Sadie's life is calm and complete. She is a mother, a good friend, and the robust survivor of a marriage she deliberately left behind. She has come to believe that she has everything she wants, or deserves. But now her father is dying: the vital, elusive man who spent his life creating perfumes for other women is slipping away from her. When she realises that she can never make her peace with him, Sadie begins to look back over her childhood. In pursuing his separate life, Sadie's father ignored her, subjecting her to succession of 'aunties', leaving her loveless and alone. As Sadie confronts the truth about her father, her relationship with her son Jack appears to be breaking down and she is intent on saving it. Then the arrival of one of those fleeting women from her father's past starts a train of events that even Sadie cannot control…
From the bestselling author of the phenomenally successful The Kashmir Shawl London 1885 As a turbulent and change-filled century draws to a close, there has never been a better time to alter your fortune. But for a beautiful young woman of limited means, Eliza's choices appear to lie between the stifling domesticity of marriage or a downwards spiral to the streets - no matter how determined she is to forge her own path. One night at a run-down theatre, she meets the charismatic Devil Wix - showman, master of illusion, fickle friend. Drawn into his circle, Eliza becomes the catalyst of change for his colleagues - a dwarf, an eccentric engineer, and an artist - as well as Devil himself. And as Eliza embarks on a dangerous adventure, she must decide which path to choose, and how far she should go when she holds all their lives in her hands.
From the bestselling author of Iris and Ruby comes a novel in which a group of old friends reunite to start a new stage of their lives. Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age. All have their own reasons for accepting. To begin with, omens are good. They laugh, dance, drink and behave badly, as they cling to the heritage they thought was theirs for ever: power, health, stability. They are the baby boomers; the world is theirs to change. But as old attractions resurface alongside new tensions, they discover that the clock can't be put back. When building work reveals an Iron Age burial site of a tribal queen, the outside world descends on their idyllic retreat, and the isolation of the group is breached. Now the past is revealed; and the future that beckons is very different from the one they imagined.
An epic love story and adventure set against the harsh, beautiful background of Antarctica. Alice is a scientist: she relies on method, precision, proof. But when her relationship with Oxford artist Peter Brown collapses spectacularly, she is forced to evaluate her own life for the first time. In her thirties, childless, tied to Oxford by her work, it is time to break away. Alice's mother, Margaret Mather, is famous as an adventuring anthropologist, one of the first women in Antarctica many years before. Alice accepts an invitation to go in Margaret's place to the southernmost point of the earth, and stay there for months, away from the world that has let her down. Little does she expect the strangeness of a place coloured blue and white, lit by an unearthly permanent sunlight. And nothing has prepared her for the close confines of a small base shared with eight men and one other woman. A base where tensions run high, where the hostile environment traps them, and where the distance means no-one has a past. Where she feels such a strong attraction to a man with danger in his face that she cannot speak to him.And where she discovers something else that will change her life forever ! if she survives.
Spanning generations and moving from the stark beauty of the Welsh landscape to the Himalayas and Kashmir, The Kashmir Shawl is a story of bravery, courage and love Within one exotic land lie the secrets of a lifetime! Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Wales for the first time in her life, to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India...
