Sussex, 1912. In a churchyard, villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will die in the coming year are thought to be seen. Here, where the estuary leads out to the sea, superstitions still hold sway. Standing alone is the taxidermist's daughter. At seventeen, Constantia Gifford lives with her father in a decaying house: it is all that is left of Gifford's once world-famous museum of taxidermy. The stuffed animals that used to grace...

Nora, a cellist, returns home to the Sussex coast with memories she must banish in order to survive: a charismatic teacher; a mistake she cannot unmake. Her mother Ada is waiting: a fragile, bitter woman who distils for herself a glamorous past as she smokes French cigarettes in her unkempt garden. A documentary maker has arrived in the village to shoot a film about King Cnut and his illegitimate daughter, whose body lies beneath the flagstones of...

Four-year-old Danny lives with his mother Natalie - 'Meemaw' - in a small Sussex town. Life is a struggle in their damp flat, where they depend on benefits for their peanut butter, bread, and Meemaw's phone data and rollies. When they are threatened with a benefits sanction for arriving late to a Job Centre appointment, salvation appears in the form of Karen, an employee. But Karen's impact is to reach far beyond this one generous gesture, as she...

Laura is content enough with her marriage and her children and her part-time job - until a long-ago lover comes back into her life. Suddenly she remembers how once her life was passionate, and realises how the excitement has faded. How much happiness is she entitled to expect?

'To the River' is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week, over 60 years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? From the painter John Constable and...

When news of the budding romance between a beloved English prince and an American actress broke, it captured the world's attention and sparked an international media frenzy. But while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have continued to make headlines - from their engagement, wedding, and birth of their son Archie to their unprecedented decision to step back from their royal lives - few know the true story of Harry and Meghan. This book goes beyond the...

May, 1914. Nestled in Sussex, the Summerhayes mansion seems the perfect country idyll. But with a long-running feud in the Summers family and tensions in Europe deepening, Summerhayes' peaceful days are numbered. For Elizabeth Summer, the lazy quiet of her home has become stifling. A chance meeting with Aiden Kellaway, an architect's assistant, offers the secret promise of escape. But to secure her family's future, Elizabeth must marry well. A man...

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...

In July 1957, the press descended in droves on the south-coast town of Eastbourne. An inquest had just been opened into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs Bobbie Hullett. She died after months of apparent barbiturate abuse - the drugs prescribed to calm her nerves by her close friend and doctor, Dr John Bodkin Adams. The inquest brought to the surface years of whispered suspicion that had swept through the town. Superintendent...