Susan Howatch's dark, epic family saga is a must-read for fans of Winston Graham's Poldark
We all want what we cannot have, but when Mark Castallack sees his longed-for inheritance Penmarric, a gothic mansion on the bleak cliffs of Cornwall, and the mysterious, mesmerising Janna, he knows that he will make them his and nothing will stand in his way.
Yet when Mark realizes his dreams, Penmarric only brings a legacy of conflict, jealousy, infidelity and betrayal. Spanning the Victorian era to the Second World War, this gripping story of one man and his two feuding families chronicles the tempestuous clashes between warring sons, wives and mistresses, and between a house divided against itself.
Black holes. Dinosaurs. Exploding particles. Ever had the feeling that you are missing out on some truly mind-blowing science but never had the time to do something about it?
Ben Miller was working on his Physics PhD at Cambridge when he accidentally became a very successful comedian. But first love runs deep, and he has returned to his roots to share his favourite bits of science in the simplest way possible. What does the behaviour of molecules have to do with baking a Victoria Sponge for Gordon Ramsay? You''ll have to read this book to find out.
Boring, complicated science - be gone! This is the stuff that you really need to know. Not just because it matters, but because it will quite simply amaze and delight you.
''Books like these should act as gateway drugs for the incurably curious'' Observer
''Miller has a gift for making complex ideas seem comprehensible . . . enjoyable and educational . . . full marks, Miller, for a tricky job well done'' Mail on Sunday
You will hear a Nile Rodgers song today. It will make you happy. Legendary producer and co-founder of Chic, Nile wrote 'We are Family' for Sister Sledge and 'I'm Coming Out' for Diana Ross, and then produced Let's Dance for David Bowie and Like a Virgin for Madonna. But before he reinvented pop music Nile Rodgers invented himself. Le Freak is an astonishing, exuberant and inspiring story of a creative genius. It is also a stunning recreation of a time and place - by the man who wrote its soundtrack.
Sarah Fortune is bored to death - but few know, and less would guess, how the beautiful and successful redheaded solicitor escapes the stultifying tedium of her career. Since the death of her unfaithful husband, Sarah has found a practical way of transforming the lives of lonely men that also suits her warm and defiant nature.
Kind, witty and obese lawyer Malcolm Cook is the first to benefit from Sarah's generosity - he shrugs off years of weight and loneliness. But then she meets Charles Tysall, an important client of the firm, whose charisma and enormous wealth conceal an implacable will and a misogynist's mad obsession.
The Sunday Times Bestseller: A heartwarming memoir about a man at the mercy of his unpredictable, demanding and endlessly lovable cats.
Meet THE BEAR - a cat who carries the weight of the world on his furry shoulders, and whose wise, owl-like eyes seem to ask, Can you tell me why I am a cat, please?
Like many intellectuals, The Bear would prefer a life of quiet solitude with plenty of time to gaze forlornly into space and contemplate society's ills. Unfortunately he is destined to spend his days surrounded by felines of a significantly lower IQ . . .
RALPH: handsome, self-satisfied tabby, terrified of the clothes horse.
SHIPLEY: mouthy hooligan and champion mouser, rendered insensible by being turned upside-down.
ROSCOE: fiercely independent kitten, tormented by her doppelganger in the mirror.
And then there's Tom, writing with his usual wit and charm about the unexpected adventures that go hand in hand with a life at the beck and call of four cats . . . or three cats and a sensitive poet who just happens to be a foot high and covered in fur.
ESCAPE WITH A FEEL-GOOD READ FROM THE MULTI-MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
Kate Lewis is thirty-five and feeling restless. She's fed up of worrying about the ironing and would like her husband Jeffrey to pay more attention to her than his golf clubs. There must be more to life than this!
Kate enrols herself on a T'ai Chi course and takes best friend Sonia along for the ride. She's determined to 'find herself' but it's easier said than done, especially when she finds the distracting Ben Mahler first . . .
YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHORS LOVE CAROLE MATTHEWS:
'A life-affirming story full of joy and hope' CATHY BRAMLEY
'A sun-filled, fun-filled wonderful escapist adventure' MILLY JOHNSON
'A wonderful setting where dark clouds part to reveal a happy ending' KATIE FFORDE
'An irresistibly warm-hearted story' TRISHA ASHLEY
'Warm, witty and hopeful - I was charmed' SARAH MORGAN
'The queen of funny, feel-good fiction' MIKE GAYLE
When Theo Calvert was driven out of the family home by his wife's cloying piety he had determined that his daughters would follow him. But in the face of the law, the girls' health and his wife's intransigence, he failed. But, if he lost the battle for their souls in life, he would make amends in death, craftily shaping his will to benefit them so long as they did not follow their mother's example.
