The FitzDeanes are wealthy. They have Ballyford Castle in Ireland and a growing shipping business in Liverpool. But Lady FitzDeane is unable to provide an heir. All of her five boys have died in infancy. There are whispers that the family is cursed - punished for a terrible mistake long buried in the past. When young Ruby Flynn, an orphan reared and educated by nuns, arrives at Ballyford to work as a nursery maid, she cannot shake the feeling that...

India, 1926: English Margaret arrives with her new husband Suraj at his family home, set amidst beautiful rolling hills, the air filled with the soft scent of spices and hibiscus flowers. Margaret is unwelcome, homesick and lonely, but her maid Archana, a young woman from an impoverished family, reminds her of her long-lost sister, a tiny glimpse of home in a faraway place. As Margaret and Archana spend more time together, an unexpected friendship...

She?ll never forget ? I?ll never forgive. People always notice my daughter, Isobel. How could they not? Incredibly beautiful ... until she speaks. An unsettling, little-girl voice, exactly like a child?s, but from the mouth of a full-grown woman. Izzie might look grown-up, but inside she?s trapped. Caught in the day it happened ? the day that broke her from within. Our family fell apart that day, and we never could pick up the pieces ?.

With a popular comic strip, card line, and children's cartoon to her name, Lucy Brighton should be in a happy place. But the ache of a cold, lonely childhood lingers on. Even though she still lives in the New Jersey house where she grew up, Lucy has had little contact with her parents since they moved to Florida five years ago. Finding Joy In The Present Then Lucy receives a call that her parents have been killed in a car crash. While settling their...

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recounting their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage and the lives they built with other people, Strout paints a portrait,...

In 1720s Scotland, a priest and his son get lost in the forest, transporting a witch to the coast to stop her from being killed by the village. In the sad, slow years after the Second World War, Ruth finds herself the replacement wife to a recent widower and stepmother to his two young boys, installed in a huge house by the sea and haunted by those who have come before. Fifty years later, Viv is cataloguing the valuables left in her dead grandmother?s...

Macy Stoddard had hoped to ease the grief of losing her parents in a fiery car crash by accepting a job as a private nurse to the wealthy and widowed Alexandria Hallstead. But her first sight of Hallstead House is of a dark and forbidding home. She quickly finds its winding halls and shadowy rooms filled with secrets and suspicions. Alex seems happy to have Macy's help, but others on the island, including Alex's sinister servants and hostile relatives,...

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It?s a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another?s kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows?s insular embrace. As a psychologist,...

Denis is searching for his mother?s past, knowing she had secrets. In Nice, he finds her friends, Monique and Clemence. In the 1950s, they were Matisse?s assistants when he was old and ill, pinning up his coloured paper shapes, putting the great cut out works together. Monique inspired his great designs in the chapel at Vence, Clemence, in pursuit of love, was caught in an affair that led to violence and disaster. So they have their own intense and...

The past A lonely and imaginative child, Julia loves her family's beautiful and wild Cornish home, Tawray, with all her heart. But, marked by her family's dark troubles, Julia enters her adult years determined to leave and seek a new beginning in London. It's there she meets the handsome David Pengelly. They fall in love, but when Julia becomes pregnant, even he can't stop the terrible echoes of the past from ringing in her ears. The only sound to...