Elisabeth Eidenbenz left Switzerland in 1937 to aid children orphaned during the Spanish Civil War. Now, her work has led her to France, where she’s determined to provide expectant mothers and their unborn children a refuge amid one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century.

Desperate to escape the invasion of Franco’s Fascist troops, Isabel Dueñas becomes one of many Spanish patriots fleeing their country. She leaves behind her husband as he fights for democracy, and she seeks asylum in a refugee camp across the border in France. Without adequate shelter, clean drinking water, or medical care, Isabel’s future looks bleak—until she meets Elisabeth.

When Germany invades Poland, an avalanche of humanity sweeps into France. In the cascade of crises that follow, Isabel and Elisabeth learn the cost and the unexpected joy of sacrifice.

Based on the true stories of refugees and the woman who risked everything to save them, The Swiss Nurse shares a message of love and strength amid one of history’s often overlooked conflicts.

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. Open your eyes, and see what you can with them before they close forever For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes: the miniature model of her Paris neighbourhood she traces with her fingers; the microscopic layers within the diamond in the Museum of Natural History; the unmapped future which brings her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, whose talents draw the attention of the Hitler Youth. A deeply moving novel about the ways people try to be good to one another, All the Light We Cannot See has touched the hearts of millions of readers across the world, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 'Far more than a conventional war story, it's a tightly focused epic ... A bittersweet and moving novel that lingers in the mind' Daily Mail

London, 1943. Across the city prominent figures in science and the military are bursting into flame and being incinerated. Convinced that the Germans have deployed a new terror weapon, a desperate government turns to the one man who can track down the source of this dreadful menace - Sherlock Holmes. The quest for a solution drives Holmes into an uneasy alliance with the country's most brilliant scientific genius, Professor James Moriarty. Only Holmes knows that, behind his facade of respectability, Moriarty is the mastermind behind a vast criminal empire. As they pursue the trail of incendiary murders, Holmes is quite sure that the professor is playing a double game and that there lies ahead a duel to the death which they cannot both survive. A tribute to the classic Universal Pictures Sherlock Holmes film series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

FATE CAN BE CHANGED. CURSES CAN BE BROKEN.

In a shabby house in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil. But when her scheming mistress discovers her scullion is hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to win over the royal court.

Determined to seize this chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of power-hungry nobility, desperate kings, holy men and seers, where the lines between magic, science and fraud blur. With the pyres of the Inquisition burning, she must use every bit of her wit and resilience to win fame and hide the truth of her ancestry – even if that means enlisting the help of an embittered immortal familiar, whose own secrets could cost her everything.

From Sunday Times bestselling author comes a bewitching novel, brimming with peril in a world where a woman’s ambition can prove deadly.

An emotional, action-packed epic of love and justice, set during the rise of the Mafia in Sicily.

Franco Fiorvanti is a handsome lemon grower toiling on the estate of a baron. He dreams of owning his own grove, but the rigid class system of Sicily thwarts his ambition. Determined to secure a better future, Franco will do anything to prove his loyalty to the baron. But when the baron asks him to kidnap a little boy named Dante, Franco makes a decision that will change his life—and even the history of Sicily—forever.

Gaetano Catalano is an idealistic young lawyer whose devotion to justice is tantamount to a calling. He’s a member of the Beati Paoli, a real-life secret society of aristocrats who investigate crime in Palermo, a city riddled with graft. Gaetano sets out to find the boy and punish the kidnapper, but his mission leads him to a darker place than he had ever imagined.

Meanwhile, Mafalda Pancari is a new mother rejoicing at the birth of her daughter, Lucia, when disaster strikes. And Alfredo D’Antonio is a reclusive goat-herd under constant threat of being discovered as a Jew. How the lives of these unforgettable characters collide makes Loyalty an epic tale of good versus evil, as the story twists and turns to its monumental showdown.

Readers will be transported to the dramatic and ruggedly beautiful island of Sicily, the jewel of the Mediterranean, where lush lemon groves and mouth-watering cuisine contrast with a turbulent history of colonization and corruption. Scottoline brings her decades of thriller writing to historical fiction, creating in Loyalty a singular novel that no reader will be able to put down.

The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change.

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.

Number One bestselling author Philippa Gregory's new historical novel tracks the rise of the Tidelands family in London, Venice and New England.

Midsummer Eve 1670. Two unexpected visitors arrive at a shabby warehouse on the south side of the River Thames. The first is a wealthy man hoping to find the lover he deserted twenty-one years before. James Avery has everything to offer, including the favour of the newly restored King Charles II, and he believes that the warehouse's poor owner Alinor has the one thing his money cannot buy – his son and heir.

