Allison Busby: 459 books

‘The end of the old world’ people said about the long hot summer of 1914. It was the last season of optimism, of certainty about the future as the sun set on the Edwardian age.That summer Aunt Tilly comes to stay with her brother the Rector and his four lively daughters in the sleepy Sussex village...

‘A DARK AND MACABRE ATMOSPHERE THAT FEELS FRESH AND ORIGINAL’ THE TIMES HISTORICAL BOOK OF THE MONTH Cornwall, 1844. On a lonely farm not far from Jamaica Inn, farmhand Shilly finds love in the arms of Charlotte Dymond. Charlotte has many secrets, and when she’s found on the moor with...

‘A gripping read from start to finish’ Carol Rivers, author of A Wartime Christmas 1920, Manchester. Carrie Jenkins is trying on her wedding dress, eagerly anticipating becoming Mrs Billy Shipton. But all too soon she is reeling from the news that her beloved father was shot for desertion...

May 1915. Kingdom Lock and his faithful sidekick, Siddhartha Singh are gunned down on the streets of Basra and suspicion falls on German spy, Wilhelm Wassmuss. Major Ross believes Wassmuss is not only still alive but that he is behind the assassination of a senior Turkish officer, the death of whom...

There’s a fine line between fact and fiction… Following the publication of his latest crime novel, Barclay Curle receives a letter from a woman accusing him of writing about the murders she has committed. Is it just the wild ramblings of a crazed fan, or could there really be a violent murderess...

Escaping to America from the turmoil of her life back in Edinburgh, DI Jim Meldrum's daughter, Betty, is swept off her feet by a handsome man from back home. A whirlwind romance quickly culminates in marriage. But what are the secrets he is hiding? Handsome and rich, but still a mystery, has Betty...

Set against the backdrop of World War I and amid the beautiful Cornish countryside, this is the story of a mother and daughter, bound together by a collection of pressed flowers and the memories they hold. To the delight of her parents, Violet Prideaux is set to marry local squire Weston...

‘INTELLIGENT AND WELL-WRITTEN’ HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY Cambridge, 1940. Snow is falling thick and fast on a cold winter’s night. As a college porter makes his nightly rounds, he is startled to hear a boy’s desperate screams for help coming from the icy river below. But by dawn the...

‘She wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into – the tedious cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world.’ But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, descendants of the fierce Maroon people, do get to see the...

A seashell holds echoes of a forbidden wartime romance Louise Ahrendts, daughter of a shipbuilder, is at home in Simon’s Town, a vibrant community in the Union of South Africa, with a Royal Navy port at its heart. Louise dreams of becoming a nurse and in a world of unwritten, unspoken rules...

A senior executive at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is found in his office with a bullet hole between his eyes, a pistol discarded close by. The death has officially been ruled as suicide by local police, but with an apparent lack of motive for such action, the museum’s administrator, Gladstone Marriott,...

LONDON’S FAMOUS MUSEUM HOLDS A DEADLY SECRET... 1894, London. Professor Lance Pickering had been due to give a talk on the British Museum’s Age of King Arthur exhibition, when his brutally stabbed body is discovered. Having forged a strong reputation working on the infamous Jack the Ripper...

North Camp, a growing Hampshire village, has been briefly energised by the cessation of the Great War and the years of peace that followed. Now, however, with the beginning of the Second World War, the lives of the inhabitants are plunged once more into chaos. Tom Munday, carpenter of the village,...

1942 – a quiet Lancashire village will soon be divided by war. In the autumn of 1942, fifteen-year-old Ruby is collected from her aunt’s guesthouse by her grandfather and taken to live with him in a small Lancashire village. A few days after her arrival, American GIs take over a nearby...