Time period: 20th century

Corsica, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Severine Guimard has always felt destined for fame. Beautiful, charismatic, and able to seduce whomever she pleases, the daughter of the French Prefect of Corsica and an American poet knows in her heart that it's only a matter of time before she'll escape this pr...

It's 1959 and eighteen-year-old Sophie is determined that now is the time for her real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds diversion and excitement in a...

Here is the captivating true story of an underdog business - a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher's Britain - from a woman at the heart of the women's liberation movement. What was it like to start a feminist bookshop, in an industry dominated by men? How could a lesbian thrive in Thatcher's t...

Looking for a new start after her father's death, Lara Hope arrives in Lisbon in search of a family she's never met. As war storms across Europe, Lara finds solace and belonging in her landlady's tranquil bookshop in one of the most beautiful corners of the city. But when she witnesses a customer...

1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades. But when mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours - a poised English beauty, a...

1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades. But when mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours - a poised English beauty, a...

In August 2014, Tom Lee and his parents drove out to visit Severalls Hospital, a former in-patient psychiatric hospital. Closed since the 1990s, as part of a nationwide shuttering of psychiatric institutions, the buildings now stand derelict and overgrown. But in the recent past, the name 'Severa...

Why do societies only remember their own national war dead? Today, the enemy dead might be largely hidden from view, but this wasn't always the case. During both world wars, Germans and Britons died in their thousands in enemy territory. From Berlin to Bath, London to Leipzig, civilian communitie...

Hampshire, 1938. Victor Silvius is confined in a private sanatorium after attacking prominent judge Sir Giles Drury. When Sir Giles starts receiving sinister threatening letters, his wife suspects Silvius. Meanwhile, Silvius' sister Caroline is convinced her brother is about to be murdered - by n...

'Can't I Go Instead' follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter's suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her fa...

This is the definitive biography of the greatest French statesman of modern times. In six weeks in the early summer of 1940, France was over-run by German troops and quickly surrendered. The French government of Marshal Petain sued for peace and signed an armistice. One little-known junior French...

Here is an engrossing biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazi...

The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Bombay, 1951. A political rally ends in tragedy when India's first female police detective, Persis Wadia, kills a lone gunman as he attempts to assassinate the divisive new defence minister, a man calling for war with India's new post-Independence neighbours. With the Malabar House team tasked to...

London, 1951: Clem Fatale, the youngest crook in the city, is on a mission to find her dad. Jimmy Fatale, notorious jewel thief and leader of the Spider Gang, has gone missing and with him the greatest prize in London: the Fool's Canary. Along with her prisoner and/or sidekick Gilbert (depends wh...

Beanie, Mercedes and Ella - a Valley Girl from LA, an English rose-with-thorns and a Kentucky blueblood - each denying their past while creating a future, together storm the boys' club that is the hottest talent agency in 1980s Hollywood. A riveting story of friendship, betrayal and survival, Ela...

Winter, 1947. Britain's secret services have been penetrated. The country is more vulnerable than ever - and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin knows it. He decides it is time to send his master of 'Special Tasks' to create extra chaos. But Stalin has a more important motive than mere disruption. He has...

1915: As war continues to rage across the Channel, the families of the Somerset village of Street can no longer avoid its long shadow. Workers in the Clarks shoe factory, at the heart of the village, have left for the army in droves, and news from the Front seems to grow darker by the day. When l...

After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and house mate in Exeter. She's always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a...

1916: As fighting in Europe continues, the Clarks Factory Girls find themselves caught in a divided community. With the country in the grips of conscription, the pacifism at the heart of Street village comes under scrutiny, and when Kate befriends Gerald, a young Quaker arrested for refusing to f...