In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era. In 1941, at seventeen years old, Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone, a brilliant,...

Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly homosexual, lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris. His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington...

Are you still married if you haven't seen your husband for months? Polly's life is great. Her children are away at uni, her glamorous mother - still modelling at 85 - is happily settled in a retirement village, and her perfume blog is taking off. Then her husband announces he needs some space and promptly vanishes. As Polly grapples with her bewildering situation, she clings to a few new friends to keep her going - Shirlee, the loudmouthed yoga student;...

Wendy?s life can be neatly divided into two: before and after. Before her husband?s car accident, it was just the two of them. They never took the train at rush hour, and they avoided their noisy neighbour upstairs. Naveem devoted his spare time to vintage train models, and Wendy to re-reading the well-thumbed pages of her favourite books. It didn?t matter what others thought about their small, quiet life together - they were happy. After the coma,...

Land of the Afternoon Sun follows a disinherited English baron and a young New York heiress who marry and move west to build an agricultural empire in Palm Springs in the 1920s, when it was just a budding town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. It's a saga about ambition on both large and small scales and the rapidly modernising world as the harsh, sun-drenched landscape transforms from a Native American haven to the playground of Hollywood's rich...

Two decades ago, Adam Sharp?s piano playing led him into a passionate relationship with Angelina Brown, an intelligent and strong-willed actress. They had a chance at something more-but Adam didn?t take it. Now, on the cusp of turning fifty, Adam likes his life. He?s happy with his partner Claire, he excels in music trivia at quiz night at the local pub, he looks after his mother, and he does the occasional consulting job in IT. But he can never quite...

Amy Winston is a hard-drinking, bed-hopping, hot-shot young book editor on a downward spiral. Having made her name and fortune by turning an average thriller writer into a Lee Child, Amy is given the unenviable task of steering literary great Helen Owen back to publication. When Amy knocks on the door of their beautiful townhouse in West London, Helen and her husband, the novelist Malcolm Taylor are conducting a silent war of attrition. The townhouse...

January 1941: As Charlie Barton tiptoes silently out of the house one cold winter morning to go off and fight for his country, his wife Audrey is left to run the family bakery on her own. Times are tougher than ever, but at the Barton Bakery in Bournemouth, Audrey is determined as always to serve the town with love, loaves and cakes, even as the town is reeling from the struggles of the Blitz. Audrey?s brother William has returned from battle with...