Fay Weldon

How many parents does it take to make a baby? In the case of Rosalind Melrose Smithson it took four: one birth mother; one legal father; one interfering neighbour and one turkey baster filled with the defrosted essence of an anonymous donor. Or not so anonymous as it turned out. For donor no. 116349, '6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair, BA (Oxon), action man' is the 9th Earl of Dilberne, who gave his seed back in 1979 as a stripling of twenty-two, and...

Alice is an 18-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own niece, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.

This is the first title in a trilogy which explores the lives of an English, aristocratic household at the close of the 19th century.

Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is 24, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - worse - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, she is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic London publisher to marry her. But, what he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months....