The glittering, sharp and sinister work of one of our most incisive and wickedly funny satirists; 'Isabel Colegate has no rival' (The Times) 'What we feel for each other is really a passion for power,' said Judith. 'We want to destroy each other by making the other fall in love with us.' Judith Lane, not-quite-beautiful but charmingly serious, is the young widow of the war hero Anthony Lane, and an editor at the successful if rather rakish publisher Hanescu Lane & Co. Ltd. But one evening the harmonious routine of Judith's life is interrupted when she receives her first visit from Baldwin Reeves, who reveals that Anthony's wartime adventures were not quite as glorious as the newspaper reports would have her believe. To protect Anthony's family from the scandal, Judith reluctantly acquiesces to the repellent but attractive Reeves's demands - but both blackmailer and blackmailee soon find themselves out of their depth in ways they could not have anticipated. Darkly funny, strangely sexy, and glittering with Isabel Colegate's scalpel-sharp wit, The Blackmailer is a savage and sinister comic classic.

In A Pelican in the Wilderness, Isabel Colegate casts through time and place to uncover tales of human solitude.

The quest for solitude – whether for social, religious, personal or intellectual reasons – dates back to ancient times. As a spiritual phenomenon it has its roots in Chinese, Hindu and Western philosophies; from the mystical Desert Fathers – the most famous of which was St Jerome – who cast themselves out into deserts and wastelands in search of spiritual revelation, to the Celts on Iona and Lindisfarne (who arrived with only onions to live on). Rousseau found solitaries inspirational, (but declared that he would die of boredom if he had to become a hermit himself, a view possibly shared by St Jerome who only managed to stay in the desert for two years).

Hermits and hermitages even used to be a feature of rural and urban England. Sir John Soane had a hermit's cell installed in his house in Lincolns' Inn. At Hawkstone in Shropshire in the 1780s it was reported that a live hermit was seen gazing at a human skull. And in the eighteenth-century it was seen as highly fashionable to place a hermitage in landscaped gardens; an advert would then be placed for a hermit, specifying particular requirements such as a promise not to cut hair, nails or beard. In return the hermit would receive food and a small gratuity. One hermit in Painshill, Surrey was sacked for drinking beer in the village inn.

But of course, recluses, solitaries, hermits, anchoresses (female solitaries) and 'loners' continue to exist to this day, quietly opting to live outside society or living in complete seclusion in wildernesses. Isabel Colegate examines their lives, motivations, self-reflections, writings and the thoughts of present-day urban and rural hermits.

Those who love Colegate's fiction will find all of its virtues here: historical imagination, quicksilver characterization, understated wit, and an eye for the bizarre matched by a power to evoke the sublime.

Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of Fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife, and a seat in Parliament. But the advent of war brings with it Orlando's downfall; and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy.

Elegant and muscular, powerful and razor-sharp, Orlando King is a bildungsroman, Greek tragedy and political saga all in one; a glittering exorcism of the inter-war generation's demons to rival the work of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.

'Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair' Observer 'I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.' 1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear - while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole. A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

'Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry' Sunday Telegraph It is 1913 - a breath away from the Great War - and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. An assorted group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, they are an era's dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale. A quiet, elegant meditation on class frustration and the transience of human concern, The Shooting Party is also the inspiration behind one of the great landmarks of popular culture - Downtown Abbey.

It is the autumn of 1913, and Sir Randolph Nettleby has assembled a brilliant array of guests at his Oxfordshire estate for the biggest shoot of the season. An army of servants and gamekeepers has rehearsed the intricate age-old ritual of the house and hunt. The gentlemen are falling into the prescribed mode of fellowship and good-humored sporting rivalry. The fashionable ladies are exchanging the latest gossip. Everything about this splendid weekend would seem a perfect affirmation of the privileges and certainties of Edwardian country life.
And yet, as Isabel Colegate so elegantly dramatizes, it is not. The social and moral code of this set is under siege from within and without. Competition beyond the bounds of sportsmanship, revulsion at the slaughter of animals, anger at the inequities of class -- these and other forces are about to rise up and challenge the social peace, a peace that can hold only a brief while longer.

"A sonorous and muted masterpiece." --The Times (London) . His wild years behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past. His reverie is broken by a January visit from his headstrong older sister, Edith, a former MP and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her Alfred's bachelor life is undesirable, his work obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. In the course of their long winter visit, this infinitely complicated brother and sister confront their deepest selves and retrace the tangled paths their lives have taken. Isabel Colegate has written a fierce, funny, unsentimental book about growing older, about grace and forgiveness, and about hope for a world we must too soon leave behind.