Sheppard first came to prominence as a cricketer in the 1950s. An opening batsman, he was selected for England while still at Cambridge, and later captained his country. In the 1960s Sheppard was a leading figure in the campaign to sever sporting links with South Africa, a crucial factor in the ending of apartheid. Converted in his first year at Cambridge, Sheppard was ordained into the Church of England in 1955. His curacy in Islington gave him a...

When her husband Mario leaves her, Olga, left to care for two young children, enters a long period of self-doubt and pity, until she acknowledges the truth about her marriage.

A searing account of George Orwell's experiences of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road To Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact.

Hannah Francis's singing brightens the days of those around her in the workhouse. Even when she is separated from her mother & forced to travel to Derbyshire with three other children to work in a cotton mill, Hannah is undaunted. Life for the pauper apprentices is arduous & dangerous, but friendships are forged & love blossoms.

When seventeen-year-old Belinda Phillips falls in love with a handsome Anglo-Indian officer, she knows that he is a man she can never hope to marry. When he is reported missing, believed killed in action, Belinda discovers that she is pregnant. Facing disgrace and ruin, she has no option other than to accept an arranged marriage with a middle-aged widower, knowing she must keep the secret of her child's birth for ever. Reluctantly she sends her beloved...

Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller, Balram works in a teashop crushing coals, wiping tables and dreaming of escape. Driven by a desire to better himself, he comes to see how the tiger might escape his cage.

Elsa's stepfather is out of work so the family have to live in one tiny room at the Royal Hotel.

One cannot live of dignity alone! The poor relations banded together some time ago to run The Poor Relation Hotel in the hope their embarrassed relatives would buy them out, but as the hotel prospered, so they began to enjoy the fruit of their labour. But once again they need money to go on and so poor, faded Miss Tonks is dispatched to her rich sister to steal something valuable from her in order to keep the hotel on its feet. All the other poor...

Liverpool, 1924. Racing to meet her fiance in her father's new-fangled motor car, Penny Forshaw knocks over a little girl and - much to her fiance's disapproval - feels it her duty to take in 6-year-old Kelly while she recovers. Her decision to look after a child from the slums will change Penny's life in ways she could never have imagined.

Born out of wedlock when her mother was only fourteen, Lucy Pocket has spent all her life with her disreputable grandmother, Eva. They are always in debt and resorting to theft in order to exist. Until her wealthy paternal grandfather buys her from Eva, determined to bring Lucy up to be a lady. When her grandfather dies, his despicable nephew cheats Lucy out of her inheritance, except for a run-down lodging house in Whitechapel, forcing Lucy to look...