"Liv Green barely scrapes by to make ends meet, often finding escape in a good book. She can't believe her luck when she lands a job housekeeping for her hero, bestselling author Essie Starling. The last thing Liv expected was to be the only person Essie talks to, which leads to a tenuous friendship. When Essie passes away suddenly, Liv is astonished to learn that her dying wish was for Liv to complete her final novel. To do so, Liv will have to step...

Forced by her parents' ambitions among her wealthy D'Urberville cousins, Tess Durbeyfield attracts the unscrupulous Alec. Seduced and discarded, she finds work as a milkmaid, and her steadfast integrity is finally rewarded by the love of Angel Clare. Of all the great English novelists, no one writes more eloquently of tragic destiny than Hardy. With the innocent and powerless victim Tess, he creates profound sympathy for human frailty while passionately...

In the summer of 1924 : on the eve of a glittering Society Party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again.

"An extraordinary story about an ordinary life." --People

"Brilliant" -- The New Yorker

Ten years on from The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Booker Prize-winning author, Roddy Doyle, returns to one of his greatest characters, Paula Spencer.

Paula Spencer is turning forty-eight, and hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne,...

Still spry at ninety-three, Theodora has lived long enough to see her family grow into an insufferable bunch of truculent knuckleheads. Having finally gathered the whole bickering brood together for the holidays at her South Carolina home, the grand matriarch pines wistfully for those extravagant, homey Christmases of her childhood. How she misses the tables groaning with home-cooked goodies, the over-the-top decorations, those long, lovely fireside

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Certain that she will be the number one suspect in the murder when someone in the house where she is working is killed, forty-year-old domestic and reluctant sleuth Blanche White decides to uncover the real killer herself.

"In post World War I England, Lady Phoebe Renshaw and her lady s maid, Eva Huntford, encounter an uncharitable killer at a charity luncheon sponsored by a posh school for girls . . . Good deeds build good character, and good character is what the Haverleigh School for Young Ladies is all about. Lady Phoebe with the tireless assistance of Eva has organized a luncheon at the school to benefit wounded veterans of the Great War, encouraging the students...

“Filled with rich period detail, this historical romance will appeal to readers who enjoy learning about other cultures and times.” —Booklist
 
In seventeenth-century Rotterdam, young Saskia is lady’s maid to wealthy English merchant’s wife. But her talent for manufacturing beautifying face balms far exceeds her lowly status.
When the Gibbons family returns to England, Saskia goes...

"She can't recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they had always done so, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her ... Cleaner Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them....

A young noblewoman, fleeing from the darkness of her past, falls into life as a housemaid at a country manor-and into the arms of the lord who owns it   Born a lady, but now orphaned and left to the care of distant relations, Lily Trehearne's fortunes are low indeed. All she inherited from her spendthrift father is a tangled web of debt, and her ultra-pious guardian, the Reverend Roger Soames, seems determined to marry her off to his son Lewis.  ...