After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude - and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.

Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon's plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant...

Oscar-winning actress Ardith Law is a Hollywood icon. A stunning beauty at 62, her star is as bright as ever. Widowed at a young age by a philandering husband, Ardith is in no hurry to marry again. Her daughter, Morgan, a successful cosmetic surgeon, has always blamed her mother for a lonely childhood while Ardith was away on location. While Ardith's long-time partner is away filming, Josh Gray, an actor waiting for his big break, is employed as Ardith's...

As the head of a prestigious movie studio for nearly two decades, Andy Westfield has had every professional luxury. He always put his career before his marriage: now, besides his daughter and young grandchildren, it's the only thing he truly loves. But then Andy's world is upended. The studio is sold, and the buyer's son demands the top seat. Out of a job and humiliated, Andy knows he needs to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible. After moving...

A surreal supermarket, fictional parenting books, a gingerbread house and an alternative to IVF steeped in Nordic mythology are deployed in 17 very different notions of home, as Carys Bray explores loss, disappointment, frustrated expectations and regret through dark, funny stories which strike at the heart of family life.

The summers spent at Roseland, the sprawling ancestral home of her best friend, Eloise, were among the happiest of Cathy's life. Tucked away on the Cornish coastline and brimming with history, Roseland seemed to belong to another century. Cathy has barely been back since Eloise's death a decade ago. So she is shocked when Jack, the love of Eloise's life and father of her children, announces that he is getting married, and that the wedding will take...

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past. But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes? Escaping...

At the end of Hawthorn Close there is a charming park which boasts two magnificent magnolia trees, and an assortment of houses and units. Several new occupants are moving into the neighbourhood and will live in units fronting the park, built and managed by a charity for people needing a home for a while. Amongst them are Brett, 18, an orphan just out of the foster child system; Carla, who is escaping an abusive ex-partner; and Matthew Woodley, a widower...

As the new Millennium beckons, Eadie is turning 30 with a marriage in tatters. She must travel back to where she once lived for a funeral she can't quite comprehend. As she journeys from the North to the South, from the present to the past, Eadie contemplates all that was then - and all that is now.

Arthur and Gwen married young. Twenty years on, Gwen's got it all: wealth, beauty, a famous husband who's the founder of Britain's most successful tech company, stables full of horses, millions of followers on Instagram, an unstable lover, a wayward son, a hoard of secrets, an aching heart, and a cyberstalking blackmailer who calls himself The Invisible Knight. As the Wiltshire town of Abury prepares to celebrate the fortieth birthday of its favourite...