His daughters felt they had lost either way, especially Anna. She had promiscuously turned her back on her mother's teachings, but watched in horror as her sister Therese followed those same lessons and naively accepted the faith which Anna was certain had ruined their lives.
In her rebellion against such blind belief she at first doesn't notice the worm in their midst when the convent where Therese has settled employs a new gardener. And when she does wake up to the danger she realises she may have left it too late to save their legacy and their lives.
Welcome back to the Dining Club. Pass the challenges we set, and a world of pleasure awaits . . .
Giving in to the handsome Andrew's charms, Grace agrees to hear his warnings of what could lie in wait for her at The Dining Club. But what could he need to tell her so urgently? And why is he so convinced it will change what she thinks of David, her dazzling yet deeply secretive lover?
Andrew also reveals a crucial element to the next trial - the final trial - that David has held back from her. Realising it is going to require all of her seductive powers, stamina and wits, Grace faces her last weekend at the Dining Club with sensuous trepidation. And then someone lets slip that there could be one more stage, for the truly elite . . .
Let yourself indulge in the sumptuous delights of The Dining Club: Part Six.
The Dining Club is now available as a complete volume, in both paperback and ebook.
On a crisp Autumn evening in western Nebraska, what started as a group of kids filming their drug-fuelled party ends in an explosive light show, leaving the victims apparently electrocuted, with odd scorch marks being the only evidence. While Maggie tries to make sense of the different stories, sifting through what is real and what is hallucination, she realises that the surviving teens are being targeted and systematically eliminated.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, Army colonel Benjamin Platt is at the scene of a deadly outbreak, desperate to identify the pathogen that has infected children at a Virginia elementary school.
Despite the miles that separate them, the two cases collide as Maggie and Platt uncover secrets that were meant to stay hidden...
Kathryn and David are the ideal couple: she, petite and pretty; he, dark, debonair and gifted. But beneath the smooth surface, unseen by their envious or admiring friends, splinters are beginning to form.
David suspects one of their two children is not his own, for plump and naughty Jeanetta does not conform with the controlled perfection with which he surrounds himself. Kathryn struggles to iron out family confrontations and maintain the calm of their lives together - but slowly things start to slip from her control. Bits of jewellery and items of clothing mysteriously go missing. David's mood swings become more irrational and violent. His drive to dominate and order the world he's created intensifies to the point of locking the playroom door and pocketing the key - a move that signals the final route into the chaos that will disrupt their perfect world.
When the body of a successful criminal barrister is found outside a chic Kensington hotel, it looks at first like a suicide. For colleagues and friends, her death comes as a huge shock - Marianne Shearer was at the pinnacle of her career, wealthy and stylish - but for the police the case is open-and-shut.
There's something strange about the circumstances, though, something that prompts fellow lawyers Thomas Nobel and Peter Friel to dig deeper. Little by little, they discover that all is not as it seems. Oddly enough, Marianne herself appears to have left a series of small, almost imperceptible clues - clues that point to a far more sinister truth. Retracing Marianne's steps, Nobel and Friel uncover a carefully concealed darker side of her perfect life that leads them back to her last, gruesome case - when she knowingly sacrificed an innocent witness to let a criminal walk free.
Beautiful, volatile Jessica has long since burned her boats in the village by the sea where she was born. She longs to return, but first she needs to secure the love of the powerful man who has spurned her obsessive adoration.
Sarah Fortune, her older, cynical friend, is keen to distance herself from her usual haunts and welcomes the chance to leave London in the hope that she might she be able to effect a reconciliation between Jessica and her mother. Pennyvale both charms and distracts her with hints of scandal and buried secrets, but it soon begins to disquiet her as cracks of distrust and jealousy show in the polite façades. Sarah is excited when Jessica tells her she is coming home, but she never arrives.
Sarah's instinctive knowledge of Jessica leads her back to the capital, fearful of what she will find. What she discovers reveals a truth more chilling than she could have imagined, but she has to return to Pennyvale to fully understand how Jessica was finally brought home, and why...
Sarah Fortune is happy to be sorting out the inheritance problems of the Pardoes, as it promises to distance her from a claustrophobic relationship with Malcolm Cook, and she cannot bear to be a captive.
