The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe for any folly, any outrage that will alter the tedium of her days. But there is another, secret Dona who longs for freedom, honest love - and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. To escape the shallowness of court life, Dona retreats to Navron, her husband's remote Cornish estate. There, she seeks peace in its solitary woods and hidden creeks. But she finds instead a daring pirate, hunted by all Cornwall, a Frenchman who, like Dona, would gamble his life for a moment's joy. Together, they embark upon a quest rife with danger and glory, one which bestows upon Dona the ultimate choice: sacrifice her lover to certain death or risk her own life to save him.

'Her best novel yet' The Times 'Incredibly compelling' Daily Mail 'Incandescent'The Observer Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. Meanwhile the mother - a novelist - attempts to understand her uneasy, unresolved relationship with her own mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, as well as a current narrative laced with temptation and betrayal, this is the delicate journey of a mother, daughter, wife and author struggling to make sense of her world. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story? Clear-eyed, self-lacerating and at times frighteningly direct, Julie Myerson's latest novel explores maternal love as the emotional foundation we both crave and fear. A howl of fury, as well as a moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a book about damage, addiction, recovery and creativity.

'Urgent and vivid A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you. Which is not the same thing as saying that it is the complete truth. Art can only ever hope to present a version of the truth. And this is what Julie Myerson has done' Daily Telegraph 'An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love - and control'The Times Myerson's motivation is anything but base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has taken over her family. She wanted to help others, herself and her son Any family for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they would not dream of exposing their situation in the same way Myerson has, will be grateful to her for having done so. She may have been rash, but she has also been courageous. She has tried to write honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves' Observer 'Yelloly, however ephemeral, fulfils a function - she is a lost girl, one who cannot be revived, from a family ravaged by that Victorian scourge, consumption. And Myerson's real, parallel lament is for a child who falls victim to our modern version of consumption - the slow ruination of a much-loved child through drugs gripping' Financial Times 'A campaigning book If the question is whether a woman has a right to tell a story that is also, actually, her own - a book reviewer can only say yes. And add that anyone who reads it will struggle not to be profoundly moved' Independent

'His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven . . . ' Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria. Once there, he learns the ease of swindling, the rewards of love affairs and the value of secrecy. Before he's twenty, he is in London, where his empire-building begins in earnest, and he becomes a rich and very ruthless man. Throughout his life, Julius is driven by a hunger for power, his one weakness his daughter, Gabriel . . . A chilling story of ambition, Daphne du Maurier's third novel has lost none of its ability to unsettle and disturb.

On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess's world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer.

A blasted world. A broken heart. A shattering betrayal. Heartlessness has become the law. In the wasted ruins of London, a woman pieces together fragments of her memory. As her past emerges, her own apocalypse begins. Then is a novel of singular invention and bravery. With it, Julie Myerson has created an echo chamber of the heartbreaking and the terrifying, and an enduring dystopian vision.