Esther Freud

Nine-year-old Tess has never seen anything like The Wild. An old bakery, converted into a home, it has a fireplace big enough to sit in, a garden with a badminton net and another one for vegetables. And then there's William, its owner. Single father of three, he cooks homemade ravioli, cuts trees down with a chainsaw and plays the guitar. When...

Summer, 1914. It is Emanuel's twenty-first birthday, and eleven-year-old Eva and her sisters are helping transform Gaglow for a glorious party. But their brother's arrival is overshadowed by the talk of war that comes with him from Hamburg, and when he is wrenched from the family to serve his country, Eva knows that nothing will be the...

Sixteen-year-old Lisa has high hopes for her first year in London. But squeezed into a temporary council flat with her bohemian mother and a little brother obsessed with foxes, she is not off to the best start. Ambitious to be more like her elusive, glamorous sister, Ruby, who lives life to the full, Lisa trails through the city, dabbling with...

It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the circle of huddled, nervous students are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at any other drama school, they will be taught to Act. To Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside is the real world - a pitiless, alluring place in which each of them in their most fervent dreams, hopes...

It is July, three months after Lara's seventeenth birthday, and a week before Charles and Diana's Royal Wedding. When Lara's father, a man she barely knows, invites her to accompany him on holiday, she finds herself far away from the fumes of London's Holloway Road in the sun-scorched hillsides of Tuscany. There she meets the Willoughby family,...