, apart from the occasional malevolent outburst, for the rest of her life.

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed...

It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules and, at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.

The tangled lives of three generations evoke a vanished world in this, the first volume of the Cazalet Chronicle. Home Place, Sussex, 1937. The English family at home.... For two unforgettable summers they gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of war. In the heart of the Sussex countryside these were still sunlit days of childish games, lavish family meals and picnics on the beach.

Oh, the boredom of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny fantasise about the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right proves difficult, and Linda must bear marriage with both Tony the stuffy Tory MP and gorgeously handsome but humourless communist Christian before finding real passion in war-torn Paris with Fabrice.

Artist's daughter Penelope Keeling can look back on a full and varied life: a Bohemian childhood in London and Cornwall, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the one man she truly loved. She has brought up three children - and learned to accept them as they are. Yet she is far too energetic and independent to settle sweetly into pensioned-off old age.

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. 

Jojo Harvey is a literary agent whose star is on the rise. In love with both her married boss and her burgeoning career, not much distracts her. Until she finds herself representing two women who used to be best friends. Used to be....

Can you ever re-create that first great love? Victoria Bradshaw fell in love with London playwright Oliver Dobbs when she was just 18. But he left her and disappeared from her life. Now, years later, he is a widower standing on her doorstep with his two-year-old son in his arms. And Victoria is foolish enough to want to take him back. Their early spring journey to a castle in Scotland becomes an odyssey of emotional discovery....

Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire....