John Catling: 6 books

The League and the Charter – John Catling's new novel Britain 1845: The Anti-Corn Law League, run by business interests guiding the industrial revolution, wants to scrap taxes on wheat imports – making bread cheaper and keeping wages low. The Charter, supported by radicals, reformers, and trade...

What happened to Jane Austen's heroines Elinor and Marianne? And little sister Margaret? Set in England in the years from 1820 to 1841, this novel tells of how these three women and their husbands found their way through life. And did they meet any other of Jane's characters on the way?

Remember Pride and Prejudice? George Wickham, cheat, seducer, gambler, swindler, the man who never pays his debts? Wickham runs off to London with Lydia Bennet, but wealthy super-gentleman Fitzwilliam Darcy, who wants to marry her sister Elizabeth, puts up the cash to enable George and Lydia to marry....

Five would-be criminals from Kassel try to hit the big money. But usually something goes wrong. This not-very-serious collection of eleven short stories based in Kassel, Germany, is not a guide book to this German town and is very much fiction. However, it may make you smile - or even laugh.

One hundred years ago in wartime London, a man in his thirties, married with two children, meets a girl half his age. They fall in love, want to marry but the law says no. Divorce is impossible. So what then? A real-life story of how this couple managed to hold together to the end of their lives. Happily ever after? No, not quite, though this is definitely a story about love.

It is nineteen forty-six, a year after the end of the Second World War. Gertrud is a young German woman working in the NAAFI, a canteen and leisure centre for off-duty British servicemen. She meets and falls in love with Len, a Corporal serving in the Royal Air Force near Hanover. They marry and she...