In 1891, Tilly Kirkland is reeling with shock and guilt after her tempestuous marriage ends in horrific circumstances. Fleeing to the farthest place she knows, Tilly takes a job on Ember Island in Moreton Bay, Australia, where she becomes the governess to the prison superintendent's precocious young daughter, Nell. Tilly knows she must keep the past hidden in order to start a new life, but she doesn't know that Nell is watching her every move and...

Jean Rhys was an artist of brilliance and fury best known for her literary masterpiece, 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. But she was also a woman in constant psychological turmoil, never far from the edge. In 'The Blue Hour', Lilian Pizzichini enters Rhys's world.

Since her death, people have got Jane Austen wrong. The real Jane - revealed in this landmark biography - was a less cosy, more spiky, more modern figure than she is usually imagined to be. Far from retelling a familiar story, Byrne's book uses new research and new techniques to give us Jane Austen for the 21st century.

Born in 1920, in the landscape of post-World War 1 Ukraine, her family driven to a distant country by the fearsome pogroms that killed her mother and ruined her father, Clarice Lispector triumphed over her origins to become a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigues all of Brazil's writers & artists.

Meg Hutchinson grew up as Margaret Rose Astbury in Wednesbury during the first half of the 20th century. She describes not only the constant struggle to make ends meet but also the laughter and love she enjoyed with her five sisters and parents who were too soft-hearted to punish any of their daughters.

Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Artemis Cooper's biography explores a woman trying to make sense of her life through her writing, as well as illuminating the literary world in which she lived.

Although the most popular novelist in history, with over two billion books sold worldwide, Agatha Christie lived a life shrouded in secrecy and fuelled by curiosity. Utilising over 5000 previously unpublished letters, notes and documents, Richard Hack allows Christie to write again, 33 years after her death.

This autobiography tells of Christie's life from childhood, through two marriages and two World Wars, and her experiences both as a writer and on archaeological expeditions with her second husband.

Wesley published her first novel when she was 70 - and went on to write nine more bestsellers before her death, age 89, in 2002. At the outbreak of WWII, she was 'roped into intelligence', where she worked on breaking codes. This biography deals with her experiences in MI5 and her many wartime love affairs.

When Helen Forrester's father went bankrupt in 1930 she and her six siblings were forced into utmost poverty and slum surroundings in Depression-ridden Liverpool. The running of the household and the care of the younger children all fell on 12-year-old Helen. With very little food or help from her parents, Helen led a life of unrelenting drudgery and hardship. Writing about her experiences later in life, Helen Forrester shed light on an almost forgotten...