Profile: 418 books

Jane Darke loves Cornwall. It is where she raised her family with the acclaimed Cornish writer Nick Darke. The family have lived for generations on Porthcothan beach and kept the traditions of beachcombing, lobster fishing and preservation of coastal ecology alive. After Nick's death Jane struggled...

Drawing on the experiences of a wide range of 60 only children, this book explains the difficulties they are faced with and how, as adults, they have learnt to cope with these problems. Growing up as an only child can foster a greater sense of responsibility and social skills, only children are often...

The Last Patriarch is narrated by the daughter of Mimoun Driouch - the patriarch of the title - from his birth to her entrance into university. Mimoun believes that life on his parents' land is not his destiny" and so we follow his journey from rural Morocco to urban Cataluña. Mimoun's own violent...

Chosen by NPR and the Washington Post as one of the best crime & mystery novels of 2008, Small Crimes is now a major film starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones' Jaime Lannister) Bent copper Joe Denton gets out of prison suspiciously early after disfiguring the district attorney....

Ana knows little about her birth mother: she knows that she gave Ana away. She has a photograph, too, found in her Father's belongings when she was a teenager. It might be her mother, but there are two women in it and she doesn't know whether it is a clue or not. She also knows her mother's name,...

Isabel is a young Catalan woman from a conventional family. She makes her living cleaning - in a pizza factory at night, and in the home of a middle-aged writer during the day. But she's hiding a secret life: one filled with multiple sexual partners and dangerous erotic encounters. When she goes to...

Trinidad, 1848. Michel Jean Cazabon returns home from France to his beloved mother's deathbed. Despite the Emancipation Act, his childhood home is in the grip of colonial power, its people riven by the legacy of slavery. Michel Jean finds himself caught between the powerful and the dispossessed. As...

FOR TABLET DEVICES. Foreword by HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, and Preface by Julie Summers, bestselling author of Jambusters. In a century that has seen the role of women in both domestic and public life change irrevocably, the role of the Women's Institute in effecting change has often gone...

Notes on Blindness was the basis for a major documentary in 2016. 'It's a gift. Not a gift I want, but it is a gift' Days before the birth of his first son, writer and academic John M. Hull started to go blind. He would lose his sight entirely, plunged into darkness, unable to distinguish...

Saz has been hired by a mystery employer, the Wavewalker, to investigate the activities of Dr Maxwell North, an internationally acclaimed therapist, healer and guru. She starts by experiencing 'The Process' at a meeting in London, then insinuates herself into North's life and home, not realising the...

Stand-up comic Maggie has fallen for "the girl with the Kelly McGillis body", a mysterious woman who can't commit herself. Meanwhile, South London detective Saz is hot on the trail of a woman known only as "September", who commutes between London and New York in a whirlwind of...

Everything was going just fine for Saz Martin and her partner Molly. It is summer in London, they're having a baby and all looks right with the world. Saz has even stopped taking on any weird and wild cases. No more danger, just easy, steady work and tucked up in bed before midnight... Yeah, right....

Saz Martin is settled into new motherhood with her partner Molly and their nine-month-old daughter Matilda. Things have not been easy since the birth - late nights, early mornings, and a sudden death have all taken their toll - but with Molly's return to fulltime work and Saz happily taking on the...

The River Rhine and its delta in Holland, protecting Germany's vital industrial area of the Ruhr, helped dictate the course of events in three land campaigns of the Second World War. Some towns and bridges were so important that they were fought over two or even three times in the space of five years....