This volume presents an illustrated selection of the finest houses in the country. It includes an eclectic mix from the very best towers, castles, halls, abbeys, cottages, private houses - even schools and prisons - in England, which are open to the public at least some of the year.

Lucy fell in love with tumbledown Rosemary Cottage as a child. So thirty years on, when she loses her city job and discovers the cottage is for sale, it feels like fate. She'll raise her children in Burley Bridge and transform the cottage into a B&B with her husband. But a year can change everything. Now Lucy is juggling two children and a B&B, but on her own. Christmas looks set to be their last on Rosemary Lane - until she meets James, a face from...

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . . In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire...

When you live on the edge of society, it only takes one step to fall between the cracks Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Inside the walls of their old cottage they make music, and in the garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining...

On the eve of the First World War, a little girl is found alone after a gruelling ocean voyage from England to Australia. All she can remember is that a woman she calls the Authoress had promised to look after her. But the Authoress has vanished. So starts the haunting second novel from the author of 'The House at Riverton'.

When Mattie invites her old friend Tim to stay in one of her family cottages on the edge of Dartmoor, she senses there is something he is not telling her. Having left behind his old life in London in a rush, Tim is unusually quiet, as if he is holding on to a painful secret. But as he gets to know the rest of the warm jumble of family by the moor, Tim discovers that everyone there has their own secrets. As Tim begins to open up, Mattie falls deeper...

Orphaned at birth, Eliza lives with her beloved grandparents in a waterlogged Somerset cottage surrounded by willow beds where she ekes out a living making laundry baskets and eel traps. Although poor she is content, until childhood friend Clem, regales her with tales of his adventures along the river and she begins to wonder what life is like beyond the Droves. When fate brings handsome, wealthy Theo to her workshop she is instantly attracted and...