1891. Seventeen-year-old Leonie Vernier and her brother abandon Paris for the sanctuary of their aunt's isolated country house near Carcassonne, the Domaine de la Cade. But in the nearby woods, Leonie stumbles across a ruined sepulchre - and a timeless mystery whose tracesare written in blood.

Kate Flynn has always been clever and brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate's 43 and has given up her university career to come home and look after her mother in ‘Firenze', their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair.

Memory Cougan, black and in her twenties, has a successful career and an adoring fiancé. But at her engagement party, she panics.

Brought to London aged five, she has no recollection of Africa, or why she left. Leaving Adam behind, she returns to a place she no longer recognises - and to Max, the coffee planter who may have the answers.

The Scandal of the Season tells the story of the real-life seduction of the beautiful, clever Arabella Fermor by the charming, enigmatic nobleman Robert Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone. Arabella is in need of a rich husband, but knows that girls have been ruined by risking an affair like the one she contemplates. The object of her desire is also flirting with a perilous Jacobite plot against Queen Anne.

Middle England, mid-1980s. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. Except something has happened. A 15-year-old boy called Robert has been killed, down by the pools. And half a dozen lives will come unravelled. There's Kathryn and Howard, Rob's parents. Kath has been making the best of her second marriage after the love of her life died young. Howard has been clinging onto a family life he hardly expected to have.

Celia is the struggling single mother of an exceptionally, angelically beautiful child: nine-year-old Rachel. All too aware of the precarious balance of the life she has built for the two of them, she worries about her daughter's longing for the father she has never met. When Rachel disappears one summer night during a blackout, Celia is stricken with guilt and terror about what her choices might now mean for her daughter's fate.

Tip and Teddy are becoming men under the very eyes of their adoptive father, Bernard Doyle. A student at Harvard, Tip is happiest in a lab, whilst Teddy thinks he has found his calling in the Church, and both are increasingly strained by their father's protective plans for them.
But when they are involved in an accident on an icy road, the Doyles are forced to confront certain truths about their lives, how the death of Doyle's wife Bernadette has affected the family, and an anonymous figure who is always watching.

Opening at the Hay Festival, and ending with the prospect of a spring wedding, Sue Gee's new novel is a lively story of tangled relationships and the sustaining powers of good books, loyal friends and conversation.

Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and is full of original recipes.

Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the twenty-first century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a dilapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water.
But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out . . . until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down.