An emotionally compelling family saga about second chances and regaining one's spirit. Newly widowed after a forty-year marriage, Margaret Wright is finding it hard to adjust to independence, having been stifled for so long by her overbearing, controlling husband. Is she up to the challenge? Margaret's decision to make a fresh start by redecorating her home has unexpected consequences when talented interior designer Jason Parker enters her life. Her growing closeness to a man twenty years younger than herself causes increasing tension among her family and friends. But having only just attained her longed-for freedom, is Margaret falling into another trap? If she rushes headlong into a new relationship, is she in danger of making the same mistakes all over again?

After the fall of France, three young evacuees from the east end of Newcastle are sent to the safety of a country village. Billeted in a grand house with a spinster and her niece, Hazel, Irene and Carol's futures will be irrevocably changed by their new lives. When peace is declared, and Hazel and Irene return to the families they were forced to leave, they find Newcastle very different to the home they remembered. Mourning the people they love, they try to start again. But when they're invited back to celebrate the Coronation of young Queen Elizabeth, they must find a way to come to terms with the past...

1950s Liverpool. In the tight-knit Irish Catholic community of the Four Streets, two girls are growing up. One is motherless - and hated by the cold woman who is determined to take her dead mother's place. The other is hiding a dreadful secret which she dare not let slip to anyone, lest it rips the heart out of the community. What can the people of the Four Streets do when a betrayal at the very heart of their world comes to light?

Sue Wilsher, author of When My Ship Comes In, makes an emotional return to 1950s Essex Tilbury, 1950s. The Empire is a boarding house run by Vi, Doris's mother - the Empire Girls of the title. When Doris becomes pregnant out of marriage, she is kicked out of the house and forced to fend for herself. Desperate to look after her daughter, she takes any job going. She falls in with the Windrush immigrants and finds herself helping one to a new life in Britain.

The Wild Earth's Nobility is the first of Frank Waters's semiautobiographical novels in the Pikes Peak saga. Here, in a frontier town in the shadow of the commanding mountain, the Rogier family settles near an age-old route of migrating Native Americans. In an era of prospecting, silver strikes, and frenzied mining, Joseph Rogier becomes a successful building contractor, rears a large family, and is gradually overwhelmed by the power of the great peak.
In Waters's visionary prose, the story becomes a mythic journey to reconcile instinct and reason, consciousness and intuition, and the powerful emotions of a family struggling with its own dreams and human limitations.
Frank Waters (1902-1995), one of the finest chroniclers of the American Southwest, wrote twenty-eight works of fiction and nonfiction. Of Pike's Peak (1971), the Chicago Daily News wrote, It is a product of maturity, written with a sustained strength and beauty of style rarely found in fiction today.
Pike's Peak is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth's Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock.

The friendship between five-year-olds Sara Miller and Judy Levine begins in the summer of 1941, when their families move into adjoining row houses in Washington, D.C. Almost immediately, the United States enters World War II, and their childhood is thrust into a world dominated by the consequences of history. When asked to help their sick friend, Su Ling, keep up with her studies as she recuperates from rheumatic fever, her grandmother, An Lei, teaches them the ancient Chinese game of Mahjong, destined to become an invariable part of their lives as it merges cultures, love, and friendship.

Separated for the first time when they enter college, their personal choices, shaped and impacted by half a century of unparalleled wars, loss, and heartbreak, only bring them closer together, as they marry, raise their families, and pursue their chosen careers. Their lifelong journey, caught in a web of intricate and surprising twists of fate, surfaces in the public eye when a Ukrainian farm girl inadvertently unlocks a thirty-five-year mystery that has haunted them since their graduation from high school.

From coast to coast and across the globe, their heartwarming and compelling story confirms the powerful bond of friendship.

After a four-month estrangement from her family, thirty-two-year-old Emma Michaels visits The Harbor View Assisted Living Home to tell her grandmother, Gussie, that she has made a decision: she's going to sell the family property--her inheritance. Sitting on the dock of Poquatuck Village, Connecticut, looking across the harbor to their family's longtime home, the two women debate over Emma's choice--and their conversation lays the framework for the book, which flows over the decades, all the way back to Gussie's youth and marriage, then forward through the lives of her three children, Auggie, Livy, and Alyssa, whose hopes and talents are warped by their mother's influence and disappointed expectations. Expectations passed down through the generations. Subtle. Unspoken. Implacable.
As Emma and Gussie remember the choices and dynamics that have produced the complicated tapestry that is their family's history, Emma makes a number of surprising discoveries about her loved ones--and herself--and she prepares to do what no one else in her family has dared: let go of the past to make room for the future, though doing so will destroy the thing her grandmother holds most dear.

July 1947. Britain is still gripped by rationing, even as the excitement of Princess Elizabeth's engagement sweeps the nation. In the Woolworths' canteen, Freda is still dreaming of meeting her own Prince Charming. So far she's been unlucky in love. When she has an accident on her motorbike, knocking a cyclist off his bicycle, it seems bad luck is still following her around. Anthony is not only a fellow Woolworths employee but was an Olympic hopeful. Will his injured leg heal in time for him to compete? Can he ever forgive Freda? Sarah's idyllic family life is under threat with worries about her husband, Alan. Does he still love her? The friends must rally round to face some of the toughest challenges of their lives together. And although they experience loss, hardship and shocks along the way, love is on the horizon for the Woolworths girls . . . Wedding Bells for Woolworths is the fifth instalment in Elaine Everest's much-loved Woolworths series.

The Internationally Bestselling Author of The English Wife 'Beautifully epic, romantic & rich in detail' #1 & USA Today bestseller Lorna Cook 'Sweeping and evocative' Rosanna Ley Three sisters The Great War The end of innocence... In 1913, in a quiet corner of London, the three Fry sisters are coming of age, dreaming of all the possibilities the bright future offers. But when war erupts their innocence is shattered and a new era of uncertainty begins. Cecelia loves Max but his soldier's uniform is German, not British, and suddenly the one man she loves is the one man she can't have. Jessie enlists in the army as a nurse and finally finds the adventure she's craved when she's sent to Gallipoli and Egypt, but it comes with an unimaginable cost. Etta elopes to Capri with her Italian love, Carlo, but though her growing bump is real, her marriage certificate is a lie. As the three sisters embark on journeys they never could have imagined, their mother Christina worries about the harsh new realities they face, and what their exposure to the wider world means for the secrets she's been keeping... Praise for Adrienne Chinn: 'A truly epic read, spanning continents and momentous events, the different narratives braided to form a powerful rope of story of love found and love lost' Jane Johnson 'What a fantastic book! The reader is swept on a whirlwind journey across Europe, from Capri to London to Egypt and beyond' Kathleen McGurl, author of The Girl from Bletchley Park 'Stunning, a sublime tale of secrets, strong women and turbulent times...I absolutely adored it' Clare Marchant