To tell a patient they are about to die is never the easiest of tasks. When the patient is thirty-five, a woman and exceptionally beautiful, the task is even harder. In the winter of 1934 Nancy Leigh...

Delve into the grand courts of the 19th century in Margaret Pemberton's evocative historical novel, The Summer Queen.Set within the expansive halls of Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s forty-year reign...

Scratch the veneer of opulence at the ‘Enclave’, a cluster of villas bought for the movie star Rosalind by her millionaire husband, and a reality of fear, frustration, guilt and love betrayed glimmer...

A huge saga – of a world destroyed by war – and a woman made triumphant by love Since she was ten Elizabeth had been forced to give way to the men in her life. First her father, a lonely, selfish widower...

A broken love affair takes Lucy Matthews to the Villa d’Este as governess to the six-year-old Danielle Van de Naude. But instead of a refuge Lucy finds she has entered a world of intrigue and fear. Why...

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.Thea, the eldest daughter of Viscount...

Susan Carter’s idyllic Bavarian holiday was rudely shattered while picnicking on the hillside by the sound of a speeding car, followed by a crash. Looking through her binoculars she saw the occupants...

What is holding together this peculiar band of pioneers? Polly Kirkham is an orphan who was brought up by the Mormons. Now, in the bitter winter of 1846, she is part of their small band of pioneers struggling...

1945: The war was over, and the families who lived in Magnolia Square could look forward to their men coming home and their lives returning to normal.But for some, the end of the war brought serious problems....

In 1880 the meeting place of international royalty and the twilight world of the demi-monde is the dazzling casino at Monte Carlo. To the young and beautiful Charlotte Grainger, humble companion to Princess...

Miranda Taylor drowns in Saligo Bay. Was it an accident – or suicide – or murder? Who is the mysterious Pete Mackay and why did Miranda say he would be able to explain everything? Sally Craig, her friend,...

Olivia Harland is enjoying her stay with her aunt and uncle in the Western Hills fifteen miles from Peking. It is 1900 and the air is heavy with the talk of Boxers, the Chinese rebels who are driving...

In the stormy turmoil of old Sarajevo, their passionate story began . . . In Belgrade, in the balmy spring of 1914, neither of the royally related Karageorgevich sisters had the slightest presentiment...

In the summer swelter of New Orleans, society girls talk of eligible young men, and of whom they will marry. For Augusta Lafayette, only the scandalous Beauregard Clay will do. He is years older than...

A war that could turn friends into enemies, lovers into fighters . . .Summer 1935. In Margaret Pemberton's Beneath the Cypress Tree best friends Kate Shelton, Ella Tetley and Daphne St. Maur are on the...

Alison Russell’s holiday is rudely shattered by gunfire when Basque separatists try to smuggle arms into the quiet fishing village in which she is staying. Accompanied only by Miss Daventry, a tough old...

They were girls of the 60s – as unlike each other as it was possible to be. Abbra – the quiet, lovely, Californian college girl – reared to a life of good behaviour and doing the right thing. She was...

Accused of witchcraft and hunted by Louis XIV’s fanatical Inquisitor, Marietta Riccardi is only rescued from being burned alive by the intervention of Léon de Villeneuve — the Lion of Languedoc. Small...

Lady Catherine Davencourt is heartbroken when her fiancé is murdered, so she is doubly horrified when the disreputable Dominic, the new Marquis of Clare, offers to marry his brother’s bereaved fiancée....

‘But I don’t hate Chung King!’ Gianetta cried passionately. ‘I love it. I love the temples and pagodas and the plum blossom and the junks on the river. What I hate is only being able to see these things...

It’s not every child who is named after a motor car, and when little Daisy Ford discovers she’s been abandoned by her mother, she resolves to put the name – and her unhappy years at the convent orphanage...

Rose Sugden is a Yorkshire girl through and through. In pre-First World War Bradford, Rose’s maternal grandfather, Caleb Rimmington, is one of Bradford’s wealthiest mill owners and her father is a highly...

June 1944 in occupied France, and the embattled coast of Normandy anxiously awaits the Allied invasion. Lisette de Valmy – just eighteen years old and an ardent member of the Resistance, she is torn between...

Magnolia Square in South London was a friendly and vibrant place to live, not least for Kate Voigt and her father. Carl Voigt had been a WWI prisoner of war who had married a cockney girl and never gone...

Four very different girls from different worlds meet on their first day of school in 1962. Artemis is the daughter of a self-made man; Geraldine is from an upper-class family; Kiki’s father is a doctor...

In the Alazkan Klondike, at the height of the gold-rush, respectable women were thin on the ground and the San Franciscan based Peabody Marriage Bureau did a roaring trade despatching mail-order brides...

It is early summer in 1953, and the friends and neighbours of Magnolia Square are looking forward to celebrating the Coronation. The war has become a memory; the future seems rosy. Kate Emmerson looks...

‘The Nile, the white fountains of the Nile. . .’ Her father’s last words haunt Harriet Latimer long after she has been rescued from the Nubian desert which they had been attempting to cross. Her rescuer,...

‘Here she is!’ Alexander was shouting. ‘This is your new daughter-in-law! An Irish peasant . . . An illegitimate . . . illiterate . . . Irish peasant!’ 1860: Alexander Karolyis, only son of the wealthiest...