Time period: 20th century

As the horrors of fascism ran riot through Europe in the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans, most of them Jewish and many of them artists, fled their countries seeking sanctuary in an imperial island at the edge of the continent. The world they found when they reached these shores - da...

This volume unbuttons the multi-layered, hundred-year-history of women's lives through fashion and beauty from 1860 to 1960. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than...

Dear reader, if you are looking for a passionate romance, a slick political thriller or, perhaps, a ripping yarn with volcanos, pirates and ghosts; a book where everything ends neatly and makes perfect, unequivocal sense, then I'm afraid this is not the book you're looking for. If you like storie...

In the early sixties, Victor 'Lucky' Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill - then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman. Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in L...

Provence, 1920. Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuf...

Set over one long, hot summer on the New Zealand coast, a ten-year-old girl's innocent investigation into a local mystery sees the cracks within her own family start to show.

When Robert Bardsley arrives at Greenfields in the spring of 1933, it is home to a collective of writers, artists, thinkers, musicians and horticulturalists; a place of unchecked idealism and outlandish lifestyles that regularly scandalises the county. An ambitious young gardener, Robert's been o...

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the condit...

In 1939 there were more than ten million children living in Britain. Their childhoods were about to beshattered by events they could neither control nor comprehend. The Second World War not only tore two million children away from their homes as evacuees, it also called on boy scouts and girl gui...

January 1943. Warsaw is a city of the dead. In the ghetto, the last 50,000 Jews await their fate but, unlike those who preceded them to the death camps, they are prepared to fight to the end. Jan Kalisz, Kripo investigator and resistance double-agent, has promised to supply them with weapons. But...

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...

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one...

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...

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...

York, 1940. World War Two has arrived for the girls of the Rowntrees factory, and with rationing crippling the country, chocolate production has been driven to a bare minimum. It's all change for the Freeman sisters when the Rowntrees factory is turned over to making munitions. Molly is put on th...