Black Swan

'If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats,' Sarah thought, 'she would be more careful not to tramp through muddy fields.' It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah's hands are chapped and raw. Domestic life below stairs, ruled with a tender heart and an iron will by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be...

Stories are like Russian dolls; open them up, and in each one you'll find another story. Come to the house where it is Christmas all year round; meet the ghost who lives on a Twitter timeline; be spooked by a newborn baby created with sugar, spice and lashings of cake. Conjured from a wickedly imaginative pen, here is a new collection of short...

It's twenty years since Miranda, then sixteen, holidayed in Cornwall and her life changed forever. Now she's back again - with her mother Clare and the ashes of her stepfather Jack, whose wish was to be scattered on the sea overlooked by their one-time holiday home. The picturesque cove seems just the same as ever, but the people are different -...

In the summer of 1927, America had a booming stock market, a president who worked just four hours a day (and slept much of the rest), a devastating flood of the Mississippi, a sensational murder trial, and an unknown aviator named Charles Lindbergh who became the most famous man on earth. It was the summer that saw the birth of talking pictures,...

Chart Throb.The ultimate pop quest. Ninety five thousand hopefuls. Three judges. Just one winner. And that's Calvin Simms, the genius behind the show. Calvin always wins because Calvin writes the rules. But this year, as he sits smugly in judgement upon the mingers, clingers and blingers whom he has pre-selected in his carefully scripted search for...

When her boorish father dies, fat, unsophisticated Mousumi is sent from India to her cosmopolitan relations in London. Leaving behind everything she has ever known, a forlorn mother and an amorous shopkeeper, Mousimi must adjust to the glamour of the western world. On arrival, she is met by the Majumdar family: Prakash - a doctor with too much...