But she soon discovers that guilt, insecurity, unrequited love and a touch of insanity afflict the Pardoes and the seaside town where they live in Norfolk - all a legacy of a suicide of two years before, when a beautiful woman walked into the sea and never came back. And there is another element of the legacy, a white-haired figure some call a ghost and others call a vagrant who roams the beach and harmlessly haunts the town: until he insinuates himself into the power struggles of the Pardoe children and becomes the mysterious and cunning enemy of all concerned.
Prosecutor Helen West views the whole subject with a jaundiced eye. In this case, she doesn't even like the officer accused, the volatile and compulsively unfaithful DS Ryan, friend of her lover, Superintendent Bailey. Ryan maintains a stubborn silence in the face of the charge but when the physical evidence against him proves to be unusually strong, West and Bailey assume his guilt.
Until slowly, preoccupied as they are with their own loves and loyalties, a different suspect begins to emerge. A man who knows the law and how to avoid it. A man who believes that there is no such thing as rape when the victim welcomes him. And there is no legal formula to deal with someone who brings chocolates and flowers, leaves without a trace, corrupts the witness with her own shame and learns to kill with impunity . . .
How do you make people love you? Emma Davey, who loved gemstones and life, found it easy. Everyone loved her. Until someone put a black bin liner over her head and kicked her to death.
For others, the quest is harder. Elisabeth Kennedy, Emma's older sister and a disgraced ex-police officer, considers herself beyond love or even self-respect. She is haunted by Emma's death and her own humiliating attempts to lure the killer into a confession. Then she is the victim of a senseless attack which adds physical scars to a fractured spirit. Still convalescent, but wanting to hide from the world, she flees the comfort of her mother's seaside house for her own eccentric home. High in her disused London belltower, she will be safe and anonymous.
But the safest places are not sacrosanct, especially the human heart, and the search for love, as well as revenge, goes on and on, like the search for hidden treasure. Elisabeth must find the courage to face a terror which is greater by far than loneliness . . .
Pip Carlton is a devoted husband and a highly respected pharmacist, cherished by his loyal customers in Herringbone Parade. When his wife dies in her sleep, without cause and without pain, he is distraught. Comforted by his caring assistant, Pip struggles to take up the threads of his life, ignoring the rumours about Margaret's death, relieved that the police are content to shrug off the mystery.
But Helen West, Solicitor and Crown prosecutor, fresh from hospital herself, refuses to believe that Margaret simply slipped into her final slumber. Others are more difficult to convince, including Helen's awkward and pragmatic partner, Detective Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey, and the only people who share her suspicions are a confused and lonely boy and the drug addict who dies so mysteriously in Geoffrey's arms.
Memories in the Parade are inflamed by the discovery of an unexploded bomb and in the midst of the evacuation of the streets, one lone man, armed with strange love potions prepares to murder again.
In 1951, the whole of London thrills to the Festival of Britain, but not Evie Smith. Mistress to Ted Hopkins these thirteen years, marriage is still little more than a dream. Ted has always resigned himself to caring for his bed-ridden wife in Lytham St Ann's, only seeing Evie and their two girls for a few weeks every year.
Then, just as Evie finds she is pregnant with their third child, Ted takes his wife abroad for new medical treatment. Five years passing with no word from him, Evie selflessly devotes herself to bringing up her daughters under the loving and protective gaze of her mother Flossie and stepfather Jim, until one day she meets and falls for charming George Higgins, a popular businessman with an almost endless supply of gifts for her family.
Tragically, George is killed saving his mother from a fire, leaving Evie lonelier than ever... but through grief may lie her chance of finding lasting happiness.
South London, 1932. Times are hard for ten-year old Lizzie Collins and her family. With her father dead, it is up to her mother, grandmother and aunt to scrimp and save to rear Lizzie and her three siblings. But the whole family is blessed with the indomitable Cockney spirit - and in particular the physically frail but strong-willed and intelligent Lizzie.
So it is only her strong instinct for survival that sees Lizzie through the snobbish school to which she wins a scholarship, through the life-threatening horrors of consumption, and through the dark clouds of impending war. After school and a stint as a butcher's clerk, she goes to work as a bus conductress and, through hard work and inheritance, manages to save enough to invest in a property. And then fortune smiles on her in the game of love.
Happily married after the war to Charlie Wilson, she relishes the prospect of a now secure future with her family. But Charlie has other ideas. Ideas that will take Lizzie to a lonely life in Devon, to the challenges of a new career, and away from her beloved London.