The second visitor is a beautiful widow from Venice in deepest mourning. She claims Alinor as her mother-in-law and has come to tell Alinor that her son Rob has drowned in the dark tides of the Venice lagoon.

Alinor writes to her brother Ned, newly arrived in faraway New England and trying to make a life between the worlds of the English newcomers and the American Indians as they move toward inevitable war. Alinor tells him that she knows – without doubt – that her son is alive and the widow is an imposter.

Set in the poverty and glamour of Restoration London, in the golden streets of Venice, and on the tensely contested frontier of early America, this is a novel of greed and desire: for love, for wealth, for a child, and for home.

Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover. One man, many lives. Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic. From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century. 'Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game' Guardian 'There are few reading pleasures as great as giving in to a William Boyd novel' Sunday Times 'One of our best contemporary storytellers' Spectator 'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks

'An incredibly important book . . . a beautifully crafted, compelling story . . . which will undoubtedly break your heart but also make it sing' - Mike Gayle Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a secret. 1907: Twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of his time locked in an attic room of a large house by the sea. Taken from his homeland and treated as an unpaid servant, he dreams of his family in Africa even if, as the years pass, he struggles to remember his mother's face, and sometimes his real name . . . Decades later, Lowra, a young orphan girl born into wealth and privilege, will find herself banished to the same attic. Lying under the floorboards of the room is an old porcelain doll, an unusual beaded claw necklace and, most curiously, a sentence etched on the wall behind an old cupboard, written in an unidentifiable language. Artefacts that will offer her a strange kind of comfort, and lead her to believe that she was not the first child to be imprisoned there . . . Lola Jaye has created a hauntingly powerful, emotionally charged and unique dual-narrative novel about family secrets, love and loss, identity and belonging, seen through the lens of Black British History in The Attic Child. 'This is important storytelling about issues of race and privilege . . . that will stay with me for a long time' - Tracy Chevalier 'Just brilliant' - Dorothy Koomson 'Powerful and emotional' - Lisa Jewell

It is 1938 and the final days of the British Empire. In a bungalow high up in the green hills above the plains of Ceylon, under a vast blue sky, live the Ferguson family: Bella, a precocious eight-year-old; her father Henry - owner of Pitlochry, a tea plantation - and her mother Virginia. The story centres around the Pavilion in the Clouds, set in the idyllic grounds carved out of the wilderness. But all is not as serene as it seems. Bella is suspicious of her governess, Miss White's intentions. Her suspicion sparks off her mother's imagination and after an unfortunate series of events, a confrontation is had with Miss White and a gunshot rings off around the hills. Years later, Bella, now living back in Scotland at university in St Andrews, is faced, once again with her past. Will she at last find out what happened between her Father and Miss White? And will the guilt she has lived with all these years be reconciled by a long over-due apology?

Already excerpted in the New Yorker, Black Cloud Rising is a compelling and important historical novel that takes us back to an extraordinary moment when enslaved men and women were shedding their bonds and embracing freedomBy fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild--a one-armed, impassioned Abolitionist--set out from Portsmouth to hunt down the rebel guerillas and extinguish the threat. From this little-known historical episode comes Black Cloud Rising, a dramatic, moving account of these soldiers--men who only weeks earlier had been enslaved, but were now Union infantrymen setting out to fight their former owners. At the heart of the narrative is Sergeant Richard Etheridge, the son of a slave and her master, raised with some privileges but constantly reminded of his place. Deeply conflicted about his past, Richard is eager to show himself to be a credit to his race. As the African Brigade conducts raids through the areas occupied by the Confederate Partisan Rangers, he and his comrades recognize that they are fighting for more than territory. Wild's mission is to prove that his troops can be trusted as soldiers in combat. And because many of the men have fled from the very plantations in their path, each raid is also an opportunity to free loved ones left behind. For Richard, this means the possibility of reuniting with Fanny, the woman he hopes to marry one day. With powerful depictions of the bonds formed between fighting men and heartrending scenes of sacrifice and courage, Black Cloud Rising offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of enslaved men and women crossing the threshold to freedom.

From New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn comes the fifth novel in the beloved Regency-set world of her charming, powerful Bridgerton family, now a series created by Shonda Rhimes for Netflix.

She wrote him a letter...and he stole her heart.

Sir Phillip knew that Eloise Bridgerton was a spinster, and so he’d proposed, figuring that she’d be homely and unassuming, and more than a little desperate for an offer of marriage. Except . . . she wasn’t. The beautiful woman on his doorstep was anything but quiet, and when she stopped talking long enough to close her mouth, all he wanted to do was kiss her . . . and more.

