Desire. Deception. A wondrously imagined tale of two female botanists, separated by more than a century, in a race to discover a life-saving flower . . .In Victorian England, headstrong adventuress Elizabeth takes up her late father's quest for a rare, miraculous plant. She faces a perilous sea voyage, unforeseen dangers and treachery that threatens her entire family.In present-day Australia, Anna finds a mysterious metal box containing a sketchbook of dazzling watercolours, a photograph inscribed 'Spring 1886' and a small bag of seeds. It sets her on a path far from her safe, carefully ordered life, and on a journey that will force her to face her own demons.In this spellbinding botanical odyssey of discovery, desire and deception, Kayte Nunn has so exquisitely researched nineteenth-century Cornwall and Chile you can almost smell the fragrance of the flowers, the touch of the flora on your fingertips . . .

    Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague. A thirteenth century Franciscan monk, traversing the Silk Road, begins his extraordinary deathbed confession, while five hundred years earlier, a grieving Chinese poet is summoned to the Emperor's palace. In a series of delicately interlaced stories, Sam Meekings' richly poetic and gripping second novel follows the journeys of characters whose lives, separated by millennia, are all in some way touched by the mysterious Book of Crows - a mythical book in which the entire history of the world - past, present and future - is written down.

    With almost everyone they know suddenly erased from the face of the earth, the girls set out for the convent where they attend school. They are abducted almost immediately and sold to a Mumbai brothel owner, beginning a hellish descent into the bowels of the sex trade.Halfway across the world, Washington, D.C., attorney Thomas Clarke faces his own personal and professional crisis-and makes the fateful decision to pursue a pro bono sabbatical working in India for an NGO that prosecutes the subcontinent's human traffickers. There, his conscience awakens as he sees firsthand the horrors of the trade in human flesh, and the corrupt judicial system that fosters it. Learning of the fate of Ahalya and Sita, Clarke makes it his personal mission to rescue them, setting the stage for a riveting showdown with an international network of ruthless criminals.

    When the cyborg arrives, she senses a worthy and dangerous opponent--one that's been dead for 800 years...

    Young Lady Helen believes her parents when they say she will never find a better husband than Richard - 'brave, handsome, wealthy, such a charming man and quite a catch'. But when her soldier husband returns to war, Helen begins to wonder just who it is she has married - his letters home are cold and distant - and Helen realises that she has made a terrible mistake. And that's when Oliver Donovan enters her life. They begin an affair that leaves Helen pregnant and alone, and she is forced to surrender her precious baby. Over twenty years pass and a second war is ravaging Europe, but that is not the only echo of the past to haunt the present. Laura Drummond is now caught in a tragic love affair of her own and when she is forced to leave London during the bombings, she turns to the mother she never knew.

    Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.The Painted Veil is a beautifully written affirmation of the human capacity to grow, to change, and to forgive.

    The invitations summon home the group of people Violet Aird has cared for most in her long life. The oldest, strongest and wisest of them all, she sees Alexa, her vulnerable granddaughter, find love for the first time, while the decision to send her little grandson away to school is driving parents Edmund and Virginia even further apart. Far from them all is Pandora, the glamorous, exciting girl who ran away twenty years before. All will converge on Scotland this September.

    Sarah will help Major Storrington, confined to a wheelchair by the tank accident that finished a promising military career, to research and write the family history of the Storringtons, an armaments dynasty. She will also serve as governess to his small son.To her dismay, Sarah finds the ménage at Maidenshall, the great Victorian mansion built on the site of a nunnery, a decidedly uneasy one:* Bored, diversion-starved Cressida increasingly seeks escape in her London fashion career and, perhaps, in the arms of other men;* Adolphus Storrington is a lonely, distracted child who spends most of his waking hours in the company of a fantasy playmate;* The Major, handsome, powerful and restive in his wheelchair prison, alternates between bursts of creative energy and outbursts of frustrated rage at his family, servants, and Sarah, who is falling in love with him;* And Henrietta Galloway, the nonagenarian retainer who wanders about Maidenshall unsettling everyone she meets with ramblings about days long past.When Sarah discovers two Edwardian-era diaries, she slowly unravels the mystery of a passionate betrayal of a previous governess and the master of Maidenshall.

    Harry gets a job as warehouse manager and his wife, Martha, works in a grocer's shop, whilst Seraphina trains as a teacher, Angela works in Bunney's Department Store and young Evie starts at regular school.Then circumstances change and Seraphina takes a job as a nippy in Lyon's Corner House. Customers vie for her favours, including an old friend, Toby.When war is declared the older girls join up, leaving Evie and Martha to cope with rationing, shortages, and the terrible raids on Liverpool which devastate the city. Meanwhile, Toby is a Japanese POW, working on the infamous Burma railway and dreaming of Seraphina...Darkest Before Dawn is a warm passionate story that makes it easy to see why Katie Flynn is one of Britain's most popular saga writers.

    Escaping to a new life in Constantinople, the two land upon its shores lonely and penniless. Needing to make money fast, they plot and plan a number of outrageous money-making schemes, until they chance upon their greatest idea yet.Armed with a wicked plan to steal precious silk seeds from the faraway land of Seres, Nicander and Marius must embark upon a terrifyingly treacherous journey across unknown lands, never before completed. But first they must deceive the powerful emperor Justinian and the rest of his formidable Byzantine Empire in order to begin their journey into the unknown...An adventurous tale of mischief, humour and deception, Nicander and Marius face danger of the highest order, where nothing in the land of the Roman Empire is quite what it seems.

    For while the naïve Gascon soldier cares little for the politics behind the battles, he is torn apart by a deep passion for two powerful women on opposing sides of the war: Nanon de Lartigues, a keen supporter of the Queen Regent Anne of Austria, and the Victomtesse de Cambes, who supports the rebellious forces of the Princess de Condé. Set around Bordeaux during the first turbulent years of the reign of Louis XIV, The Women's War sees two women taking central stage in a battle for all France. Humorous, dramatic and romantic, it offers a compelling exploration of political intrigue, the power of redemption, the force of love and the futility of war.

    As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

    An inspector calls to interrogate the family, and during the course of his questioning, all members of the group are implicated lightly or deeply in the girl's undoing. The family, closely knit and friendly at the beginning of the evening, is shown up as selfish, self-centered or cowardly, its good humor turning to acid, and good fellowship to dislike, before the evening is over. The surprising revelation, however, is in the inspector...

    Now living in New York City among old friends, far from Europe's chilling atrocities, Ross soon meets Natasha, a beautiful model and fellow migre, a warm heart to help him forget his cold memories.Yet even as the war draws to its violent close, Ross cannot find peace. Demons still pursue him. Whether they are ghosts from the past or the guilt of surviving, he does not know. For he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy--and that paradise, however perfect, has a price. . . .

    Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents' house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.