Patsy Kent is just fourteen when her beloved mother Ellen dies of consumption in November 1918. The pregnant but unmarries Ellen fled her respectable family and landed up in Tooting, desperate to find somewhere to live and a place to work. Thus she found Florrie Holmes' place in Strathmore Street. Patsy, born there, has grown up surrounded by loving people who more than compensate for the lack of a family.
On her mother's death Patsy gets a job in the same market where Ellen had worked. At sixteen she is pretty and innocent, so when she meets the gipsy Johnny Jackson at a fair she is bowled over. Hop-picking in Kent with the Jackson clan tarnishes her illusions but then Patsy becomes pregnant and the ill-suited pair marry. Divorce isn't on for people like her; when she really falls in love, with kind Eddie Owen, it looks as if she must stay shackled to the feckless Johnny . . .
Kate's father owns a boatyard and they have a comfortable, loving family life until her father gets drunk, something which is increasingly frequent - then he gets violent. Kate and her mother survive it together until the father attacks Kate one night when she is almost eighteen. Her mother stabs him in the back with a kitchen knife, kills him, is tried and hung for murder.
Kate's loving grandmother and friends help her through her trauma. The only thing she doesn't have is a man - until she meets Bernard Pinfold (Toby). They walk out together and have a night of love just before he goes off on a two-year contract in South Africa. He doesn't write and Kate is saddened by his let down. However, she gets on with her life, converting her grandmother's house into a home for handicapped children, caring for a motherless child, Joshua, whom she comes to love and almost brings up as her own.
Almost two years later she receives red roses and a letter from Toby wondering whether she is free, or found someone else. He is due to return and still loves her, but doesn't want to upset her if she's got another life. Of course, she forgives him...
Bestselling author Jack Henry is suddenly on the brink of bankruptcy. With bills mounting and the IRS calling, he realizes that he has a major problem on his hands. But who is to blame for his declining fortunes? Certainly not Jack himself. The fault, he determines, lies with his agent, Stan Wycoff - who takes 15% of everything Jack makes for doing absolutely nothing.
Jack needs a way out of his dire financial predicament - and fast. And then he remembers that both he and his agent have substantial life insurance policies on one another. If Stan were to die unexpectedly, Jack would cash in . . .
But can a famous crime writer commit the perfect crime?
Douglas Petty is a man who enjoys his reputation as an unreconstructed male with a penchant for too much wine and too many women. Inheriting his father's eccentric estate and dog sanctuary quietened him a little, and marriage to Amy a little more. Even so, it seemed out of character for him a sue a tabloid newspaper for libel when it printed a scurrilous story about him.
His lawyers told him he had a good chance of winning the case, mainly because Amy's testimony would clearly refute the story. But then Amy is involved in a horrendous train crash and while the authorities assume she died in the resulting fire, there is no body to prove it. And if she wasn't killed why has she disappeared and, with no money and no other family, where is she?
In a story of mesmerising suspense, Amy slowly reveals why she cannot return to her beloved home, and why she can never escape from the lies she was told as a child.
Someone is coming to Southtown, San Antonio, and the only thing on their mind is destruction. His name is Will 'the Ghost' Stirman, prison escapee and murderer, and he has one thing on his mind: revenge.
That's a problem for private investigator Tres Navarre, whose boss and mentor Eraiyna Manos has a past with Stirman that puts her on his hit list. As Tres digs into the past, he unpicks a thread he really doesn't want to pull.
Rich with dusty Texan atmosphere, Southtown is the fifth book in the multiple-award-winning Texan suspense series by the internationally bestselling author of the Percy Jackson novels.
Welcome back to the Dining Club. Pass the challenges we set, and a world of pleasure awaits.
The young, ambitious Grace has surprised herself by falling hard for alluring city financier David, and even more so by her body's response to the private club he has introduced her to - a club that promises to lavish her with pleasure beyond her wildest dreams, if she can only pass a series of challenges.
Fighting her rising anxiety, as David slowly dresses her in his gift to her - a pale chiffon and lace dress which hugs her curves so provocatively - Grace must walk into the heart of the Dining Club. But one of its members is far from happy that David has a new guest: the decadent and demanding Amber. As Grace navigates the searing tension, her first challenge awaits . . .
Let yourself indulge in the sumptuous delights of The Dining Club: Part Two.
The Dining Club is now available as a complete volume, in both paperback and ebook.