Did he think she was mad? Eloise Bridgerton couldn’t marry a man she had never met! But then she started thinking . . . and wondering . . . and before she knew it, she was in a hired carriage in the middle of the night, on her way to meet the man she hoped might be her perfect match. Except . . . he wasn’t. Her perfect husband wouldn’t be so moody and ill-mannered, and while Phillip was certainly handsome, he was a large brute of a man, rough and rugged, and totally unlike the London gentlemen vying for her hand. But when he smiled . . . and when he kissed her . . . the rest of the world simply fell away, and she couldn’t help but wonder . . . could this imperfect man be perfect for her?

The Sunday Times bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 'Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history...and what a show' The Times 'If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?' England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man's vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage. A Guardian Book of the Year * A Times Book of the Year * A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * A Sunday Times Book of the Year * A New Statesman Book of the Year * A Spectator Book of the Year Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)

Bringing sixteenth-century Languedoc vividly to life, Kate Mosse's number one bestselling novel The Burning Chambers is a gripping story of love, betrayal, war, adventure, conspiracies and divided loyalties. Carcassonne 1562. Nineteen-year-old Minou Joubert receives an anonymous letter at her father's bookshop. Sealed with a distinctive family crest, it contains just five words: SHE KNOWS THAT YOU LIVE. But before Minou can decipher the mysterious message, a chance encounter with a young Huguenot convert, Piet Reydon, changes her destiny forever. For Piet has a dangerous mission of his own, and he will need Minou's help if he is to get out of La Cite alive . . . A thrilling adventure and a heartbreaking love story, The Burning Chambers is a historical novel of excitement, conspiracy and danger like no other . . .

IN THE FINAL RECKONING, CHOOSE YOUR SIDE CAREFULLY…

The epic conclusion to the globally bestselling historical series.

After years fighting to reclaim his rightful home, Uhtred of Bebbanburg has returned to Northumbria. With his loyal band of warriors and a new woman by his side, his household is secure – yet Uhtred is far from safe. Beyond the walls of his impregnable fortress, a battle for power rages.

To the south, King Æthelstan has unified the three kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia – and now eyes a bigger prize. To the north, King Constantine and other Scottish and Irish leaders seek to extend their borders and expand their dominion.

Caught in the eye of the storm is Uhtred. Threatened and bribed by all sides, he faces an impossible choice: stay out of the struggle, risking his freedom, or throw himself into the cauldron of war and the most terrible battle Britain has ever experienced. Only fate can decide the outcome.

The epic story of how England was made concludes in WAR LORD, the magnificent finale to the Last Kingdom series.

The Black Mountain is a Quick Read short story from bestselling author Kate Mosse. It is May, 1706. Ana, a young Spanish woman, lives in a small town on the north-west coast of Tenerife with her mother and twin younger brothers. The town is in the shadow of a mighty volcano, which legend says has the devil living inside it. However, there has been no eruption for thousands of years and no one believes it is a threat. One day, Ana notices that the air feels strange and heavy, that the birds have stopped singing. Tending the family vineyard, a sudden strange tremor in the earth frightens her. Very soon it will be a race against time for Ana to help persuade the town that they are in danger and should flee before the volcano erupts and destroys their world. Will they listen? And Ana herself faces another danger . . .

'Literally out-Christies Agatha' - Janice Hallett, bestselling author of The Appeal Nina de Gramont's The Christie Affair is a stunning novel which reimagines the unexplained eleven-day disappearance of Agatha Christie that captivated the world. In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days. Only I know the truth of her disappearance. I'm no Hercule Poirot. I'm her husband's mistress. Agatha Christie's world is one of glamorous society parties, country house weekends, and growing literary fame. Nan O'Dea's world is something very different. Her attempts to escape a tough London upbringing during the Great War led to a life in Ireland marred by a hidden tragedy. After fighting her way back to England, she's set her sights on Agatha. Because Agatha Christie has something Nan wants. And it's not just her husband. Despite their differences, the two women will become the most unlikely of allies. And during the mysterious eleven days that Agatha goes missing, they will unravel a dark secret that only Nan holds the key to . . . *A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK* *Instant New York Times bestseller* 'Storytelling at its very finest' - My Weekly 'Scintillating' - Daily Mail 'Romance, enigma and wit in bucketloads' - Elizabeth Macneal, bestselling author of The Doll Factory 'A genuine marvel' - Kristin Hannah, bestselling author of Firefly Lane 'Ingenious' - AJ Pearce, bestselling author of Dear Mrs Bird

The astonishing new novel from two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward.

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land – the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.