Time period: 19th century

April 1814. Napoleon is deposed and exiled after defeat by a resurgent allied collation. Saddled with huge war debts, the British government has no choice but to place many of its naval ships in reserve. Captain Sir Thomas Kydd is one of the lucky officers not to be put on half pay. Instead, in t...

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...

Yorkshire, 1816. Horace Richards, heir to the Kinsley Hall Estate, dies in France after losing everything to Sir Christian Leigh-Bolton. When Horace's sister Eleanor is thrown out of her home by his widow, she seeks refuge with Mrs. Jennings, her mother's retired companion. With Mrs. Jennings, El...

June, 1878. The body of a boy is pulled from the depths of the River Thames, suspected to be the beloved missing child of the widely admired Liberal MP Ralph Gethin. Four months earlier. Harriet is a young maid newly employed at Finton Hall. Fleeing the drudgery of an unwanted engagement in the s...

Susannah Gibson charts the struggles and immense achievements of a group of trailblazing women who risked their reputations to become public intellectuals. Burdened with ailing children and unsympathetic husbands, enduring the sneers of contemporaries who thought books frazzled women's brains and...

In 1824, Lyme Regis is as tumultuous as the sea that surrounds it. Wealthy holidaymakers dance in the Assembly Rooms whilst the poor riot over the price of bread, scientists do battle with theologists, and amidst it all, one woman is about to make an extraordinary discovery. When twenty-four-year...

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...

In the 1880s, control over northeastern Africa was a political minefield into which Prime Minister Gladstone did not want to step - until his emissary Charles Gordon was besieged in Khartoum, and the city became the focal point for war. It was the height of European colonialism. Injustices were a...

Liverpool, 1861. Annie Shaw longs to be taken seriously. At 14, she's fed up of being babied by her secretive big sister Delilah. When Annie's old friend Clara visits with tales of the good money that can be made at the cotton mill outside Ormskirk, she sees her chance at adventure and runs away....

1854, Edinburgh. Respectable faces hide private sins. Apprentice Sarah Fisher is helping to fund Dr Will Raven's emerging medical practice in exchange for being secretly trained as a medic, should the rules barring women ever change. Sarah needs no instruction in the inequalities that beset her g...

In the deep of the dark, a pair of eyes watched. A great mouth opened wide. Cassia Thorne leads a double life. In one she is a respectable young music teacher for the children of the elite. In another, she sells ballads on the streets and spends her evenings locked up in Fleet Prison. When the Ba...

London, 1877. Annie Besant and her confidant Charles Bradlaugh are on trial for the sordid crime of publishing and selling a birth control pamphlet. Remarkably - 45 years before the first woman will be admitted to the English bar - Annie is defending herself - declaring a woman's right to choose ...

An engaging, thoroughly researched tale of youthful naivety and courage in the face of adversity, full of rich detail and imagination.

An engaging, thoroughly researched tale of youthful naivety and courage in the face of adversity, full of rich detail and imagination.

On the cusp of adulthood and stuck in a small town, Eliza Mace is thwarted by powers that conspire to protect, control and deceive her. But when her father disappears in mysterious circumstances, her determination to uncover the truth is unstoppable.

1820. Mary Dorothea Knatchbull is living under the sole charge of her widowed father, Sir Edward - a man of strict principles and high Christian values. But when her father marries Miss Fanny Knight of Godmersham Park, Mary's life is suddenly changed. Her new stepmother comes from a large, happy ...

Everyone has heard of Zola, but not many people have read him. This book is quite simply designed to get you to want to, by taking a look at what is on offer, with so much more to discover. Zola made it his aim to write novels exploring the many compartments and classes of modern French life in t...

Desperate after her season comes to a spectacularly disastrous end, the Honorable Miss Clara Vetry jumps into a carriage hired to take a housekeeper to Scotland. The laird of Castle CaerLaven has no interest in a wife, especially a love match - but when Caelan sees his new housekeeper, he changes...

1887. London, but not as you know it. The Industrial Revolution went further than anyone could have imagined, and the sprawling, chaotic metropolis of Even Greater London spreads across the southern half of England. The immense Tower casts electricity through the sky, powering the mind-boggling m...

In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain's southern shoreline - and so sparked a crisis that would engulf science and religion for the next six decades. By its end, the literal reading of the Bible had been overturned, science had been liberated from religio...