For Amelia and her siblings, the grim past which their mother Emily had endured seemed very far away. As pretty as a picture, Amelia looked forward with pleasure to becoming acquainted with the young men clamouring to get to know her, and especially the two gentlemen who had come all the way from Australia to meet her family. Ralph Hawkins, bringing with him his friend Jack - a handsome half-aboriginal Australian - arrived in Hull looking for his...

Ruth, Lizzie and Heather each have their own reasons for greeting the end of the war with mixed feelings. For Ruth, it means she could lose Sammy, the evacuee boy she has come to love. Heather must adjust to the homecoming of her husband. And Lizzie is confronted by her own strength of will.

Louise Hart has endured a great deal of pain from her callous husband Paul, but one cold December night in 1959 she can take no more. She and her son Davey escape their Coventry high-rise flat and flee to Tanglewood, the dilapidated ivy-clad mansion where her mother, Dolly, runs an animal sanctuary.

Janet Florin has been missing for almost a week, and family friend, Trisha Marlowe, desperate for news, hires Sal Kilkenny to track her down. Ramin's brother, Berfan, is missing too. A failed asylum seeker, likely to be returned to Iran, has he disappeared to escape deportation? His brother says not. And when Sal hears that Berfan has been seen in Manchester, the chances of finding him look good. Meanwhile as the summer kicks into gear, the temperature...

In the wild, windswept Welsh marches a noble young lord rides homewards, embittered, angry & in danger. He is Guyon, lord of Ledworth, heir to threatened lands, husband-to-be of Judith of Ravenstow. Their union will save his lands - but they have yet to meet.

'The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz' is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the notorious concentration camp.

Sixteen-year-old Jeannie spends most of her time at Scarborough Harbour, she is a net mender and herring girl. When she meets Harry, a fisherman from Hull, she falls head-over-heels in love with him and soon finds herself pregnant. Harry's dour grandmother tells Jeannie that they must marry, despite him being out of work. They do so, and begin a life in the hub of Hull's fishing community. But it is not long before Jeannie realises she has made a...

Aunt Mildred declared that no good could come of the Melbury family Christmas gatherings at their country residence Flaxmere. So when Sir Osmond Melbury, the family patriarch, is discovered - by a guest dressed as Santa Klaus - with a bullet in his head on Christmas Day, the festivities are plunged into chaos. Nearly every member of the party stands to reap some sort of benefit from Sir Osmond's death, but Santa Klaus, the one person who seems to...

Never, even in his most optimistic moments, had he visualised a scene of this nature: himself in one arm-chair, a police officer in another, and between them ... a mystery. So thinks the Reverend Dodda, vicar of the quiet Cornish village of Boscawen and a reader of detective novels when an actual mystery unexpectedly lands on his doorstep.

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students, and bad publicity for the college. So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of undergraduates meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon, only to find the drowned body of the college bursar floating in her canoe. The police assume that a student prank got out of control, but the resourceful...