Meet Jake, who emigrated from London to do his college degree in America. Now hes a successful architect who seemingly has everything: a big house, a nice car, and plenty of money. Theres just one thing missing: hes lonely as hell and has no one to love. Enter Catherine, the most unlikely girlfriend he couldve imagined. There are lots of reasons why Jake shouldnt choose her: a psycho mother, an over-protective cousinoh yeah, and she just so happens to be underage. But Jake has never met anyone quite like Catherine before, so what can he do when his heart overrides his brain, but fall hopelessly in love with the girl? But love, Jake finds, comes at a price, and hes not so sure hes ready to pay it.

This story is set in the late seventies on the staff of an old London Primary School. Architecturally, the building is a late Victorian gem. Educationally, it is a multicultural kaleidoscope of four hundred children and twenty staff, who aspire to the cultivation of a learning community-against all the odds! The story concerns the staff only and the children will be heard in the background and referred to from time to time–but never seen! The National Curriculum and OFSTED are as yet but twinkles in a government mandarin’s eye!

Returning to the luxuries of London after five years on location in the hotspots of the world, photojournalist Charlie feels like a fish out of water; her adventures are not topics for conversation at dinner tables where the merits of marriage, maternity and the latest marinade dominate. Her sister Kate, one-time sassy vixen, is now a young married with two small children, one large au pair, a stainless steel balloon whisk and an interior-designed house. Kate is also in retail therapy. And she is determined Charlie should follow suit. But can real domestic happiness only be played out in a wendy house? When Charlie meets fellow photographer Andrew Edwards, a man with a government health warning tattooed to his forehead, it looks like independence isn't all it's cracked up to be...

When two emotionally abused servant-sisters respond to their pent-up hostilities, brutal murder of their mistress is the result. Based on a historical incident in Le Mans, France in 1933.

A teenage girl's father died by suicide, so her mother said. Determined to reveal the truth, she follows her father's footsteps that led to his fateful day.

When Nicola changes overnight from a bright, happy young child into a sullen, rebellious girl, ceasing to show interest in anything or anyone around her, her parents struggle to understand why. As she develops into a difficult, troubled, hostile teenager they put it down to hormones, believing it will pass. Yet Nicola goes from bad to worse and no matter how much her mother tries to reach out to her, it seems she is hell bent on self-destruction. When she leaves home at seventeen, rushing into the arms of a man ten years her senior and quickly becoming pregnant, her despairing mother almost gives up on her. A decade later, the events that stole Nicola's childhood and changed the course of her life threaten finally to destroy her. She knows if she is to cling on to her sanity she must tell her mother the dreadful secret she has carried all these years, but her fear that she will be met with disbelief, hostility and branded an evil liar drives her to the edge. A heart-rending story of betrayal, secrets and gripping fear.

For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession. Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West. The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones-and find that our old love has only deepened.