Time period: 19th century

Abandoned, penniless and orphaned as young children, Bertram and Alice saved each other from a terrible fate. For seven long years they have been kept apart, Bertram - BJ to his friends - learning how to survive and then thrive in the penal colonies of Australia, and Alice growing her prosperous ...

When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugenie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Not only were they both young and beautiful, but they played a pivotal role in ruling their realms during a tempestuous era charact...

In 'Rites of Passage', historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally - to modern eyes - bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain. Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give c...

The moment Pixie Tate steps inside the opulent Aldershoff Hotel in Manhattan, one of the last relics of New York's Gilded Age, she senses instantly that its elegant walls hide a dark secret. Pixie knows that she must use her unique gift to travel back in time in order to discover the mysteries of...

The moment Pixie Tate steps inside the opulent Aldershoff Hotel in Manhattan, one of the last relics of New York's Gilded Age, she senses instantly that its elegant walls hide a dark secret. Pixie knows that she must use her unique gift to travel back in time in order to discover the mysteries of...

London, 1873. Madeleine Brewster's marriage to Dr Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family's sullied reputation. After all, Lucius is a well-respected collector of natural curiosities. His 'Small Museum' of bones and specimens in jars is his pride and joy, although firmly kept un...

Inside the grand walls of Edinburgh's 19th-century scientific institutions, anatomists began to map the secrets of the human body in order to discover new medical innovations. But to the horror of the local population, a shortage of bodies soon led to the gruesome act of graveyard bodysnatching, ...

Lincolnshire, 1854. After much reflection, Caroline Lawson has accepted Max Cavendish's marriage proposal. Yet their peaceful life on the farm is soon threatened by a series of mishaps and the strange deaths of livestock. As pressure mounts for Max to make the farm a success, the weight of respon...

In July 1860, 52 years after a federal law banning the importation of slaves to the country and on the eve of the American Civil War, a slave ship docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Concealed in its hold were 108 surviving captives from West Africa, who had been kidnapped from their homes and transpo...

1841. Mr Montgomery Hurst of Radcliffe Park is getting married. To the great consternation of the county of Wickenshire, he is not marrying the daughter of an earl, but an impoverished widow with three children, whom nobody has ever heard of. Society is both appalled and intrigued. Nobody is more...

Nottingham, 1827. Mary Reddish, a young housemaid unjustly committed after defying her employer's advances, must navigate the brutal treatments of the county asylum while trying to prove her sanity. Meanwhile, Ann and Thomas Morris, the asylum's matron and director, struggle to uphold humane prac...

In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women wh...

South Africa, 1820. When Ann Waite discovers a battered longboat washed ashore in Algoa Bay, she is stunned to find two survivors: a badly scarred sailor and a little boy. As the man walks away into the morning mist alone, refusing to take the child - Harry - with him, Ann is left with no choice ...

1853. In the serene countryside of rural Yorkshire, Caroline and Trixie's unbreakable bond, forged amidst the hardships of York's slums, is the cornerstone of their shared dream: to transform their modest farm into a flourishing haven. Amidst this toil, Caroline finds herself caught in a delicate...

It's been several years since Kitty Cavanah's life was turned upside down when her family made the perilous journey across the Irish Sea to Blackburn and she became a widow. After facing near destitution she's finally making enough to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. Until,...

1812, the Lake District. Despite their attempts to keep their forbidden romance away from the disapproving eyes of society, Dr Jacob Sandys and his lover, the actress Dora Fitz-Pennington, find themselves drawn into the scandals of the British elite once more when William Wordsworth's prized note...

Grab your pick axe and your canary cage - it's time to mine for coal in the Victorian pits! As a British man living in a coal-mining village during the Victorian era, you're forced to endure the dangers, difficulties and despair of working underground in the 1800s. It's gruelling work, with long ...

1814. Ashore on leave, Captain Sir Thomas Kydd learns of a dismal harvest and general hardship among the population. In Germany, Napoleon Bonaparte is celebrating victories that once again make his name feared throughout Europe. An armistice is signed and while the Allies lick their wounds Bonapa...

Margaret Prior is a prison visitor in the 1870s. Set in and around Milbank, one of London's most notorious gaols for women, the story is both a both a ghost story and an intriguing literary mystery tale.

This title tells the story of Edward Rulloff - a serial murderer who was called 'too intelligent to be killed' - and the array of 19th-century investigators who were convinced his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind. By 1871 Rulloff was captured, chained in a cell - a ps...