Historical fiction

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea. Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city. George, a private...

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea. Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city. George, a private...

Like A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In 'Morpho Eugenia', an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In 'The Conjugal Angel', curio...

Two sisters growing up in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool join the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War 1 and find themselves in a hellish, death-filled world that contrasts acutely with the warmth and love of working-class Liverpool.

Suffolk, 1924. After the death of her fiance in the field hospitals of France, Angel becomes nurse to the MacDonald family in the small village of Uffasham. Taking residence at the appropriately named Angel Inn, she is met by many new faces - and old ones, too. Edith, a fellow nurse from the war,...

August 1939. 30-year-old Hetty Cartwright is tasked with the evacuation and safekeeping of the natural history museum's collection of mammals. Once she and her exhibits arrive at Lockwood Manor, however, where they are to stay for the duration of the war, Hetty soon realises that she's taken on m...

August 1939. 30-year-old Hetty Cartwright is tasked with the evacuation and safekeeping of the natural history museum's collection of mammals. Once she and her exhibits arrive at Lockwood Manor, however, where they are to stay for the duration of the war, Hetty soon realises that she's taken on m...

The King is in love with Anna's portrait, but she has none of the accomplishments he seeks in a new bride. She prays she will please Henry, for the balance of power in Europe rests on this marriage alliance. But Anna's past is never far from her thoughts, and the rumours rife at court could be he...

It's long been known that if a thing can go wrong, it will. With knobs on, usually. Disasters start to pile up. A new colleague with no respect for the past and a great deal to prove. Historians lost in time. And - worst of all - Rosie Lee on her very first jump. Then there's the small matter of ...

When Jahan travels to 16th-century Istanbul as a stowaway, with the gift of a white elephabt for the Sultan, little does he anticipate the journey on which he is about to embark. Whispers in the palace gardens and secret journeys through Istanbul lead him to Mihrimah, the beautiful princess. Stil...