For fans of Alexander McCall Smith and James Runcie's Grantchester Mysteries, the first novel in a clever new crime series about Victorian London and an indomitable female detective.Mrs. Laetitia Rodd, aged fifty-two, is the widow of an archdeacon. Living in London with her confidante and landlady, Mrs. Bentley, who once let rooms to John Keats, Laetitia makes her living as a highly discreet private investigator.Her brother, Frederick Tyson, is a criminal b...

Kate is a thirty-something-year-old adventurer and single mother who sells her stateside business to go to Kathmandu, Nepal with her young son, Jack. Her intention is to adopt an orphaned toddler named Devi, a little girl she knows only from a photograph. The expedition ends up completely redirecting Kate’s moral compass and forcing her to find peace within chaos. Stand in the Traffic is the story of Kate’s year long journey through culture shock, paperwork delays, and revolution....

Nobody marries for money any more. Or do they? The aristocratic Hasty sisters are astonishingly beautiful, irresistibly sexy and startlingly intelligent. They are also, unfortunately, extremely poor. On the death of their charming, autocratic father, they discover that their sole inheritance is their ravishing good looks. Even worse, Melismate, home of their ancestors for nearly a thousand years, is to be sold, leaving them homeless. Rufa, the eldest and most beautiful of the Hastys, is al...

Cassie is nothing if not organised. A successful journalist, she's ticked almost all the boxes: attentive boyfriend, own flat, good job, great friends - it's all fallen into place. In theory, at least. There's one part of Cassie's life, however, which is anything but organised, and that's her love for the Darling family. As the only child of ambitious parents, Cassie spent her childhood abandoned to the somewhat peremptory care of a series of nannies until one day, peeping over the garden ...

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, another future classic from Costa Winner Kate Saunders ( Five Children on the Western Front).Emily watched, in a trance of astonishment, as the bear opened the picnic basket, took out a tartan rug and spread it on Holly's bed.And then the penguin spoke.Actually spoke .'What's going on? This isn't Pointed End!'The bear said, 'It looks like a hum...

An epic, heart-wrenching follow-on from E. Nesbit's Five Children and It stories.The five children have grown up and World War I has begun in earnest.Cyril is off to fight, Anthea is at art college, Robert is a Cambridge scholar and Jane is at high school. The Lamb is the grown up age of 11, and he has a little sister, Edith, in tow.The sand fairy has become a creature of stories ... until, for the first time in 10 years, he suddenly reappears.The s...

In Edwardian England a vow of friendship is a thing of innocence. Even when tested by the passionate militancy of the suffragette movement or the rigorous demands of the Season, the bonds between Rory, Eleanor, Jenny and Francesca hold fast. But nothing can withstand the unprecedented onslaught of the First World War - and as the best of an entire generation is extinguished on the battlefields of Europe, a schoolgirl pledge, too, lies broken...

Lily-Josephine had a talent for love. Wilful, enchanting and passionate, she was the centre of a charmed universe - until her foolish, indulgent father married again.Like Snow-Drop in Grimms' fairy tale, Lily ran from her jealous stepmother one idyllic summer evening in 1941. She escaped to find sanctuary but, at Randalls, discovered a love far greater than any she had ever known...A generation later, the events set in train that night begin to unravel when Sophie Gently fa...

Melissa Lamb and her cousin Ernestine are at the centre of the Wild Young Bohemians, an exclusive dining club at Oxford for the beautiful and ambitious. Melissa is in the grip of an obsession. Ernestine, however, mild and practical, does not see through Melissa's ruthless determination to restore her derelict family mansion - a Gothic legacy of lust, greed and death, with a spectacular secret that has slept for a hundred years.Melissa will let nothing stand in her way - until a ven...

It's 1973 and 12-year-old Jenny is in shock. She's just been cast as one of the lead roles in a feature film. She's going to be a child actor! Soon she must jet off to France, to the idyllic Château Mouchotte, where she will join her film family: three other children and two renowned actors.The glitz and glamour of being on set is a million miles away from Jenny's normal life, but showbiz is never straightforward and there's one fierce and famous actor that threatens the whole shoo...

"Reminiscent of Road Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . . . a great read-aloud." --BooklistWelcome to the most magical house in London.The family of eleven-year-old twins Oz and Lily have inherited it, together with the mysterious shop downstairs. Long ago, the shop's famous chocolate-makers, who also happen to be Oz and Lily's great uncles, were clever sorcerers. Now evil villians are hunting for the secret of their greatest recipe. The terrifying...

Kate is a thirty-something-year-old adventurer and single mother who sells her stateside business to go to Kathmandu, Nepal with her young son, Jack. Her intention is to adopt an orphaned toddler named Devi, a little girl she knows only from a photograph. The expedition ends up completely redirecting Kate's moral compass and forcing her to find peace within chaos. Stand in the Traffic is the story of Kate's year long journey through culture shock, paperwork delays, and revolution. As the d...