Two apparently harmless women reside in cottages one building apart in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when a mysterious foreigner, Theodore Cadmus - from Caldera, a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of - moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered. The fates of the two cousins...

In 'The Canterbury Tales', Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce.

Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron. Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days - no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern.

'The Thames' is about the river from source to sea. It covers history from prehistoric times onwards, the flora & fauna of the river, paintings & photographs inspired by the Thames, its geology, smells & colours, its literature, laws & landscape, its magic & myths, its architecture, trade & weather.